Happy Monday everyone! Before I share the post I have for today I wanted to thank everyone for the response on Facebook, Twitter and the post where we shared the news of our little one on the way! We are so excited and it feels so awesome to feel the love from all of you, you guys are amazing and I feel so lucky that you all read and follow my online adventures.

For today I want to share an update I did on the fan of the sewing room, I was super inspired when I saw a chevron project posted on Design Sponge last year, I pinned it with the hope that someday, when we had a house of our own I could refurnish my own.

Since we are on a very tight budget for all of our house improvement projects we are going to refurnish a lot of the things that were in the house, in the case of my office/sewing room I already showed you what I did with the build-up, now it’s the time for the fan! In my case I needed a full recover for this fan because I didn’t like anything about it, as you can see in the before picture, it had flower shape lights, the blades where showing the wicked pattern side, and I definitely didn’t like the brass body.

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…I married the love of my life. WOW! it’s crazy how fast time has pass because it still feels like it was just yesterday, I am so blessed to have him in my life and even more blessed now =]

First two images by the awesome Next Exit Photography

I am so happy to finally reveal the real reason why this place has been so quiet and why I’ve been so sick =] We have a little one on the way! So at least is a happy sickness. 2012 has been pretty crazy for us, so far we have a new house, new car (mine) and a baby on the way! talk about excitement and stress. We could not erase the smile off our faces, we are beyond excited and we feel so blessed, it’s kind of funny how everything just happened at once, but some times things are just meant to happen like this! It feels like it’s Christmas, we got it all packed in a few weeks.

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I wanted to start by saying THANK YOU! for all the lovely comments we received when we announced that we are homeowners, I loved reading all of them! It feels so good to be in our own house now. We moved weekends a go and after a full week with no internet service I am very happy to be back, but still trying to catch up with work and emails =]

The very first project I got to tackle the week we moved (other than cleaning, trying to unpack and organizing) was the revamp for the build-in desk in the sewing room, because since the minute I saw it I knew I wanted to prettify it.

The counter top was a laminate surface, so I come out with a buch of different ideas to revamp it, I though painting was not going to be a very durable option with me using it all the time, but once at the store I realized that they had a special paint for laminated surfaces! silly me =]
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I wanted to share this amazing news with all of you today because for the past 3 months I’ve been keeping it a secret that we started house hunting, I don’t think we could be any more excited because finally this weekend escrow closed and we are officially home owners!

We were so excited we wanted to move right away! but right after we took this pictures a snow storm hit the mountains and up until today there was still snow coming down, we lost power because of falling trees and it was way too difficult to even try to move things in the snow. So we will wait for the weather to get better to attempt to move.

Our new house is by no means new, it was actually build in the 70′ and needs a lot of work, no really A LOT of work! but that was exactly what we were looking. We contemplated building in order to have the house we wanted, but after we saw this house we knew right away that it was perfect for us, it had all the potential we were looking for, and since it needs so much work, we can renovate it to be exactly what we want =]

The house it’s located downhill, so in this picture you can only see one floor, but it’s actually a 3 story down, and the main level entrance is one of the things we LOVE! we used to have to carry groceries about 30 steps up from our rental driveway to the house, so this by itself it’s a great improvement! We have a two car garage with a little shop below it, we plan to renovate that too, but so far that’s last in our super long list!

And along with the news I wanted to share one of the things that excited me the most about this house – the 3rd floor -> this is actually a 1 bath/2 rooms level, and it’s all MINE to set up my studio/office!! YAY! – So I can’t wait to get started in the renovation of this space (one of my first projects in the house)

It’s funny that even before escrow closed I had everything I want to make with this space planned out in my head =] I decided to keep the wall dividing the 2 rooms (at first I wanted to get rid of it and have just one very long room) and make the front room my office/design studio and the back room as my sewing/crafting area so that way I keep things more organized.

I am so excited to share the rest of the house and the improvements we are going to be working on, since it will be mostly done by us with the professional help of Ken’s dad. We decided we want to move in and slowly work on one room at a time, for this next couple of weeks we are going to be working on cleaning, and whatever the weather allows us to do outside, and I’ll be working on my studio every time I can.

I am so happy to finally write this post, we have been crossing fingers for weeks!!
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and if you have any moving tips I would really appreciated! since last time I moved I only brought 2 bags from Chile, this move will be a little bigger than that LOL.

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You might be wondering why is this place so quiet, the answer is that I’ve been sick =[ I spent about 2 weeks in bed and that made me be super behind on work, so up to today I've been only trying to catch up with work having absolutely no time to stop by this little blog. It makes me so sad when I can't come and play with you guys!

One cool thing was that right before I got sick I decided to upgraded to an Iphone. Ken tried to convinced me for about a year before I actually decided I wanted one, I think I refused for way too long =] right? – I had a chance to play with it while in bed and I have to say I LOVE IT. Among other things I finally joined Instagram and even tho I am still trying to figure it out, I think it’s pretty awesome.

So hopefully now that I am feeling better I’ll get to share some previews and stuff there, so let me know if you are on Instagram too, I am HowJoyful there =] I don’t really have many pictures and most of them are of Curly but hey! he’s a very cute subject.

On another note, even though the news of Google discontinuing Google Friend Connect has been all over the blog world for quite some time now. I wanted to share my frustration and sadness about it, as of March 1st they stopped the support for all non-Blogger blogs, so what does that mean for HowJoyful? Since I use WordPress the little widget in my sidebar (the white box below my ad) that used to say “follow this blog” is will no longer work (I just still have not erased it hoping Google will change their minds – hopeful thinking never hurts), but that is not really what makes me sad/mad, it’s the fact that everyone that used to get updated to their readers via Google Friend Connect will not longer get it.

I was actually super happy to almost reach 1,000 readers on GFC and I wanted to celebrate it with something special (GFC was about 1/4 of my total audience so it is a pretty big deal to me), but that same week I heard for the first time that Google decided to eliminate Google Friend connect along with a few other Google services that are not very popular (it was pretty late already, I could have tryed to write a post to warn everyone before they stopped delivering updates, but I’ve been so out of the loop while sick). Right now Google is recommending to create Google+ Pages and add their widget, but keeping up with yet another page/social media and start from scratch will be hard, I just don’t know if it will be worth the effort.

My readers are super important to me, I know that if you bother to read my blog there is something I must be doing right. I just treasure each one of you, so I just can’t get over the fact that every blog that is not hosted with Blogger will not be able to use GFC anymore, I kind of undertand that Google is protecting their own blogs, but their solution could and should have been better than just say “start all over with Google+ pages”.

I am so sad I have no way to let all of those readers about this change =[ so I just really hope some of them will visit, realize that they are not getting the updates and re-subscribe... ( what a pain for all of them!) And just in case you are one of them and are reading this post, there are a lot of other ways to get updates when a new post is published:

• You can subscribe to the RSS feed.
• Add this blog to Google Reader
• Follow via Bloglovin'
• Get email delivery
• You can like our Facebook Page
• Follow on Twitter

Anyways, enough with the GFC issue because I am very excited to be back and feeling better =] I hope you guys missed me! because I sure did =] I know I still owe a few tutorials I showed the previews for, so I’ll try to post them soon (I have so many half done post drafts right now… but I’m working on it!) I’ve missed you all so much!
I hope you all have a lovely day!

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