Welcome to our life:)

Hello all! My name is Melissa Ayala and I am happily married to the man of my dreams, Santino. Since this blog will be about our lives together I will start with a little background for you. During my senior year of high school I was in the lunchroom one day and one of my friends suggested I meet her brother, back in that day (2004) MSN messenger was a big hit so we exchanged email addresses and started talking. We went back and forth for about a month when we stopped talking...and suddenly one day he instant messaged me and we started talking again and on May 3rd of 2004 we became "official". After just 1 year we moved into our first home together. 3 year flew by and my dreams were finally coming true on Christmas of 2007 we were engaged:) Here is us after getting engaged...

Since I always wanted a fall wedding and I knew that the fall of 2008 was way too soon to wedding plan, we were engaged for almost 2 years before we married on 10-10-2009.

Between getting engaged and married we upgraded from our small little 700 sq ft first home into our dream 1912 beautiful home. We got a heck of a deal on the house, and with that, it needed work, but nothing a little bit of paint and elbow grease couldn't fix up. We still have a long way to go to make our home be right where we want it to be, but as for now, we're enjoying every bit of it.

We are very lucky to have a big kitchen with this old house, but the tile floors were not quite what we were wanting. So we tiled the floors with beautiful 18x18 tiles with inset 6x6 decorative tiles. Some day we will get new cabinets...:)

Our next BIG project was replacing all 32 windows of the house!! Here is the before of the window project..the old windows were original and very drafty.

The new windows are amazing to look at and even better on the checkbook:) In this pic we painted the first floor of the sun porch, on the right of the photo. Another think to add to the to-do list; we plan on replacing the windows of the sun porches someday...

A small side project was re staining the front door-the wonderful original oak door was dark and dried out from the sun. It was in desperate need of a little TLC. And TLC is just what the hubby gave it:)

and finally...the beautiful finished product.

Aside from installing ceiling fans, light fixtures, painting, and some other cosmetic issues that almost sums up everything we've done so far. But no worries, we are planning a big bathroom remodel in November of this year. We follow Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University's budget and with that we have learned so many useful tips and we have been buying piece by piece needed for this bathroom so we aren't overwhelmed with the hefty expense of remodeling 2 bathrooms:)

So, with all of that said, welcome to the life of the Ayala's, we look forward to sharing all of our experiences with you as we tackle our upcoming projects at our home and our lives.



-Melissa & Santino