Get to know the (almost) Pope's

With our house closing in 2 days and our wedding in 33 days, we have a lot going on. We are picking out paint colors and making moving arrangements while searching for wedding songs and making last minute wedding arrangements - things are crazy! Not only do we have all of that going on but Grayson just had a promotion at work (yay! - so proud of him!) and I am spending hours each day searching for an elementary teaching position (yeah, they aren't hiring teachers anymore, who would have thought!).

Our house is a two bedroom, two bathroom town-home in Davidson, NC. Believe it or not, we are buying the place from my sister (we like to keep it in the family - haha). It has been awesome purchasing a place when we know the previous owners because we have no nerves about finding any "hidden problems." Another perk is that whenever we head over to babysit my beautiful niece and handsome nephew we have been able to measure and map out our decorating strategies early. The downside to this is that we have lots of ideas but none of it can be purchased until after the wedding (gift $, oh yeah!).

Which brings us to our wedding :)
Grayson and I have been dating for 5 years. We met back in high school (insert "aww" here) and both went to NC State in Raleigh, NC (yay to any Wolfpack fans!). Grayson "popped the question" over Christmas on one of our date nights (we try to do this weekly, you should too!) and I have been on cloud nine ever since. I'll say this now, because Grayson is not with me as I write this entry, but he is the most amazing man a girl could wish for, I am so blessed we found one another :) Enough mushy gushy - While we are excited to begin our lives together, as husband and wife, we have also been spending lots of time planning our beach wedding. The wedding will take place on the beach in Emerald Isle, NC and the reception will be in Swansboro, NC at my families beach house that my grandfather built in the 80s. We are so excited for the week, our families have done an amazing job making our dreams of a casual beach wedding come true! If your interested, our wedding website is (www.popekindredwedding.com) and eventually we will post pictures from the wedding and if your interested we can let you know where and how we did our decorations (a lot of them stolen from other blogs we love.)

Grayson and I were first introduced to "blogging" as we were planning our wedding and researching decorating ideas for our house. We used numerous blogs to get our inspiration and realized we should share our ideas with others too (in the words of my professor, "I'm just a giver"..). We hope to gradually document our adventures of house decorating and newlywed bliss through this blog. While I (Maggie) have done the initial planning of our blog, Grayson is the artistic one and will most likely be the one who makes it all worth while :)

Thanks for joining us on our crazy ride...

-Maggie (& Grayson)