Halloween!!

We had such a great Halloween, and I hope you did too!  We had SO many trick-or-treaters! We'd heard that our street is kind of quiet for trick-or-treaters even though lots of kids live around here (probably because our street is on a MASSIVE hill...), so we weren't expecting much at all, but it ended up being great!

I'd decorated the inside of our house at the beginning of October, so here's a few pictures of our indoor decorations:

Here's the left side of our fireplace mantle... 

And the right side of our fireplace mantle! 

The day before Halloween we did some decorating outside:

The picture didn't turn out too great, but they looked nice in person! We got some cool vintage-looking Halloween cutouts for our window, and we love them! We also got some fun blue bat lights. Oh and this is a sneak-peak of our new windows before they were finished... They hadn't updated the outside trim, etc yet when I took this picture! It's all nice and finished now though. 

The morning of Halloween, Kevin and I woke up semi-early and drove to Linvilla Orchard to get a pumpkin and some other fun Fall items! With the honeymoon this month and everything, we haven't had a lot of time to prep for Halloween! We weren't even sure if we'd have time to go to Linvilla or if we'd just need to stop by a grocery store for a pumpkin, but the night before Halloween we decided we could head there in the morning! So we got there nice and early and got some coffee and apple treats from their cafe, and then we wandered over to their pumpkin area and picked up some cool stuff!  We found a pumpkin with lots of character that we both loved, and then we also picked out an assortment of gourds because I think gourds are so darn cute and full of character. And after we were done with the pumpkin area, we went over the the apple orchard and picked some apples!!  And when we got home, we carved our pumpkin!!

Linvilla Orchard! 

McGee carrying our apple box! It's later in the season than we usually go, so a lot of the good apples were gone already!!  We ended up finding some great ones after searching really hard though! 

We have like 4 gourds there, plus a cute pumpkin that McGee's folks got for us, and then a little pumpkin that we thought was fun (on the right). 

Here's our pumpkin! We loved that it was far from perfect... It had a lot of weird lumps and it was kind of oddly shaped. It had quite a good stem though! 

And here it is all lit up that night! 

At about 4:30pm on Halloween our neighbor had a fun party (lots of kids, lots of adults), so we got to meet a lot of our neighbors! We were told we could bring an appetizer, so I checked Pinterest for Halloween appetizer ideas and we made a fun one! And at the party I found out that one of our neighbors was born in Oakdale, CA (where the almond ranch is)!!  What are the odds of that??

This was our appetizer we brought! It's just some guacamole and some olives and sour cream for the eyes, and blue corn chips! It was easy peasy. 

And at the end of the party when it started to get dark, we left and went to our house to get ready for trick-or-treaters! We ended up just grabbing a few of our camping chairs and putting them at the end of our driveway, and our neighbor across the street did the same, and we sat at the end our driveways with our jack-o-lanterns. We chatted for a few hours and drank some beers, and we ended up getting quite a few trick-or-treaters! It was such a fun night. 

In non-Fall news, our new windows are in and completed and we LOVE them!!  Another HUGE project is checked off our list. We'd really wanted to have them finished before winter, because we could feel every cold breeze with our old windows (they were like 60 years old). If you stood anywhere near a window, you could just feel the freezing air coming through. So, we can already feel SUCH a huge difference in the temperature in our house (which will help a TON with our heating bill this Winter!!), and we've also noticed it's a lot more quiet in our house now!!  You could hear the wind and any outside noise, so now it's nice and quiet.  I have a picture of before and after, so you can see a difference for sure, but we didn't do it for the appearance at all. We just wanted more functional windows and they're so great!! 

This was a "before", taken last March I think. 

And this is the "after". Just a few subtle differences in appearance, but they are SO much more functional now!! And also before, we couldn't even open a lot of our windows because they were permanently stuck closed. So, they all open quite easily now! Oh and if you can see the window grids in the "after" picture, they were there in the before picture too but they were painted dark green so they were quite hard to see!