Other than the house

House, house, house, that is all we talk about anymore! But there are lots of other crazy things going on in our lives besides our crazy house!

We went to my mom's last weekend and the dogs got so sick while there that they are definitely not welcome back. Rico threw up 5 times (count them 5! I did at 4 in the morning, only I missed one that my mom found later). And where did he throw up? On my mom's BRAND NEW carpet and BRAND NEW comforter. We cleaned and cleaned cleaned and mom says that she can't really tell anymore. Seriously, the woman is not going to let our dogs back in her house, thankfully we will have a grandbaby for her soon, or she may have decided to not let us back in.

So then right as we are getting ready to leave Thisbe has diarrhea, the kind that shoots out of her before she has any idea she needs to go. Fortunately, it was on the cement floor in the breezeway so mom did not actually have to kill us, or Thisbe. Unfortunately, Thisbe was out sick for the next two days, although she seems to have recovered now.

I recently started to PANIC! about the fact that I have not decorated our baby's room. This is because we did not want to find out the sex of our baby because we thought a surprise would be so fun! But I also do not want a yellow or green room and did you know that most baby things that are supposedly gender neutral are pretty much boy? So I don't really want to decorate the room but I kind of feel like a bad person for not having this room done before the baby arrives. Of course the crib will be set up and everything for baby will be in the room and that will probably make me feel much better, but this week I've been feeling like a bad person about it.

I am taking two classes for my masters this quarter and I cannot believe how overwhelming it is. Even being home all day I feel like I barely have time to get all the reading, posting, and papers done. I only have two more weeks of this, but of course the last two weeks have all the big papers and assignments so it will be a busy two weeks. Then I will be taking time off to HAVE A BABY! After that I will have two more classes that will be done by August.

Since we are done with the kitchen cabinets, Bryce and I have really been enjoying each other this week. We get to sit down and have dinner and then putt around the house working on organizing rooms for the big rearranging that will take place here shortly so that we can start setting up baby's room. We've taken the dogs for extra walks in the evening, watched a couple of movies, and played some Nintendo. It's been so nice :)

Bryce is incredibly busy at work, he can barely get everything done in 8 hours, and most days he is in a little early or staying a little late. We hope that all the hard work will pay off in the means of a promotion into an engineering position.

So there are a few of the other fun things going on around here. It's always a bit busy and crazy but it's just the way it is for us I guess!

The Cabinets are DONE!!!

It is a big day at our house! Last night Bryce finished putting up the cabinet doors (just what this girl wanted for Valentine's Day!). I cannot believe how different our kitchen looks, every time I walk in the room I have to think a second to figure out where I am!

The before picture:

And the after!!!

It is absolutely amazing that only weeks of hard labor led to this transformation. There are three coats of clear coat on these fresh cabinets as well as new self-closing hinges. The kitchen feels amazing. Our "experimental" cabinet door still needs finished and we also got some fancy crown molding to go around the top. So there will be another picture in the coming weeks, but for now, we are done and the cabinets are beautiful!

There's a hole in the house

The cupboards are still coming along, between our already busy lives and the 4 hours of drying time, it takes a while to get all those cupboard doors done. But the hinges arrived yesterday which puts us one step closer to having cupboard doors back on these cupboards! On Saturday I got home from having lunch with my mom and my mother-in-law to find Bryce and my father-in-law cutting a hole in the side of the house.

The hood over our stove was not vented outside, it recirculated back into the house. If you have a vent that does this you will notice that when you cook something especially smoky, none of the smoke actually gets sucked out of the house, it's just blown back into the house, resulting in the fire alarms going off. This sort of thing really bothers Bryce because "it's wrong." So he decided to vent it out of the house, as usual it proved to be a little more difficult than we had hoped. Most of the difficulty stems from the fact that our house is ridiculously tall and we do not have a ladder that is tall enough. So we borrowed one from friends, but it was only barely tall enough...but somehow they made it work.

Here is Bryce working on drilling a hole to the outside wall, this tool is VERY old, and I don't recall what it is called, but I do know that after this project he had to rewire it because apparently the wiring was so old it would shock you once in a while.

There it is, a hole to the outside! This project made me a little nervous, I could just see holes in all the wrong places on the side of our house...but the hole was done perfectly.
Measuring sheet-rock to replace where the tile and sheet-rock had to be torn out behind the hood.
The finished product. It now vents outside perfectly and we just need to keep any bugs or animals from moving in until we get a screen on the outside. The tile that was removed was ruined and it also ruined the sheet-rock. So when we get around to replacing all of the back-splash we will also have to replace the sheet-rock, it doesn't look perfect yet, but it's not that noticeable. And I have lived with a giant hole in the closet door of the bathroom for almost a year now, so I'm sure this will blend in soon as well!

At first sight

The first time I posted about our house was on February 13th 2009. I believe we saw the house for the first time at the end of January, so it has officially been a year since we first laid eyes on "Our House." So much has happened in this past year, not just to the house of course, but also in our busy lives! We get compliments all the time on all we have accomplished in less than a year, sometimes I am in shock about everything we have done when I look at a room and remember everything we have changed. It's unbelievable some days! Just recently I was showing a friend my blog and talking about all the things we have recently done, when I realized that everything we have recently done we did in January! I was shocked to realize we accomplished so much in such a short time!

We have officially painted all but ONE room in our house. That means I have touched nearly every square inch of wall space in this house, with the exception of those spaces that wonderful friends and family touched for me :) The room that we have left is probably the room that needs the most work and since Bryce and I have recently burned out in the home improvement department it will have to wait. This particular room has a door, and we would rather it had a window, it has tile in front of this door and we would like to have it all carpeted, and the ceiling and walls have some issues that may require tearing out and re-sheet-rocking. This room is actually quite a ways down on the priority list, so we probably won't get to it for a while, however, we will be moving our upstairs guest room to this room shortly. And then the upstairs room can finally get ready for baby!

The cupboards still have quite a few days left on them, Bryce plans to start the cupboard doors tonight/tomorrow. They will take a few days to get three coats on, and they need done on both sides, so that adds some time as well. I am ready to have my cupboard doors back on and to not have to look at everything inside the cupboards anymore.

After that I think our major home improvement projects will take a break, because we need a break physically and financially! So the next few months will probably involve cleaning and organizing, and getting ready for spring which will bring baby and grass seed, and a new fence and possibly a new paint-job on the outside of the house...