Straight Line Winds.... meet The Humpty Dumpty House

Wow what a 36 hours it has been! The Humpty Dumpty House narrowly escaped some major damage from the storm on Tuesday evening. The events kind of went as so:

Tuesday evening ~1/29/08

• 6:45 ish - Adam returns home from work after staying there to study for a test he has on Friday
• 7:00 ish - it starts to get a bit windy and I comment that I think we need to get the TV on b/c there is a chance of severe storms so I want to know what is going on. My dear husbands reminds me that I may, in fact, worry too much and that it is just some rain and wind. (mind you, the tornado sirens have now been going off for several minutes)
• 7:05 ish - Our lights go off, our entire house shakes and a very loud "not just a little bit of wind and rain" sound can be heard. I run towards the bathroom/hallway area and yell "This is not NORMAL and where are you!!" Adam had gone on a hunt for our flashlight, Lord only knew where it might have been. He was using the light from his cell phone to try and find it. After the 5 seconds of madness stopped we were now also looking for our poor little dog, Abbi. Adam eventually found her sitting back by the patio door, shaking in fear so bad he could hardly pick her up, poor little thing. At that point I had located our small radio, that I had luckly put batteries in, so I found some weather coverage to find out if we were in the clear. Adam called me to the back patio door where he found Abbi and said "you have to see this". Our large tree that is only about 20 feet from our backdoor was 2/3rds of the way gone and lying in our yard. I immediately said "Praise God!" because had the tree fallen towards our house it would have done some major damage.
• 7:10 ish - Adam took the flashlight and went outside to see what else might have fallen. We found out he had 3 large fur trees uprooted and laying against our house and roof over the garage area. Another portion of a tree had fallen in our drive way and hit the front of my car. In the back yard we knew about the one tree but another has almost down and was literlly laying a foot away from the corner of our house, but didn't hit it. One of the trees on the side where the garage is had fallen on the powerline that goes to our meter.
• 7:15ish - Firetrucks are going up and down our street and firemen are coming 2 by 2 to each house to make sure that everyone is ok and to tell us it might be some time before we have electricity, so with it being so cold, we need to make sure to stay warm.
• 7:30 ish - We start calling our parents to let them know what is going on, and I talk to my Dad since he is my insurance agent about what to do with my car and if there is any damage on the house.
• 8:00ish - We are talking to our friends Steve and Michelle and Michelle offers to let us (including Abbi) stay at her condo in Avon since we have no heat and it is supposed to get down to below zero, so I start trying to get stuff together for that. Our next door neighbor comes over and tells us he has a big fire started in his fireplace if we need to warm-up and also has a chainsaw and other stuff if we needed to borrow it. Adam did go ahead and borrow the chainsaw, the amazing thing was that our neighbors property had virtually no damage.

By around 10:00 we are heading over to Michelle's condo packed up with our toothbrushes and some pajamas. Abbi made the trip too since we didn't think leaving her in a house w/o heat with subzero weather would be very nice.

Wednesday ~ 1/30/08

After fueling up for what we knew would be a long day with some Cracker Barrell breaksfast, Adam and I headed back to the house a little tenative about what it might look like in daylight. We intially took a drive down our street and noticed that basically every house south of ours on the street had a tree down, but no ones house seemed to sustain major damage.

We spent most of yesterday with Adam using the chainsaw to cut up the trees and get any that were on the house off of it, while I was dragging stray limbs and such into piles. All while fending off all the tree removal companies and contractors that were a steady stream of visitors for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We will probably use one of the tree companies to actually get the stuff we can't use for firewood off of our property, but the actual cutting we could do ourselves without paying $$$$$$. We got quite a bit done and I even got my car over to Church Brothers for an estimate and I'm taking it in next Monday to get fixed.

We finally got power restored at 10:30 pm last night and in the meantime used our fireplace, for the first time since moving in, so that we could try to have some warmth and keep the pipes from freezing.

This of course has put a little delay in our renevation plans this week, but praise God we are all safe and it was just some trees that fell down with a little damage to our house and car.

I will try to post pictures tomorrow, I left the camera with Adam today incase he needed to take any pictures for insurance purposes.

A blogging sabatical

I know it has been a little while since I blogged anything.....to be quite honest not much blog-worthy has been occurring. We have installed the door in the bathroom, the only thing it is missing is a door handle. Adam has continued the mudding and sanding of drywall in the kitchen, but again not exceptionally fun to take pictures of or blog about. Thursday we are hoping to do the texture painting on the ceilings in the kitchen (where we patched the drywall/plaster) and bathroom ceilings and get the kitchen painted. Once this is all done then we can start the install of the kitchen cabinets, hallelujah!! If we get the paint up then I will take some pictures and post them.

Our fancy bathroom.....

Well, I really don't know how fancy it is but it seems fancy next to what it was and next to the fairly "constructor basic" bathroom we have had in the past. These pictures demonstrate the evolution of getting the bathroom finished which is almost done, we just had to hang the mirror and put the hardware on the vanity, which is done now but no pics yet.

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Just for memory's sake this is what this area looked like before

Our vanity light which I ordered online from http://www.smartbargains.com/

This is our 48 inch vanity which came from Home Depot, our plumbing set-up was a little weird for a traditional vanity so of course that took a little longer to get situated than we would have hoped, but we are leaning everything takes longer than you expect.

Here is everything assembled, the counter top is a precut granite counter top that you can buy at Home Depot and install yourself. By the way, my contribution was putting the toilet paper holder up, which I must tell everyone is perfectly level :)

And below is a close-up of the fixtures, which are the match for the tub fixtures. They are all American Standard and again came from Home Depot. You can't tell from this picture but the sink is quite large and deep, which is nice. I also think I will like that this sink is an under mount sink for cleaning purposes in the future.

Dishes in the bathtub????

So this was a first for me, I did our dishes in the bathtub the other day. We don't accumulate that many dishes we need to wash right now, but a few had started to pile up and since there was no sink at the time the bathtub was my only option. We are actually eating pretty well for not having a fully functioning kitchen, (our current kitchen is a microwave, large toaster/convection oven, and refrigerator) but we aren't being very environmentally caring in that we are using paper and plastic everything, as much as we can, so it doesn't have to be cleaned up later.

I think the kitchen is our next room to tackle so hopefully there aren't too many more times I need to do dishes anywhere but the kitchen sink, or even better using a dishwasher :)

Your first taste of Birthday Cake

I'm sure none of us remember our first taste of birthday cake or how messy we were allowed to make ourselves, so that our friends and family could take pictures of us that haunt us in graduation and wedding videos.



I got to experience my nieces first birthday cake this last weekend and I must say she did an absolutely awesome job at the messy part. It did make for some great pictures and lots of laughter.

"I am a one year old birthday princess"

"I love my Daddy & Mommy, but where is this cake everyone keeps talking about?"

"Ohhh, here it is, yay I'm one and there is a small fire I can play with!"

"What is this stuff....hmmm...not milk, not cereal, kind of feels like lotion maybe I should put some on my hands."

"Whooooah....this is really fun to put all over my hands and now everyone is laughing at me and taking pictures, lets see what else I can do"

"This stuff doesn't taste too bad, lets see how much I can get in my mouth."

"Forks....shmorks....using my hands is a much better way to devour cake. Oh and doesn't my cake look scrumptious now, do you want a bite??"

"Here, Daddy, I'll put some on your hands and then you can eat like I am"

Our first finished before and after

So we have officially showered in our new house (we were showering before just had to ask some really nice friends to help us in that area)!!! I think this might be the first project that is completely done and there is a significant visible change in the before and after.

Just in case everyone has forgotten what this lovely are in our home looked like before I have reposted a before picture and then an after picture.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I think it is quite a vast improvement and the new tile and fixtures look really nice. Just in case you were curious this is also a new tub, that other one was nasty, I'm sure there were some kind of cooties I could have gotten from the old one. In the he picture below you can see the shower head and top of the tile. We didn't go all the way to the ceiling there is about 8-10 inches of painted wall up there. Oh and the shower rod you see is not staying, we purchased one of the metal ones that kind of curves out. We had to order special drill bits to make the holes for the anchor and screws, to install it, because the porcelain tile is so hard.

And then below are our pretty new fixtures. It really is fun to pick out everything and then see how in comes together.


We need to install the vanity, vanity light, and mirror and then we will be pretty much done with the bathroom in regard to necessities. What we will need to complete are the finish tasks like the window sill, baseboard, etc.

The shower is ready for grouting and to be used

After a long night and hardly any sleep with having to wake up for work this morning, Adam finished tiling the bathtub surround. Now we can grout tonight and by early next week be able to take a shower in our home.

I think it looks pretty good for our first wall tiling job, we had done floors before and I think we might stick to only floors in the future.




This little duck tape contraption in the center is the soap dish and you have to "securely tape it to the surrounding tiles" so it adheres to the cement board and hopefully never falls off.
Whew, I think I am all caught up, finally! Hopefull enough will occur this weekend that I can have more updates for Monday.

Oh the lovely porcelain throne .....

Before we get to the lovely white porcelain throne, this is what it looked like when we first began tiling the floor. We have since made some progress which will be posted in a bit. Daa Daa taa DAA!!! The item I have been waiting to have in my new home finally was installed and able to be used. Thank you to Village Pantry on 56th Street for happily providing us with a throne to use in the meantime. I know I'm about ready to kill this point, but you truly don't realize our modern conveniences until you don't have them, then you become so grateful for running water, a toilet, a bathtub, etc. Maybe this should be a good lesson in simplicity (what we really need vs. what we think we need)......I'll ponder that for a while.
Here are our shower walls about half tiled. This project is was so tedious and just seemed to take forever. I don't thinking shower tiling will be in Adam's plans for a very long time and he probably hasn't ever spent so much time sitting in the bathtub before.

As you can see "man's most used invention" duck tape was a viable tool for this tiling project. Of course even if it wasn't the appropriate tool Adam, as a man, probably could have found a way to use it :0

Christmas and the world's cutest niece...

I'm rewinding a day or two because we actually moved on the 26th so these posts are a little out of order.

Here we are all packed up and ready to go to my parents for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so we needed to take Abbi with us since we would be gone overnight. We took some laundry to my parent's house to finish up so we didn't have to move dirty clothes, I think that is what made the car a bit more crowded. This picture is funny to us because Abbi was trying to sit perfectly still for fear that something was going to fall on her during the drive. When I would look back to check on her she would flash me this look as if to say "This is pure torture because you know I hate the sound of falling or moving bags!" Don't feel too sorry for her she is pretty darn spoiled!

Here is my brother and my favorite (and by the way only) niece in her Christmas dress ready for church on Christmas Eve. This was her first Christmas so she was quite the attention getter this year. Good thing she is too young to know how much everyone is spoiling her, we will have to bring in the reigns next year when she is almost 2 and will totally know how to "play the game" by then.
I think she has 3 different ones of these ride-on-or-walk-behind toys and she pretty much just does the walk behind portion right now. The other misc. arms and legs in the picture are members of my Dad's side of the family, it is tradition to get together on Christmas Eve.
See how can you say no to that cute little smile....I can't yet, but I'll try to get thicker skin.
"Uncle Adam, hurry up I want to see what is in this box and play with this toy. You are going to have to get faster with those scissors before you have kids of your own!"
It was a fun Christmas, having a little one around again. Hopefully as the years go on there will be more little ones added to the bunch and we will get to experience it through the eyes of children, which is the best part.

The Big Move... and more important FINAL Move!!!

Welcome home! This is what our lovely living room pretty much still looks like; until we get more rooms done so we can unbox some of our belongings.



As you can see in the picture below the TV is at least able to get the local network stations. Poor Adam has had to go without Sports Center too long, if he was not able to watch or listen to all the bowl games he might go into some kind of withdrawal :) I think football has been on the TV 95% of the time it has been on so far. By the way this is a temporary spot for the TV we aren't so awkward as to have it at the back of a room with all of our furniture facing the other way.

This is our make shift kitchen, it consists of a microwave, toaster oven, card table, kitchen cart, and refrigerator. It works for now, but I can't say I'm not looking forward to being able to cook again.

At least we have a dining room table and we can eat dinner together there, that makes it feel a little like home.

Catch up post #2

Here is the bathroom after it had been painted. The poor souls that were there when we were painting got to hear about 20 times how much I liked the color of the paint. These pictures don't capture it in its true beauty, but it really is one of my favorite house colors :)



Adam had mortared the joints of the cement board on the floor so we could start tiling in here.
Here is the kitchen with a portion of it primed. All of the areas that are done being mudded and sanded were primed by my Dad a couple of Saturday's ago.
And so glad we are finally getting to cover up some of that fugly orange stuff that was on the walls.

Drywall and Mudding ......Catch up post #1

Here are few picture of the drywalling process. Chris, Adam's brother, came over a lot the week before Christmas to help Adam get this done before we had to move in. I was thankful, since the mudding/sanding part creates a ton of dust, that we were able to get a large majority of it out of the way before we were living in the house. Anyway I think for not being "professionals" they did a great job. Its hard to believe that the house looked like this just about 10 days ago. When I update with more pictures you will see that dramatic progress has been made at least in the bathroom.

These are of the bathroom just after all the mudding and sanding had been completed.

Here are the shower walls just waiting patiently to be tiled, more on that in later posts, but if you ever think of tiling your shower talk to Adam first. Lets just say it is a long tedious process.
And here is the kitchen just waiting to be finished so it can be primed and painted. There are a have a few spots that need a another mudding but it shouldn't be any long process and hopefully painting can occur soon.