The Humpty Dumpty House

Months 7, 8 and 9 all combined

2010-11-24T13:37:00.003-05:00

So I have to make a made dash to catch-up on the 2nd 6 months of Leah's life before she turns 1 :)

Here she is at 7 months old, during her 7th month she perfected her crawling skills and learned how to get into everything, she became a master of mobility and we had to baby proof and move a lot of things up. She began venturing a lot more with her foods and I had a lot of fun making her baby food. She would try almost anything and ate very well.

And here is 8 months. As you can see there isn't a huge difference in the pictures, I think her filling out had started slowing down since she was on the go constantly. During her 8th month she started pulling up first on her activity table then on anything she could figure out how to get to a standing position. We started introducing more and more table food and she transitioned really easily to being nearly off all baby food/purees by the time she was 9 months old. At the end of August, Leah's beloved Miss Laurie, that has been babysitting her since I went back to work, found out that her breast cancer from 3 years ago had come back. Understandably she wasn't going to be able to continue watching Leah and we were blessed by being able to quickly get her in a wonderful daycare in a matter of 3 days. She misses her Miss Laurie, but wants her to spend all her time trying to get better and kill that awful cancer!!!

Just short of being 9 months old Leah was dedicated at our Church and all her grandparents were in attendance.

And finally here she is at 9 months, getting her to nicely lay down by her doggy just isn't working any longer, she moves way too much. During her 9th month she perfected her ability to pull-up on anything and everything. She made new friends at her new school and loves her current teacher Miss Sandy. She totally transitioned to table food and got her first tooth. She really started clapping and loved to see how loud she could make her hands :) When we went to her 9 month appt she was 29 inches long (92%) and 17lbs 14 oz (30%) and I can't remember the inches for her head but it was like the 87%, so she is a tall, skinny kid with big old noggin :) The daycare germs have been getting their punches in, I think she has been sick with something from pretty much the week she started, luckily nothing has been too serious or lasted too long and we haven't had any ear infections.

On a really nice day in September we all headed to the zoo, here is Leah with her Daddy enjoying the Rhinos. I think this is the first time she went to the zoo and stayed awake long enough to see and enjoy the animals.

Month 6 ......a vacation and cancer turning our world upside down

2010-08-02T18:55:00.003-04:00

Leah had a pretty eventful month 6, we went on our second vacation in a month and this time we drove out to Hilton Head, SC with my entire family. Leah did great and on the way back we drove straight through, that's 14 hours + for a 6 month old, thank goodness for a great little traveler. We stayed at a great townhouse condo right on the beach (well basically it was like a 100 yard walk) and had a big pool and baby pool right outside our patio. It was one of the best vacations I've had in that it was a perfect mix of relaxing and yet not getting bored. We ate some great food, we went to Savannah for a day trip, and spent a lot of time at the beach. But best of all we spent 9 days together as an entire family and everyone got along great and really enjoyed each others company.

Below was Leah's first dip in the ocean, she wasn't exactly a big fan in the beginning but got better each day.

Leah and her older cousin Camryn had a lot of fun together. Camryn liked playing pick-a-boo with Leah, and Leah thought anything Camryn did was really funny. The only thing Camryn wasn't a big fan of was Leah pulling her long locks every time she got a chance :)
Here is Leah our last night there, by that point she loved the water and thought the sand was great to run her fingers through and throw around.

While we were on our trip we noticed that my Dad just didn't quite seem himself and urged him and my mom to get to the Dr. as soon as we got back home. On June 10th, the Thursday after we got back Dad had an MRI which confirmed that he has a brain tumor in the left side of his brain. Its been quite a roller coaster since then, but I'll elaborate more on that in a separate post. To say the least that day turned our world upside down but we have been very blessed as a family for all the love and support that has been shown to us.

During our trip Leah started getting up on all fours and rocking and as soon as we got home she started doing her own version of a crawl. At first it was more of lunge, which usually led to a head first dive into whatever toy she was going after.

Getting her picture by a piece of paper that said what month it was and the date just is not even possible anymore, due to her new found mobility. This month again she was more interested in eating her stuffed puppy than laying next to it.

We didn't get to have her 6 month appointment until a little after actually turning 6 months, but her stats were 16 lbs 1.5 oz and 26 1/4 inches long.

5 months....first trip and meeting some VIPs

2010-08-02T18:39:00.002-04:00

Gosh its going to be hard to remember all the way back to 5 months but we did a lot of fun things like going to Boston to visit Adam older brother, Chris, his wife, Kacey, and our nephew, Nolan. We saw a lot of things in the city via our own personal tour guides :) and Leah actually did really well on her first flight and time sleeping somewhere besides our home. It was great to getaway for a quick trip and get to see their life at MIT and Cambridge.

Leah also met her great-grandparents (Adam's maternal grandparents) for the first time as they came back from their time down south for the winter. Adam's grandpa battled prostate cancer while they were away but as you can see his looking great and doing really well.

During month 5 she also started to be able to sit up with using her arms as support, such a big girl!!

The pictures with her Dog were starting to harder at this point b/c she suddenly realized there was a stuffed animal beside her, which of course meant she needed to try and eat it!!

A whole lot of catching up

2010-08-02T18:38:00.003-04:00

So I've been really bad and haven't blogged for almost 3 months, opps. We have a lot to share, we've had a lot of fun and some very sad things happen along the way. So I'll try to catch up as fast as I can.

Opps we need to rewind to 4 months

2010-05-17T19:41:00.004-04:00

I'm totally a blog slacker and haven't updated since Leah turned 3 months old, opps :( The biggest development that happened from 3 months to 4 months was that Leah learned how to rollover from her back to her belly. Once she figured this out, putting her on her back was just a game for her b/c within seconds she was on her tummy. This was fun for playing and stuff but we had to make sure she didn't play on the floor too close to eating b/c otherwise we were cleaning up her and the floor! She also went for her 4 month appt (actually a few days after turning 4 months) and was 14lbs 4.5 oz and 24.5 inches long, which is basically puts her in the 60th percentile for both weight and height.

Some other things we did was go to the final four festivities downtown. The picture below is of us watching Butler practice a Lucas Oil. Adam ended up being able to go the championship game on Monday with my dad. What and amazing final game he got to see.

We then had our first Easter with Leah and she seemed to think it was a pretty great day to celebrate Christ's resurrection. She looked adorable in her little pink Easter dress and we spent the day with family, it was a nice day. For some reason Leah took like 4+ hours of naps that day and then didn't sleep hardly at all that night, it was such a fun Monday let me tell you.

And of course here she is with her dog on her 4 month birthday, and for the first time I look at this picture and I actually think she is starting to look a little like my baby pictures.

I'm a quarter of a year old!

2010-03-27T11:35:00.003-04:00

Hi its Leah here again, Mommy and Daddy let me do this month's post because I have more time on my hands then they do. If we waited for them to do this post I might be 3 years old instead of 3 months. That's right this is my 3 month of age post and I'm gonna tell you all about what I did since I turned 2 months old. First though we have to show you the picture that Mommy takes of me every month next to my doggy.

I've decided to start posing for my pictures this month with my one hand behind my head, aren't I cute :) And mommy wanted me to tell you that I'm really filling out now, as you can probably see by the pictures. I guess this is the only time in life that it is cute to be chunky and have rolls, at least that is what I have heard. Mommy and Daddy have been weighing me lately on the Wii, I even have my own Mii, and I seem to be a little over 13 lbs. We'll get more precise measurements when we go back to the doctor next month for my 4 month appointment.

This last month I've really mastered being on my tummy and being able to support myself. Mommy and Daddy tell me I'm pretty strong and that I'm getting to be such a big girl, they say it is happening way too fast.

We finally got some nice days where the temps got up into the 50's and 60's, the first day it was pretty and sunny out Mommy and Daddy wanted to take me for a quick walk outside around our neighborhood. My first official walk outside, since I was born in the dead of winter. So they bundled me up in this snowsuit, and then laughed hysterically while they took pictures of me, I don't understand what was so funny!

I'm keeping Mommy and Daddy on their toes and learning all kinds of new tricks. One of the things I did between month 2 and 3 was learn to roll to my sides and play with my toys. It is much easier to reach what I want this way. There was an even more exciting development that happened a couple days after I was 3 months old, but that will have to wait for the next post.

My mamaw and pawpa have a grandparent's pass to the Indianapolis Zoo so on one of the Saturday's that it got up to the 60's we went there for my first trip. Here is picture of Daddy and I by the Rhino's. I slept for a lot of the trip but I liked watching the people that were there and maybe a few of the animals.

One of the biggest changes this last month was that Mommy went back to work on March 3rd. She was very happy that her work let her have a reduced schedule so that she only works 5 hours a day and is only away from me about 6 hours a day, we hope that it can continue until the end of the year when I turn 1. While Mommy is at work I go to Miss Laurie's house, she is one of Mommy's best friends, and she and her daughter Casey play with me and take care of me until Mommy picks me up. Mommy tells me we are so blessed to be able to have this schedule and have someone that loves me taking care of me during the day. Its also very fun that Mommy, Daddy and I are all home by about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and have a lot of time to play and have fun together, Daddy says we will be able have even more fun as the weather gets nicer and we can take long walk and go on bike rides. Here is picture that miss Laurie took of Casey and I, our Mommies say we will be friends just like they are :)

Well that about wraps it up for my 3 month post, I'll see if Mommy can get the 4 month post done or if I'll have to fill in for her again b/c she is too busy.

Nice try Boilers!!

2010-03-27T09:05:00.003-04:00

I guess Leah's excitement about the Boilers making it to the sweet sixteen wasn't enough to propel them over the Blue Devils and on to the Elite Eight. It was a nice run and better than anyone would thought they could do after the horrific train wreck in the Big Ten Tourney. We'll miss you Kramer and Grant, hopefully next year will be just as fun to watch.

P.S. I realize I'm edging closer to being a month late on getting the 3 month post completed. That's next on my to-do list.

2 month Stats and Shots

2010-02-11T13:54:00.006-05:00

So this little girl has been with us for 2 months now and I think both Adam and I can say even though we don't think we can love her more than we already do, our love for her grows everyday. She has changed a lot this month, not the least of those changes being that she has gained over 2 lbs this month. After the little turkey took forever to gain back her birthweight, that first month, she has gone from 8lbs 9oz to 10lb 11oz this last month. We went for her 2 month appointment on Tuesday and she checked out great, hitting all of her milestones and being a healthy little girl.

Her stats are:

Weight - 10lbs 11.5 oz (45th percentile)
Height - 23 inches (70th percentile)
Head Circumference - 39.5 cm (65th percentile)

Of course this appointment included shots, actually 3 of them, and an oral vaccine for Rotavirus. She, as expected, let out the horrible "I'm in pain" cry and turned 8 shades of red, but we brought a bottle of breastmilk with us and gave that to her once she settled down just a bit. That turned out to be a good idea and she soon went to sleep in her carset. Actually for the next 17 hours pretty much all she did, just waking up long enough to eat a few times. I guess we should feel blessed that the shots made her sleepy and not cranky. I'm also happy that she didn't get feverish or any of the other side effects.

One of the big things that little missy is doing is that she started sleeping in her crib at night at about 6 weeks. On most nights she goes down between 9 and 10 gets up once at sometime between 3 and 5 and then goes back down until some time between 6 and 8. We can definetly handle the only one waking and the nice stretch of sleep. She has also just recently started taking some naps in her crib, we'll have to work more on this, but daycare might help this happen more regularly :)

Here is a picture of her on her 2 month birthday with her stuffed dog, that we are taking her picture with every month to show how much she is growing.

And here is her life in pictures of many of the things she has started doing this last month.

Its hard to see but she is all about blowing bubbles and does so almost constantly, when she isn't "talking", eating, or crying!!

Here she is getting ready for the Superbowl, this was a jersey that was her cousin Camryn's but it was 3-6 months and just wouldn't quite fit yet. We ended up dressing her in a Colts onsie we had so she could use her hands :)

We got out the Bumbo just to try it out, I think it might be a little while before her head control is enough that she looks comfortable.

And the best part of the last month has been all the smiles we get (I know this is a horrible picture, but you take what you can get). She melts my heart with her sweet little smile and now she is also "talking" to us constantly in the midst of these great smiles.

And here is a video of all that talking she has been doing.

http://vimeo.com/9356402 from Amanda Phillips on Vimeo.

We have a bag of potatoes

2010-01-29T12:44:00.003-05:00

Leah and I went to a the Breastfeeding Support group at Clarian North yesterday and I'm able to weigh her there. She is now a big bag of potatoes and weighs 10lbs 2 oz, she gained a pound in 2 weeks which is right on target according to the doctor. And this kid is long, I'm interested in what she is measuring at her 2 month appt that is coming up, because due to length she can't fit in really any newborn clothes anymore and is basically in all 0-3 clothes and some 3 month clothes. I hope for her sake she is tall and lean like her daddy.

She is also really starting to notice her surroundings, especially her toys and mirror on her activity mat. I got a video of her playing from earlier today (if I upload this right)

Feeling Blessed!

2010-01-25T13:14:00.002-05:00

Do you ever have those days when the blessings of life are just more apparent to you than others, I think I'm having one of those days. Here are some of the things I'm grateful for:

1. A nice warm home that is comfortable and a place where we can host friends and family, and use the blessings we have been given to bless others.

2. A perfect little girl that is healthy, and getting to watch her literally change every day and learn about the world around her. This week she loves seeing herself in the mirror on her activity mat and coos and smiles. She now give tons of smiles to Daddy and I and doesn't laugh yet but gets this really excited coo when we respond to her smiles. She also just seemed to realize there are toys hanging on her activity mat and hits them and gets really excited that she figured that out, as well as, laying on her tummy and holding her head up like a champ.

3. Being married to a man that is both an amazing father and husband. I didn't realize when we had a child how much more I would love my husband by watching him embrace his role as the rock of our family. I feel like our marriage has grown more in 6 weeks then it probably had in 3 years, b/c you forget all the little things that you used to argue about and just concentrate on taking care of this little person and being a team to accomplish things. The way he takes care of Leah and I melts my heart everyday. Leah is one lucky girl to have a daddy that loves her the way he does and is so hands on with taking care of her, never turning away from changing a diaper or giving a bath, or like this weekend nearly getting pooped on!! :)

4. Friends that want to help us in whatever way they can as we transition though life. We have had meals twice a week brought to us since the week after Leah was born, until this week. It seems like a small thing, but what a blessing to not have to worry about meal planning or eating really badly those first 6 weeks, and getting to spend that time as a family enjoying one another. It also gave us an excuse to get to visit with a lot of friends we don't see as often and get to introduce Leah to them. Also those friends that call to check in just to make sure you are doing OK or that try to help you with the small things b/c you usually have one arm occupied by a little person.

5. An OB/GYN and Pediatrician that are wonderful doctors but that care for the people they see and not just medicine. My OB is close to my age and has two small kids so her opinions are nice to hear and she is helpful and encouraging in being a new mom. She is also very good about making sure that both myself and Adam are taking care of ourselves so we can adequately take care of Leah. Our pediatrician was totally picked by a couple of referrals of friends and he has turned out to be nothing but great. He is awesome with Leah, supportive of me and breastfeeding and willing to allow me try different things to stick with it, and also makes sure Adam and I are doing well so we can be good parents to Miss Leah.

6. Our families. You never know how much you love your parents until you are one yourself. Although I was already really close to my Mom I feel even closer to her now, understanding what it is like to be a Mom. She has been supportive, encouraging, and there whenever I needed her while letting us have our space as needed.

So those are some things going through my mind today and just wanted to get it down to have it to read when I may not being having one of those "I feel so blessed" days :)

One month post ( a little late)

2010-01-25T11:09:00.003-05:00

On January 9th, Leah turned 1 month old. I'm going to try and take a picture each month with this same stuffed dog to see how she is growing. Her first month was a great and totally busy month with Christmas and all the other things going on during that time. We finally had some success in the weight gaining department and by the time she was 4 weeks old she was several ounces over her birth weight, it was a lot of work for all involved to get that pound of weight on that little girl. We have enjoyed getting to know our little one and can't wait to see what the future months have in store and how much she is growing and changing.

And this picture if from this weekend at about 6 1/2 weeks, hasn't she changed so much, and Leah just wanted to say "Go Horse"!!!!

Catching up

2010-01-07T13:57:00.003-05:00

We've been a little behind on blogging these days so this will be a catch up entry. On Christmas morning we woke up for our first Christmas as a family of 3 and really the only ones with gifts under the tree were Leah and Abbi. Adam and I didn't really worry about getting presents for each other this year since we had so many other things going on with having a baby.

Leah was sporting her Christmas wardrobe and looked a bit like a candy cane, a cute candy cane, of course.

On Christmas Eve Leah got to meet her Uncle Ryan, my brother, since he hadn't been home from St. Louis since she was born. It was weird that my little brother wanted to hold this tiny newborn right away, but I guess having a child of your own gets most guys over the I'm going to break the baby thing. On the Saturday after Christmas she met her Uncle Chris, Aunt Kacey, and only boy cousin, Nolan. We hadn't seen Nolan since this summer, because he and his parents are now living in Boston, and boy has he changed from a 1 year old to an almost 18 month old. He is a very active little boy and is starting to try and talk more, although his words are a little cryptic right now he can get his point across :)

We were a bit busy over the Christmas weekend and just needed some recoup time after that weekend. Adam said next time we need to have better timing and not have a newborn right at Christmas, as if we have that much control :) The last week of the year we just spent a lot of time together since it was the last week before Adam went back to work.

We didn't really do much for NYE since we didn't know if we would be awake, asleep, or feeding a child, we slept through the ball dropping and I think said "Happy New Years" to one another about 2:00 am when Leah woke up to eat.

Below was Leah's first time wearing her Boiler gear for the game against West Virginia on New Year's day. We think she might be the cutest little Boiler fan out there!

In my previous posts I mentioned some issues we have had with Leah's weight gain. After her 2 week appt where she hadn't really gained any weight and was below her birth weight still we tried a different approach to feeding and she lost another 3 oz, at this point the pediatrician was a bit more concerned and so for the next week I exclusively pumped and fed her all the breast milk I could pump and then supplemented with formula until she was full, which seemed to top off at about 3 oz. She did great with the bottle and it was actually a little bit nice that Adam could help me feed her. In that week she gained 13 oz and went from a sleepy, kind of apathetic, eater to a really hungry demanding eater. She was finally back up to her birth weight plus a little more. The pediatrician then said that I could just pump and feed every other feeding and go back to nursing the other feedings. We visited the office again this week for a last weight check and she is still gaining weight, finally this kid is heading in positive territory. We are still doing the combo of pumped milk and nursing but I hardly have to supplement anymore so its working for now and our baby is gaining weight so we are happy.

Although I definitely want her to have the benefits of breast milk, I'm glad I have been pretty open and flexible to how we are feeding her so that we can do what works for us as a family and not get so wrapped up in success or failure on the breastfeeding front. A mindset I would recommend for any new mommy, everything is new and not easy so feeling like you are a failure at something is just a stress that you as a new mom and your family doesn't need!

And here is just a cute picture of our little peanut and as you might be able to tell she is filling out more, you can see it in those chubby little cheeks!! She was done with me taking pictures of her but I think she is so cute when she gets fussy, at least when its during the day and only last a minute or two :)

My Second Week

2009-12-23T10:03:00.003-05:00

Well, hello again everyone, I'm now a whole 2 weeks old and life just keeps getting more interesting. Lets see what has happened in week number two, well first of all my cord fell off last week and has been healing very nicely. Mommy and Daddy couldn't figure out where it was for a while after they noticed it fell off, but then Daddy found it in my onesie. Glad my furry friend Abbi didn't find it on the floor and eat it, yuck!!

On Saturday one of Mommy's friends, Kathy, came and took pictures of me and everyone said I was being so good. I didn't cry at all for the awake ones and once they wanted some pictures with my peepers closed I feel right to sleep. I only got a little frustrated at the end when they woke me up to put me in a Christmas dress for some Christmasy pictures, after a couple hours I decided I was done being a model :)

On Sunday I made my first trip to church and all the ladies loved all my hair and that Mommy could already put a bow in it. I slept in my seat for nearly the whole service, until Mommy smelled something a bit foul coming from my direction and determined I had a dirty diaper that needed changed. Mommy and Daddy did a good job scheduling so that I ate right before we went to church and was hungry right when we got home, we all worked together and it was nice for Mommy and Daddy to get out of the house for just a bit.

Other than that we have a ran a few errands here and there for Mommy and Daddy to finish some Christmas shopping or grab some groceries, but I always stay in my seat or we wait in the car so I don't get too many germies around me, being so little and all.

Yesterday we went for my 2 week check-up and I was supposed to have gained enough weight to be back to my birth weight. Well I had a surprise for Mommy and Daddy, even though I seem to be a great eater, I hadn't gained any weight from my 1 week check-up and still need to gain 9 oz to get to my birth weight. I think Mommy and Daddy were a little bummed about that, maybe I just have a good metabolism :) Dr M., my pediatrician, said this happens pretty frequently and that for the next week we need to breastfeed and then Mommy needs to pump and feed me that as a supplement. I go back next week and hopefully have gained quite a bit of weight. This new schedule is a little harder on everyone because it now takes longer to feed me and Mommy and Daddy are trying to get in more feeds a day, so sleep deprivation for them might be back for awhile. I'm a really good sleeper so they were kind of getting used to having some decent periods of sleep at night before starting this new schedule, I just like to keep them on their toes.

Well tomorrow is Christmas Eve and we are heading to Mamaw and Pampa Love's for the day, and then on Christmas, after we open our presents that morning, Grandpa and Nana Phillips and Uncle Matt are coming over for lunch. I'll have to fill you in more on my first Christmas in the next post.

My first week....from Leah's perspective

2009-12-18T14:45:00.003-05:00

Hello everyone, this it little Leah and I have been out in the big bad world for a week now (actually a little longer, but it took me a few times of asking to get Mommy to sit down and type this). Things have been good so far; me, Mommy, and Daddy have gotten to know each other better everyday and are doing pretty well and are starting to get more settled into feeling comfortable with feeding and other things and getting faster at them all the time.

I've had a lot of family coming to see me, of course my grandparents are always up for a visit and like to snuggle with me. They only seem to complain about my little green friend, my soothie paci, they say its always in my mouth when they want to get a picture. Mommy and Daddy don't care about good pictures, like me, and are just glad that my paci and I are such good friends when other things don't make me happy!!

I have tried out my activity mat, my bouncer, and my swing. I like them all for about 10 to 20 minutes and then I'm ready to be with either Mommy or Daddy for awhile. I think I might try them for longer periods of time to give Mommy and Daddy more breaks.

I'm a really good eater and at my first Doctor's appointment on Tuesday I had gained back 3 oz from the weight I was at when discharged from the hospital, my Doctor was really happy with this. I am also making lots of wet and dirty diapers for Mommy and Daddy and I like giving Daddy the nicest gifts which usually require a new onesie and changing pad protector, he still loves me though. Mommy and Daddy take me back to the doctor next week and hopefully I am back up to my birthweight or more, if my eating is any indicator I don't think it should be a problem.

The last few days Mommy and Daddy have felt much better because I have been really good at going down after my night feedings and letting them get 2 1/2 or 3 hour stretches of sleep before the next feeding. Sometimes they have to wake me up to feed because I like sleeping so much. We figured out the trick was swaddling me in my Aden and Anais muslin blankets. Mommy is so glad she got those for me after some raving reviews by her mommy friends. I sometimes play tricks on Mommy and Daddy and sleeep a lot during the day so that they think I will never sleep at night, but I still sleep at night, I just like to make them sweat :)!!

Mommy and Daddy have an older furry child named Abbi and so far we get along just great. Abbi likes me and is somewhat protective of me. If I am crying a lot she wants to make sure I am ok and will follow Mommy and Daddy everywhere with me until she knows it is ok. She also checks out everyone that comes over to visit me to make sure they are OK. She likes to sniff me and sometimes her hair tickles my nose which makes me squirm. I think as I get older we will continue to be friends, she seems like a nice doggy.

Just in the last few days Mommy has gotten out the Moby "D" wrap and Slingling for carrying me around hands-free, and I love them. I get all warm and cozy and plus I get to be close to Mommy and hear her heartbeat which puts me right to sleep. This is going to be a great help for Mommy once Daddy goes back to work and she needs to use both of her hands to do things around the house.

Well that is about all I can think of to tell you right now, but I'll be back to tell you more about my 2nd week and my first Christmas.

Leah Kate's Birth Story

2009-12-15T03:16:00.003-05:00

As most of you already know Leah Kate P was born on Wednesday 12/9/09 at 6:40 pm via c-section. This is a little post (probably not little, probably really long) about what all took place to get our 8 lb 3 oz, 21 inch daughter here.

12/8 ~ 6:30 pm : After eating a nice dinner at Texas Roadhouse we headed to Clarian North and were greeted by the great staff by name as we buzzed in at the L&D entrance. We were then greeted by 2 nurses one that was just getting ready to be done with her shift but would be back with us in the morning and the other our night nurse. They had me put on the lovely hospital attire (i.e. the normal blue/green hospital gown) and then went ahead and started the port for my IV and I think took some blood, I can't remember for sure. They then started the cervidil (cervix softening medicine), and Adam and I started running through the channels to see if there was any entertaining TV on, we ended up settling on the Butler game. After that was over ,we stuck in "50 First Dates" that we brought from home. They recommended I take some Ambien to make sure that I got enough sleep for my "Big Day" on Wednesday. I took that about 10:30 pm and Adam said I was out in about 15 minutes and slept hard until about 6:00 am the next morning.

12/9 ~ 7:00 am: I was able to wake up and take a shower and order a light breakfast (thank goodness my Dr. allowed this, otherwise I would have been even more insanely hungry by the end of the day). I ordered a bagel and fruit and Adam got this awesome and huge breakfast sandwhich, can't say I wasn't a little jealous!

8:00 am: After 12 hours of having the cervidil in the nurse took that out and checked me. We were all hoping if nothing else I was at least fully effaced and hopefully more had occurred, seeing that I was 9 days overdue, maybe my cervix just needed a jump start. The nurse checked me and was still only 2 cm and maybe 50% effaced, which wasn't horrible but wasn't really a lot of progress from the cervidil. At this point they started the Pitocin and everything was really cool and calm at this point.

9:00 am: My doctor came in and decided to break my water. I was contracting every couple of minutes but they really weren't strong enough to feel or do much of anything in the way of progress. She also likes to break the water a little earlier with post-term babies b/c there is a decent chance that the baby has had a bowel movement in utero since her system was ready to go about a week before. When she broke my water there was a significant amount of meconium in it, so our sweet little girl definitely had already decided to make sure her bowel systems were working. Because of this they started me on something called Amnio-infusion, where they infuse fluid into the uterus to clean out the meconium as much as possible to get it away from the baby and also I believe helps keep infection at bay. This also allowed them to really get a good reading on the strength of my contractions which at this point weren't enough.

10:30 am: My parents had arrived in the meantime, they were trying to beat the weather and hung out with us for a bit. I think my Mom noticed that I was starting to grimace every few minutes and mentioned to my Dad that she thought it was probably about time to leave the room. Within about 5 minutes of them leaving I could definitely feel the contractions and moved to the birthing ball to help cope some and breathe through each one. They were coming every 1.5 to 2 minutes and although they were still not as strong as they need to see them to say they are doing much, I was not able to talk or function much as each one came. Adam was awesome and just kept reminding me to breathe and let me squeeze the bujeebees out of his hand.

12:00 pm: I was checked again and still contracting at the same pace, they were getting a little stronger but still not where they wanted them to be. I was still only 2 cm and maybe had progressed a little in effacement but not anywhere near 100% yet. They did tell me that they were by no means suggesting any pain medication but if I did want and epidural, they needed to know about 15 t0 20 minutes before hand because they had to get a bolus of fluid pumped into me before they could do the epidural.

1:00 pm: I started seriously thinking about the epidural, I was still contracting every 1.5 minutes and I was just thinking that if this continued and resulted in a vaginal delivery that I was not going to have any energy left to push. I felt a little bit of a wimp that I was considering an epi at 2 cm but the contractions with Pitocin just aren't the same as when your body does the process naturally.

1:15 - 1:30 pm: I informed my awesome nurse Sara that I was ready for the epidural and she started the fluids. About 15 minutes later the anesthesiologist came in and Adam had to leave since it has to be a completely sterile environment, so he took the opportunity to eat some lunch. They then began the epi which the anesthesiologist said I was a textbook epidural and that the way it looked everything should start to work soon and I should feel significantly better.

2:00 pm: Adam arrived back to a new woman, it was amazing the difference and so quickly. I couldn't feel the contractions anymore but was able to still feel my feet and move my legs from the knees down. They said this was good for the time it would come to push because it would give me more strength and they just really wanted to make sure I couldn't feel the contractions. Adam and I were able to relax a little bit and figured we were in for a long day at this point.

2:30 pm: The babies heart rate started declining and of course my monitors started going a bit crazy. My nurse came in and asked me to start turning from side to side to just make sure it wasn't a positional thing and that Baby just didn't like a certain position. Her heart rate had gone from ranging between 120 resting and 150+ active to between 80 and 100 bpm. In the midst of this another nurse had come in to assist my nurse and a NICU or Peds doctor was suddenly in my room. After switching sides a number of times my nurse calmly paged my doctor, yet Adam and I knew things weren't quite right. Her office is in the building 2 floors up so she could be over in a few minutes if needed. After she wasn't there fairly quickly the nurse asked them to page her again. In the meantime my nurse had the Pitocin turned off and made the call to give me a short of something that started with a T to counteract the Pitocin and stop my contractions. A few seconds later my Dr. walked in and said she was trying to get an elevator when she got paged the 2nd time and was literally praying at the elevator that God would get one there ASAP. She came into my room and went to try and touch the baby's head to try and stimulate the baby to see if that would get her heart rate up, of course after all the other stuff her heartbeat immediately went up from the 100 bpm level to 130 and stabilized. Feeling less stressed we all laughed b/c it seemed like Little Miss just wanted some attention from the Doc and as soon as she got there the baby completely stabilized. My doctor went ahead and checked me and in the like half hour since I had gotten the epi, my body must have relaxed and the contractions became strong enough to get me from 2 to 4-5 cm in that short time. But it was too much for Baby and she did not respond well. Since we had no medicine at this point to get things moving along we needed to reevaluate and have a strategy about restarting things without bothering the baby and getting her stressed out. My dr was a little concerned that everything had pretty much come to a screeching halt and that my body wasn't doing any of this on its own. She said she would come back at 4:00 pm to check me and they started the pitocin back up at 1/2 of where it was when they had to stop it.

4:00 pm ~ The doctor came back to check and there was still no progress from where I was before and she was really getting concerned that my cervix was not effacing and just did not seem to want to get out of the way. Also they measure the baby's position in stations and she had been in a -1 station with zero being engaged and the +'s meaning she was moving through the birth canal and she was actually moving backward and was now a -2 station. This really puzzled my Doctor and she said while things were calm lets just talk about a c-section and that it might be something that needs to be considered if we don't start getting contractions at the strength we need them or if my cervix continues to stay unchanged. I went ahead and signed the needed consent for a c-section and then she said should would be back in a couple of hours to check one last time and then we would make the call.

4:00 to 6:00 ~Adam and I talked and at this point we both were getting to the point of just wanting to meet our sweet baby and didn't want to just keep pushing nature if that wasn't the way she was meant to come out. My doctor, who also attends my church, just put it this way. God is always in control of every single little life and the way they come into to the world and we would all like to see that happen as naturally as possible, but he has given her the knowledge of being able to perform a surgery and when the risks of continuing to wait start to outweigh the risks of a c-section then she is thankful for her knowledge and training to be able to help get this little life into the world. I luckily had gone into the entire situation knowing that flexibility was going to be my best friend and a "plan" was going to be my enemy. I have watched too many of my friends experience all different kinds of labors and deliveries and didn't want to feel like I failed at this b/c it didn't happen the way I "planned" for it to. I just wanted a healthy baby at the end and if a c-section was how that needed to happen then so be it.

6:00 pm ~ My doctor came back in to check me and still no progress from earlier. She said at this rate I could stay pregnant for another 7 days but at what point do we just make the call to get this baby here safe and sound and make sure I'm as healthy as possible. We all agreed that a c-section was the direction we were going and the whirlwind of prepping began. Adam made a mad dash to the waiting room to inform our parents what was decided and that we would be in the OR within the hour.

6:00 to 6:20 - Everyone was coming in and out of my room to cover all of the bases of things that needed to occur to get me ready and a different anesthesiologist came in to give me a larger dose of the epi as I no longer wanted to be able to feel my feet or anything else from the top of my abdomen down :) My nurse Sara was amazing and made sure we always knew what was going on and what the next steps were. My doctor, who has an almost 6 month old baby, said she needed to go pump b/c when my baby was born and cried she would have major "let down" and I would probably prefer that she was concentrating on my surgery and stitching me back up, I agreed :)

6:10pm: Everyone was ready and they wheeled me back to OR. Adam had to stay in a little recovery waiting area while they prepped me. The anesthesiologist did a little test with a needle to make sure that I was totally numb, which I was and then gave the go ahead to prep. At this point the big blue drape went up and my ability to know anything that was going on with the actual surgery was completely gone. Adam was then brought in and my doctor arrived. Everything was set-up to go.

6:30 pm: They started surgery and it was the weirdest feeling b/c I could feel the sensation of what they were doing but I had no pain. They kept me somewhat informed of what they were doing and Adam later told me he watched some of the surgery (mainly post arrival). With his medical background (animal not human) surgery and stuff fascinates him more than grosses him out so he probably thought there was a little bit of a coolness factor in being able to watch the surgery.

6:40 pm: I could feel them pull her out and immediately heard the first whimper and then an all out cry. She let us know right away that she was fine with a great pair of lungs. NICU was brought into the OR in case there were complications with her breathing from the previous BM she had in-utero but she was soon okayed so they began bulb syringing and cleaning up our little miss Leah. Soon after this, the nurse told us that she was 8lbs 2.5 oz and 21 inches long. They flashed her behind the drape really quickly immediately after she was born but then Adam went and took some pictures as they were cleaning her up and brought them over to me so I could get a better idea of what my sweet baby looked like. We then announced to the room that her name was Leah Kate and got many compliments about the name. Everyone was commenting about the amount of hair that she had, which didn't really surprise us given the full heads of dark hair that both of us have.

7:15 pm: I was taken back to our recovery room with Leah in my arms and Adam went to the waiting room to share the news about Leah to our parents who were patiently (not really!) waiting for her arrival. Adam came back to the recovery room to get settled and have a chance to bond with our girl for the first time together as a family of three. My doctor stopped by and gave me a huge hug and said everything went perfect, she then offered to help me get started with nursing, she currently has a 6 month old that she is nursing so her real life experience and knowledge was very helpful. Leah did awesome and latched on perfectly right away< she has made breastfeeding so much easier than I expected.

8:00 pm: Our parents came back and got to meet Leah for the first time, which initiaed her into the world of camera flash like the amount at a professional photo shoot :) The nurse then offered to give her a bath since I still wasn't able to get out of bed. Leah screamed pretty much the entire time and Grandpa Love videotaped the whole thing. The part that took the longest was washing her hair, imagine that, but she actually stopped crying and enjoyed getting her hair washed. Then our parents left for the evening and Adam gathered up all of our things to move to our new postpartum room by around 11. Leah actually was very nice to her new parents and took a nice long 2 1/2 hour nap in her bassinet so that we could catch some sleep as well from our long but very amazing day.

--> Keep posted for continued updates on Miss Leah and the new adventures yet to come

The last 48 hours.....

2009-12-07T22:06:00.004-05:00

Hopefully that is all we have or less until this kiddo gets here. Since to this point she had decided that she is not coming without being evicted, we are scheduled to go to the hospital at 6:30 tomorrow evening to check-in and start on cervidil, which is a medicine that helps to soften your cervix. We'll spend the night and then they will actually start what most people know as induction on Wednesday morning (pitocin and breaking my water), unless the cervidil somehow jump kicks my body into starting contracting itself. So this is our last night sleeping in our house as just the 2 two of us, and probably getting close to a full nights sleep for quite some time.

Today we did some stuff around the house, finalized some last minute planning with taking care of our dog while we are gone for a few days, and then tried to get some Christmas shopping done tonight. We also picked up my birthday gift to Adam for his 30th, which is a new grill. Our current grill is on its last leg and so this one is quite a bit nicer. And since he is the grill master of the house I knew that was something he would enjoy having.

I think our plan for tomorrow is to finish up some random things around the house, finish packing our bag for the hospital (I'm pretty much packed, Adam hasn't packed a thing), probably grab a somewhat early dinner before heading to the hospital, and then try to figure out how to entertain ourselves at the hospital and maybe get a little sleep. Between trying to sleep in a hospital and having our minds racing with the idea we are going to be parents so soon, I don't know how much sleep we will actually get.

And for your viewing pleasure, ha ha ha, this is what 41 weeks pregnant looks like. I think this child had definitely maxed out every square inch of room she has or at least I feel that way.

The things you do while waiting to have a baby

2009-12-05T09:19:00.002-05:00

So for the last week we have been trying to occupy ourselves some while waiting for this little lady to get here. Well first of all we both kept working until late this week and I wouldn't have changed that, sitting at home and waiting would have made me crazy antsy. Adam figured out with his vacation, paternity leave, and company shutdown he didn't have to work after Wednesday. I worked until Thursday in the office and then attended an out of office Christmas party, I am now down working until after my Maternity leave, which will mean I won't work again until the 1st of March.

We have gone to the Mall a couple of times, more to walk in a warm place than to shop. Each time we've had store clerks ask if we were shopping or trying to have a baby :) I must have that "I'm about ready to pop" look at this point.

On Thursday Adam went and got our real Christmas tree and we put it up and decorated it and put up a few other decorations, as well as hung all of our stockings over the fireplace. This was the first time in 3 years that we decorated for Christmas. In 2007 we were in he midst of moving into the house and last year it was still such a chaotic mess that we didn't get any Christmas decorating stuff out.

Other than that we have just been kind of doing what we would normally do and not getting too far from home. Although we have been dong more laying around just watching and tv and being lazy then we have done in the last 2 years. I guess it is filling our energy tanks for when this little one comes and we don't know which way is up and what day it is.

Tick...Tick...Tick...Tick....

2009-11-28T12:43:00.003-05:00

This is what I feel like, a ticking time bomb, that could go off at anytime but no one knows when that will be. I had my 39 week appointment this last Wednesday at which time I really had made no progress in regard to dilation or effacement. My Dr., um helped me get to 1 cm, just to see if maybe we could get things going a little.

Thursday we were able to have both sides of our immediate families over, as well as, my aunt and uncle from my Dad's side, and had a great Thanksgiving dinner. My mom did a ton all afternoon and then everyone else pitched in so I really didn't have to do much at all. Adam was the Turkey preparer and he did a great job for his first Turkey, it was really good. He also made a homemade apple pie, he enjoys baking much more than I do! I would normally feel compelled that I need to make something but I really didn't at 39+ weeks pregnant. I did mash the 7lbs of potatoes so I guess that was my contribution. I think my mother and mother-in-law were about ready to strap me to the couch to make me sit down and stay, but its just so weird to not help prep stuff, especially when it is at my house.

Yesterday we really didn't do a whole lot, since I can't sleep past 6:00 or 6:30, I got up and did stuff until Adam got up. We then played some Wii bowling and tennis, I'm much better at bowling than tennis, Adam kicks my butt in tennis when he isn't even playing full force. Adam then played about 2 hours of Tiger Woods golf while I took a nap, guess that triptophane (sp?) was kicking in ;) We did have an indication that maybe a little more was going on in the labor department, no contractions or anything, so we decided we would go to the mall if for no other reason than to just walk to see if we could get this party started!! I don't really know that it helped and we didn't buy a darn thing at the mall, good thing we don't get up at 4:00 am with the crazies.

Today I'm pretty much feeling normal and don't really feel like I'm having any contractions or anything. I told Adam we need to go to a movie or something tonight because this sitting around and waiting thing is going to drive me crazy.

So there you have it, pretty much no news, and I guess she still has about 60 hours to get here and still be within the time of her due date and not considered late!!!

It could be a big one!!!

2009-11-05T09:46:00.009-05:00

So we have less than a month to go and I had my 36 week appointment yesterday. All is still good in the blood pressure, weight, and position of baby departments. But I am now measuring ahead and enough ahead that my Doctor wants me to have an ultrasound next week to confirm how much is baby and how much is fluid/placenta. If it is as much baby as I'm measuring that would mean they would estimate at least an 8-9 lb baby at birth. I think I can mentally handle a baby in the 8lb range but anything over 9lbs makes me cringe. Guess she might need to wear those newborn clothes very quickly, good thing most of her stuff is 0-3 months and not a ton of newborn clothes:) When I told Adam he first laughed (not nice!!) and then reassured me that it could just be a lot of amniotic fluid and she might not be huge, thanks Honey!

The nice thing about it all is I get to see my little girl next week and I wasn't expecting see her again until she was in my arms, so that part if fun!

On the preparation front I think we have everything at this point that we were wanting to get prior to her arrival. We picked up the carseat last weekend and I think we are going to install it tonight so I can take and get it inspected soon. I put the bouncer together and Adam's co-worker who had twins let us borrow their swing. So we have a bassinet ready to go, a crib ready to go, a bouncer ready to go, and a swing ready to go, hopefully one of the 4 she will want to sleep in, at least that is what we are hoping. This weekend we need to make a Goodwill run to get some "crap" out of the house, do some last minute organizing of the nursery, and I should probably get her diaper bag ready and my bag semi-packed. Anything beyond that will just be bonus that we can accomplish.

And for your viewing pleasure, I'm doing a comparison shot this week:

15 Weeks , 20 Weeks, 27 Weeks

32 Weeks , 36 Weeks

1 Month to go and the Nursery is Nearly Done

2009-11-01T21:03:00.004-05:00

Were on the home stretch both with the pregnancy and with completing the nursery, good thing, huh :) So I'll just label pictures and let them speak for themselves.

These need a little straightening up but these shelving units/cabinets were in our kitchen originally. We kept them and then refinished them and painted them white to match the nursery. I think they came out pretty cute and they were really cheap stable hardwood bookshelves.

Here is the nursery as you are looking in from the doorway.

Here is the far wall and we are pretty much done filling the dresser for now, thank goodness we got a decent sized one!

Here is our beloved recliner/glider and the adorable owl pillow my friend Kim gave me at my shower last weekend.

The crib wall with a little decal saying above the crib "Dream on, Dream on, Dream until your Dream comes true."

This is the owl mobile that was my DIY project for the nursery. The little owls are made from socks. I then used an embroidery hoop and wrapped it in ribbon, and used the pink ribbon to attach the owls and attach the mobile to a ceiling hook (basically like a plant hook).

Our last free weekend EVER.....and 32 week belly

2009-10-08T10:02:00.004-04:00

This last weekend I had a wonderful time going to Brown County with seven of my girlfriends and renting a cabin. We ate (a lot), fellowshiped, of course talked to the wee hours of the morning, went to downtown Nashville and ate at the Artist Colony, played games, and just enjoyed each others company. Below is a picture of our little group on the deck of our cabin. (Someone please remind me in the future that when pregnant do not be the only one to wear white and be standing sideways in a picture, seriously could I look any larger!!)

And as requested by my brother-in-law (since they are now in Boston), here are a couple of 32 week belly shots.

I keep telling Adam that I don't understand how I'm going to continue to get bigger over the next 8 weeks, there is not room. He just smiles and says, "I don't know but your are going to get bigger," thanks honey! She is definetly a squirmy one lately, I feel like most of the time I'm sitting still my stomach looks like an earthquake is occuring.

Shower #1 and the Nursery

2009-10-08T09:32:00.004-04:00

Now its been nearly two weeks, but I had my first shower with mostly my family and several of the family friends we have known over the years. It was great seeing everyone and having our little girl blessed with a lot of people excited to meet her and clothe her :)

You know how everyone knows the "hometown" cake maker in small towns, well one of my aunts knew one, and that cake was delicious.

I'm sure her Daddy was happy that this onesie first of all wasn't pink and that she can wear her gear to cheer on the Boiler basketball team this year. I'm sure there will be bonding time with Daddy, watching games, Mommy will just have to make sure Daddy doesn't get too excited with special cargo in his arms :) I'm not even mentioning football b/c that might require we make it to a Bowl game and... um... yeah that isn't happening.

She did get plenty of "girlie" things including a bunch of adorable dresses one of my aunts found.

And this was all the shower goodies spread out on the nursery floor to try and organize after we got home. As you can tell this kid is really going to be doing without, especially in the clothing department!

And now for the Nursery, taaadaaa it actually looks like one!!! (please ignore the glass cabinet doors on the floor, that is for another project in another part of the house) Adam surprised me this weekend by going and picking up the crib and having it put together by the time I arrived home on Sunday, bonus points for Daddy.

And here is looking from the other side of the room, the crib is a little bare right now but I think everything is going to come together really well. We obviously have bedding to put in, a changer for the top of the chest of drawers, some decorative things for the walls, a couple bookshelves, and curtains to hang. And just in case anyone was wondering that recliner/glider is definitely suitable for naps, I tried it out for a few minutes on Sunday :)

And here is all that stuff that was on the floor in the previous picture actually organized in a closet. We got this organizer from Ikea and it really maximizes the space. We have a few more shelves and stuff to get up but its functional for now. We also need to get the doors painted and hung, I guess the list never ends, does it??

No Pictures....but hey at least I'm updating

2009-10-02T09:00:00.004-04:00

Just realized if I didn't update this blog soon, I will have gone a month without an update. So what has been going on around the Phillips home well after our Ikea trip we have done the following:

1. I can't remember exactly when but we finished all but a couple of like 4 x 12 inch spaces of the wood floor in the dining and kitchen, I think Adam has mentally blocked that there is any more of that to do :)

2. We set-up our dining room table and chairs that had only been the boxes probably close to a year, and installed the light fixture above the dining room table.

3. We built the Ikea bookshelf for the office and started putting some stuff on it, but then I figured out I have way more decorative stuff (or crap as Adam would probably refer to it) than I thought so I kind of stopped that process until we are ready to actually hang pictures and do the fine detail decorating.

4. We finished the horizontal stripes in the nursery, we have a few places to touch up but no one else would probably even notice them, so I don't see that at the top of the priority list.

5. We got all of the plastic up off the floor and nursery clear of non-nursery items so that we could start filling it with the stuff Baby P actually could use.

6. One night Adam and our friend Cory cleaned everything up and built our closet organizer system (again from Ikea) and moved our recliner/glider into the nursery.

7. I had my first shower last weekend so once I got home I went through everything and started filling her closet and organizing everything else into piles based on where it should go (i.e. chest of drawers, kitchen, bathroom, car, etc)

8. This week we unpacked the chest of drawers from the boxes and assembled it, other than putting on the knobs it is done and ready to be loaded.

It's so fun, her nursery is really starting to look like a nursery, I know pictures would be nice and I will have to take some and post them soon. We still need to paint and hang the closet doors, finish sanding and then paint the bookcases, pick-up the crib and put it together (hopefully our task for next week), and then eventually I need to get window treatments and hang things on the wall. So really not that much, I feel like we might actually be ready to bring this baby home sometime soon.

As for the rest of the house, it is honestly a bunch of little stuff that once the nursery is done we can hopefully check off the list pretty fast.

This weekend is what Adam is calling our last free weekend EVER! I think that might be a little dramatic, but I'm going with 6 of my good friends to stay in a cabin in Brown County from Friday until Sunday and Adam is doing.....well I'm not sure....but I will assume it will have a lot to do with watching football and weather dependent maybe visiting a state park and doing some outside activities.

Other than that we are just staying busy with Birthing classes and showers, and I'm very thankful that the sciatic nerve issues I was having a week or so ago have disappeared. I think I have a very obedient child or God had mercy on me, b/c after pleading that she please reposition herself somewhere besides the left side of my sciatic nerve she miraculously moved last Friday night and I was overjoyed to be able to walk and move like a normal person by Saturday morning, just in time for my shower. I'll be 32 weeks next week, so not much longer before she is no longer able to cause Mommy any pain, at least not from the inside :)

A once in a long while shopping trip....

2009-09-12T21:25:00.003-04:00

That is hopefully what a trip to Ikea will be for us, because if we went and spent what we spent today, very often, we would be living in the cardboard they use to pack your stuff.

So our adventure started with a trip to Cincy to visit the closest Ikea we have and we had planned out what we were getting. I had a list, and with their handy-dandy website, I was even able to note the aisle and bin where the merchandise could be found.

Items on our List:

Hermnes 8 drawer white dresser for the Nursery
Expedit bookshelf and some of the storage containers for the office
Antonius closet storage system for the Nursery closet

Items we ended up taking home that were not on our list:

A glass front kitchen cabinet (Lindingo style with glass)to put above our kitchen cart, we planned to put a cabinet up there but we were going to either DIY or pay someone to replace the solid doors with glass fronts, now we don't have that project anymore!

A really cute and very soft golden retriever stuffed animal for Baby Girl

A little farm set for our niece for Christmas, she is obsessed with Horses and Cows right now and the set had both of those.

Very cool chair pads for all the dining room chairs and the 2 bar stools

2 drawer sets for the Expedit shelf system

A little kids table and chair set, we figured the other little ones in our life can use it now and our little girl will also be able to use in a good year or so.

There was also just a plain mirror to put on the back of my closet door, but in the process of removing stuff from the cart, the clumsy pregnant girl, knocked it out of the cart and it went crashing down to the floor. We were too worn out to go get another one, so I guess I just left with 7 years of bad luck and no mirror.

A nice surprise of the day was that our good friends Kim and Eugene had already planned to travel to the same Ikea today, so we ended up finding each other in the store. We had lunch with them in the quite yummy yet very inexpensive cafeteria area. Eugene also offered to help Adam load the truck with all the stuff, what a blessing that was, I am no help these days, and some of those boxes were pretty heavy. It was funny b/c before running into Parks we actually ran into another couple from our church, I guess it was Indy Common Grounders travel to Ikea day!

As if that wasn't enough damage done to our bank account, Adam thought it would be a fine idea to stop at L. Fish on the way home just to see if they had any glider or rocker recliners we might like. We actually did find one that we agreed was aesthetically pleasing, wasn't huge and would be to scale in the nursery, and most of all it was super comfortable. So that was our final purchase of the day.

At least I can now say that we have virtually everything we need for house and nursery (with the exception of the crib which I'm ordering this weekend). Anyone really good at assembly??? We have more items to assemble then I think we are going to care to assemble :)

I guess next up will be pictures of all these things in their proper place in the house.

Hello 3rd Tri and Nursery Sneak Peek

2009-09-01T22:51:00.005-04:00

I have officially entered my 3rd trimester, this little girl is making her arrival in hopefully no more than 3 months :) I have heard the comments "Ok, now I can really tell you are pregnant" or "I can finally tell you are pregnant" a lot the last couple of weeks. I didn't think this bump was hiding anywhere for awhile, but I guess I finally hit the large enough to not confuse weight gain with pregnancy spot?

Here is the honorary belly picture:

We've also made some headway on our little girl's bedroom. Adam got done with the insulation, drywalling, and drywall finishing on Friday and then my parents came up and helped get the nursery to a point to paint. On Sunday we did some paint sampling with the little samples you can get at Lowes (what a lovely little invention) and determined our initial wall paint was too dark so we decided on something a bit lighter and then tried out our idea for the horizontal stripes. Adam then went to town and painted the whole rest of the nursery walls last night. We have some touch ups to do and then need to put the stripes on the wall. After that we will put up all the mouldings (window, door, and baseboard). Then it will be time to actually get the real stuff into the nursery.

A blank slate:

Our little horizontal stripe project:

Nursery nearly completely painted:

And the Mommy madness begins

2009-08-22T22:10:00.004-04:00

Last night I found my inspiration for the nursery and thus I came home and searched for all of my other items so that I have everything ready to go when Daddy gets done with that mudding and sanding he has been working on this weekend.

Here is what I think we will be using for furniture pieces:

Crib

Dresser (we'll put a changing pad on top of this for the changing station)

Glider/Recliner

And this was our $24.99 inspiration that we found at, of all places, Lowes. We are planning to paint the walls the green color and then do some horizontal lines in the chocolate and plum color:

This is what I'm planning to use for the bumper and crib skirt:

And these for the sheets, I think it is fun that since I don't have a crib set, I can kind of make things fairly interchangeable:

And finally possibly this wall decal somewhere on a wall, maybe above the crib, but I would do the plum colored owl and chocolate colored branch:

I had initially considered doing more of a shabby chic thing, and this is a complete divergence from that, but I really like the different pieces. I think it looks childish enough without being too babyish, and yet still being girly enough.

Now if I could just get in there and put my thoughts into action!!! Patience, Mommy, Patience.

Finally a house update...Bath #2 and Laundry Room

2009-08-18T11:00:00.005-04:00

We haven't just been sitting around watching my belly grow, we actually have been trying to get this house done so that when the Little Miss comes along there aren't anymore projects (or at least big ones) to complete.

After finishing the pantry (our last house post), we took some old kitchen cabinets and sanded them down then painted them white and put new hardware on them. We then put them up over the washer and dryer for storage and added a clothes bar for easier hanging up of clothes as we take them out of the dryer.

For old times sake here is the original laundry area when we moved in, we had the gorgeous wallpaper, lovely carpet, and even the occupants paint and kitty litter.

And here is our handy work.....

The bathroom was a much bigger project. We had to virtually rip everything out, reframe the room and rerun plumbing and electrical since we were going from a tiny half bath to a slightly larger 3 piece bathroom.

Again here was the loveliness we got to start off with:

After Adam had ripped everything out and before the rebuild started:

And our final product.....it really did end up being a nice bathroom, but it is really hard to take pictures of a long skinny room so just use your imagination on where everything is :)

The only thing we are waiting to complete is getting a shower door ordered and put in, but other that we are done with this little area!!!!

We have since started getting the nursery to a place where I can do my Mommy duties and make it look like a nursery. Dad (Adam) is doing the manly stuff right now like blowing insulation into the walls and finishing some drywalling. The insulation is done and the drywalling just needs to be taped, mudded, and sanded and then we will be ready for me to do the decorating, wooohoo!!

24 weeks .....The second trimester is almost over

2009-08-14T13:14:00.004-04:00

I can't believe it has already been 24 weeks and that we only have 16 weeks until this little one is going to be making her arrival.

I read somewhere that my uterus is the size of soccer ball this week and Baby Girl is getting close to being a foot long and is weighing in at a whopping 1.5 lbs. If at this stage, she were to be born, there is a chance of survival with modern medicine, we of course are praying that she stays put for a few more months.

I had my monthly doctors appointment and everything looked good:

Blood pressure - good
Weight - good
Measuring right on schedule with my estimated due date
No signs of pre-eclampsia or any of those nasty pregnancy things

At my next appointment I get to drink the lovely sugary nastiness and then get my blood drawn to make sure I don't have gestational diabetes, this is just one of the normal tests as all you Mom's out there know. After my appointment in early September I start going every 2 weeks and then we are taking our prenatal (birthing and breastfeeding classes) in early October. I have a feeling that this fall is going to fly by!!

Happy Wife....Happy Life

2009-07-30T11:20:00.004-04:00

Isn't that how the saying goes? That is what I said to Adam at about 11:00 pm on the night he finished the pantry and I was finished unloading our lovely plastic tote of food into the blessed little pantry.

I then realized I had lived for over a year and half with all of our food either in this large plastic tote seen below or on our counters. If you know me I might be disorganized in other ways but a messy kitchen drives me nutso, so how I lived this long without organization in my kitchen I don't know.

I think Adam was a little surprised at my cat like reflexes (from a 5 month pregnant woman at 10:00 pm) to unload that tote and some of our cabinets into the newly finished pantry closet.

It has been so nice to see what food we actually have and to not be afraid of spilling an entire box of spaghetti into the monster tote while looking for a can of salsa! I think all in all I'm an easy wife to please if all you have to do is put a few shelves in a closet and call it a pantry!!!

Hopefully I'll have some pictures of the bathroom and laundry room to put in the blog soon, they are nearly done. We have actually been refinishing and painting some cabinets that were in the old kitchen for the laundry area, that process has been much easier than I thought it would be. Adam's answer to that was that sanding and painting cabinets are things normal people do in their normal home updates, not our normal crazy shanangins, he's right!

20 weeks and Old Wives Tales

2009-07-22T16:13:00.005-04:00

So here is the basketball at 20 weeks, I keep getting comments about how high I am carrying and that I am all out front so I have definitely heard the basketball reference.

Last week before our ultrasound we tested out some of the old wives tales. The Chinese chart thing said I was having a boy, a list of all types of OWT that you answer gave me a 57% chance of having a boy, and the necklace thing (if it spins in a circle its a girl and back and forth is a boy) says I'm having Girl, Girl, Boy (wowah, I don't know about 2 more kids). So who was right??????

Well without further ado here is Little Miss, yes that's right we are having a perfectly healthy little girl (I'm not sure anyone that actually reads this didn't already know that, but anyway). Our ultrasound tech got some great profile pictures and we even got to see her in 4D. So far so good and all of her vital body parts and development look just great.

I am definitely feeling movement now and she has even thrown a few Tai Chi or Kickboxing moves in this week. I got one kick or punch straight up at my stomach, that felt a bit odd, and then one towards my back. Usually they are pretty low, but those two were after I ate a few M&Ms so maybe I made my poor baby spaz :) This could get pretty interesting as she gets bigger and starts running of room with her crazy gymnastics.

I've done pretty well as far as the shopping so far, I made one trip into Children's Place and they were having mark-downs plus another 40% off that price so I got here some stuff for next summer and then I went into the Carter's store at Keystone and they were having a clearance sale so I picked up a few things there. Since I got that out of my system I think I'm now focused on getting nursery furniture picked out and the all the fun decorating from there.

In case you want to know we are not going to be divulging the name, but we currently have a list of 3 that Adam and I can both agree on, so we'll see if we can make a final decision before we are on our way to the hospital.

Next up:

Nursery Furniture

Crib Bedding

Calling a pediatrician

Getting scheduled for our Childbirth and Breastfeeding classes (probably won't attend till October)

Getting this crazy house done and enjoying each other before our little girl comes to turn our lives into pure blissful craziness!!

Sprouting a Sweet Potato...18 weeks

2009-06-30T18:24:00.004-04:00

This week our baby is approximately the size of a sweet potato, about 5.5 to 6 inches long and about 6.7 ounces. This is what Baby P is busy doing this week, passing the hours yawning, hiccuping, rolling, twisting, kicking, punching, sucking and swallowing. The baby can now hear external sounds, especially mama's voice and may even be stimulated or respond to certain voices that are familiar. Wonder if this will make Adam start talking to my belly, or maybe I will start requiring it so his voice will also soothe the baby at 2 a.m.!! Everything I read says I may start to feel movement. I have occasionally felt "something" but when you don't really know what you are supposed to be feeling its hard to identify what is what. I read something that said the baby's feet are about 1 inch long, so they are definitely not real identifiable kicks yet.

At the Phillips home we are also sprouting zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, and green beans. Our garden has really taken off the last few weeks and we should actually have edible food here in a couple of weeks.

Last but not least, we have made some substantial headway on the laundry room and 2nd bathroom area. We nearly have everything painted and Adam plans to start tiling in the next few days. Thanks to Mom and Dad and Michelle and Steve for their help painting this weekend, I was feeling a little useless because I was banished from the area, but we couldn't have gotten it all done so quickly without them. Adam also got one window replaced in the nursery so there is one more to go and we will have replaced every single window in our house. Our remaining items are to get the fixtures into the 2nd bathroom once the tiling is finished, finish drywalling the closet in the nursery, blow insulation into the walls in the nursery, some finishing things on the cabinets in the kitchen (mouldings and such) and installing the hardwoods in the kitchen and dining room. That might seem like a bit of stuff, but compared to the list I made at the beginning of this year, seeing less then 10 items left on the list for the interior of the house to be finished makes for a very happy me!!

The Pop @ 15 weeks

2009-06-11T09:48:00.003-04:00

I really don't particularly like this phrase but I guess you can say I have popped. Here is a belly picture at 15 weeks. I'm hoping the popping slows down a bit from here on out or you are going to be able to roll me to the hospital at 40 weeks. The one part that makes me feel good is that I've only gained between 4-5 pounds so that assures me that this is more baby than french fries and frostys :)

One of many parental decisions made

2009-06-09T15:59:00.003-04:00

We made our first of I know many more parental decisions by choosing a daycare center to take Baby Phillips to after I come back to work. We toured 3 centers last week and the final decision came down to between a great place called Small Blessings at 96th and Zionsville Road and an equally great place called Heartland Hall at 116th and Meridian. Initially we were probably leaning more towards Small Blessings, in that we liked some of the things that applied more to older kids (like not until they were at least 2 maybe even 3), but after discussing our options it just made more sense for us right now to enroll with Heartland. Some benefits of Heartland are that it is literally right across the street from my work which means not only convenient drop-off and pick-up but also the ability to go visit the baby once I'm back to work full-time. Another benefit, obviously not what we based our decision completely on but a nice benefit, is it is at least $2000 cheaper a year plus add in the additional gas of getting to over to Small Blessings and we can all go on a nice family vacation for the difference.

We are excited that this decision is out of the way and as of last week they had openings in March when we needed to start, so hopefully I get a call soon to confirm our spot. If you can't tell I'm just a bit of a planner, so knowing that something is taken care of and moving on to the next thing makes me feel much more comfortable then having something up in the air.

Now it will be moving on to finding a pediatrician. I don't think I was realizing that I needed to start looking quite this early but after talking to a few other moms they said they looked for a pedi about the same time as daycare.

Its crazy how much planning there is for a little person that isn't even born yet :)

Next post: I'm going to try and take a 15 week belly shot to insure you all I'm starting to look pregnant and not just fat!

Other things under construction.....

2009-05-22T22:36:00.003-04:00

Wow it has been forever since I posted anything here. I really do need to update some pictures of the house, but thought I would update any blog readers still out there on some other news. We have a little Phillips under construction and scheduled to be completed around December 1st. We are super excited and relieved to have made it this far in this pregnancy after experiencing a miscarriage last fall. We are very thankful for a healthy pregnancy and baby so far, and pray that things continue in that direction.

This news does affect the house, in that there is a definite deadline for completion and it isn't waiting until November 30th, that might result in a really grumpy pregnant lady that would not be fun for her sweet husband. We hope to have most things wrapped up by mid-summer. If we have some random things like crown molding or something like that to do, I don't care, but the big things will be done.

Thanks if you still follow this neglected blog and I will try to be more faithful about updating it, but you might not just get house updates in the future :O)

We finally slept in our room!

2009-01-29T11:13:00.003-05:00

So after a year and a few weeks of living in our house we are finally in what was always meant to be our bedroom. I ended up staying in yesterday since our road didn't get plowed until sometime between 10:00 last night and 7:30 this morning, so I actually moved the bed from the other bedroom, and then when Adam got home from work (mind you he leaves so early in the morning we got another like 4 inches after he left) we moved the chest of drawers and armoire. I'll post more pics of the room fully furnished and stuff, but since I hadn't posted in awhile just thought I would get his update on here. You will notice the one item that remains unfinished is the crown moulding, we figured that was not necessary in order to peacefully sleep in our room so we went ahead and moved in and will finish that at a later date.

A staining we will go......

2009-01-05T16:41:00.008-05:00

In reality our closets are basically finished but since I am way behind on blogging this was the project that consumed most of the extra time we had over the Christmas/New Years time.

Below is the old closet once we tore all the drywall down, we had contemplated just making 2 openings for the room I am standing in and having a standard closet, and closing off where you see the purple door. But as I posted previously the contractor that did the framing and my husband decided to have a happy surprise for me and make my side a walk-in closet.

Here is Adam's side of the closet after it was reframed with nice new wood that was plumb and square (made drywalling much easier). We made his opening wider so that we could put in double bifold doors, I think that makes a shallow closet much more usable.

And below is my side of the closet, which as you can see is about 20 inches deeper than Adam's, he seriously probably has less than half the clothes that I do, so I think the set-up is appropriate.

Once Adam got everything drywalled, which by the way was made a ton easier by borrowing an electronic drywall sander from his co-worker, we needed to decide how we were going to fix all the missing floorboards due to the reframing. We finally settled on using most of the spare pieces from Adam's closet to put down in my closet, so that my whole closet would have the original floor like the rest of the room.

For Adam's side we tried to go and find something close that was pre-finished but that was to no-avail unless we wanted to spend $3-4 sq. ft, which we really didn't for a closet. We ended up getting unfinished hardwoods in white oak from Lumber liquidators for like $1.50 sq ft and then found a stain that matched really well. For the next couple of days I went through the process of staining the floor, and as you can see below it came out pretty darn well. We used a product by Mini-wax called Polyshades, it has the poly and the stain mixed together so you basically eliminate having to poly it after you stain. We used the stain color of Classic Oak and I put it on with a 6 inch stain brush. I did 3 coats and between them I used 000 (fine) steel wool for a sand/buff process to the poly. In the photo the two floors meet right at the doorway but I don't think you can tell much of a difference!

And here is my closet floor (below), Adam pieced back together all the flooring scraps we had to make this look right and I think he did a great job. We polished it up after this picture was taken so it looks a bit cleaner now.

One final staining project that I did, was that I needed a shelf above my top hanging rack in my closet, so since we couldn't' find anything that matched my organizers (of course) we decided to by some precut pine and stain it. This one I did the old fashion way and went through three coats of staining and then let it dry then 2 coats of polyurethane to seal and protect it. For both projects being my first staining experiences I think the results came out well. Of course all I did was follow the instructions.

Next up.....is completed closets and a finished master bedroom. Of course to finish the master we still need to paint, put up crown molding, moldings for doors, windows, & floor, change out the light fixture, hang curtains, and then move all of our stuff from the other room. Hopefully that is all done by the end of the month, but of course I never predict when we are going to have things done anymore.

A week of Christmases.....

2009-01-02T16:34:00.005-05:00

We had a pretty busy Christmas week this year starting the Saturday before with my Mom's side extended family, Christmas Eve & Christmas Morning at my parent's, Christmas Day at Adam's parents and then we finished the week with Adam's mom's side extended family on the Saturday after Christmas. Here are some pictures from 3 of the 4 gatherings, at the final one I brought my camera but never got it out my purse to take any pictures.

What is more entertaining at family gathering than watching 2 year olds color and fight over toys, guess not much since there were about 6 adults in this room.

This cracks me up.....my niece is trying to eat cherios with a fork and has reindeer antlers on her head. I do have to say she looked more Christmassy than the rest of us.

Camryn trying to hold herself back from tearing into her presents, especially since they were wrapped in Dora Christmas paper. And her at the end of the night all ready to go home and go nigh night so that Santa could come. I think the little robe is pretty darn cute.

Uncle Adam with Nolan our nephew from his side of the family. This was Nolan's first Christmas and he was all decked out in his outfit. He loves to jump/bounce on your lap so he was getting passed around a lot because we were all out of shape and our arms would start to hurt.

Man down....Man down

2008-12-02T10:20:00.003-05:00

We have officially had our first encounter with medical attention needed due to a house project gone bad! It really wasn't that serious but did require a few stitches and an update on the tetanus shot. If you haven't guessed, it wasn't me it was my beloved husband that had to endure this bit of immediate care madness to get his finger sewn up. If you don't know Adam's history, his childhood and even early college years had many trips to the ER and I think getting stitches is second nature to him at this point.

In our married life we only have had one ER run and that was due to a cat bite at the clinic he worked at for awhile. We felt a bit silly going to the ER for a cat bite, mind you it was a small little tiger I think that bit him or a really ticked off male cat, but the ER doc on call said you should always go to the ER for a cat bite due to all the nasty in their saliva. Your hand or arm can swell up huge in a very short time if not treated properly, who knew? Anyway I'm tangenting, you probably would like to know how this little incident occurred.

The story goes as follows, I was having a fun night out with some of my good friends that I grew up with and we were out to dinner. I knew Adam was going to work on removing a door casing for a portion of a door in the current closet so the door could be drywalled closed. That seems easy right? Not so much when your door casings are metal and you have to do a combo of using the reciprocating saw and a pry bar to get it out. So I look at my phone when I'm leaving the restaurant and I have 3 missed calls from Adam on my cell and 5 missed calls on my blackberry, that is usually not a good sign! I call to see what is going on and I get the following "Looks like I'm going to have to get a few stitches, OK got to go they need to check me in and told me to get off my phone." That is not a nice way to leave your wife when all she knows is that you have been using a saw on metal and your getting stitches.

I got a call back a couple minutes later and he said he was removing the last piece of metal casing and was using the pry, his hand slipped and hit the mangled metal and he looked and saw a hand full of blood. He mostly got his left index finger but a bit of his middle finger as well. On his index he hit the vein so he had to apply pressure quickly.

After about 2 hours at immediate care and a trip to CVS to get an antibiotic and some vicodin, if he need it, he made it home with a few stitches and his two fingers wrapped in gauze and other stuff. So needless to say I think his home construction duties might be on hold for a few days since he is left handed and probably shouldn't really be applying a ton of pressure to that area of his hand. It's OK he has finals next week and needs to study for those anyways, now he has no home items to distract him. I think he could find an easier ways of getting out of me nagging him to get something done next time :)

What's been going on?

2008-11-11T10:45:00.005-05:00

Holy cow that might be the longest break I have ever taken from blogging! We have been doing stuff, I just keep forgetting to take pictures and work is really busy this time of year so I haven't had my few extra minutes at work or in the evenings to post anything.

Things that have happened in the last 6 weeks:

We got the closet framed in the master bedroom, now just waiting for Adam to start drywalling so we can finish that room.

We knocked out the wall in the 2nd bathroom that we will be moving to make the bathroom bigger and able to handle a stand up shower.

Put in some recessed lighting above the fireplace, we felt like our living room was dark and didn't want floor lamps everywhere. I've decided cutting the hole for this is a skill and Adam definitely was better with his circles this time then last, you live you learn.

We got rid of 2 1/2 tons of trash, I'm not exaggerating, it was literally 2 1/2 tons, you have to pay by the ton when you take it to the junkyard. I finally don't feel like the neighborhood blacksheep since there aren't windows, doors, and a bunch of other random stuff all over the place inside and out. Adam actually moved about 6 tons of trash over a 2 day period, ask if you want the full story. Lets just say junkyards aren't open on Saturday afternoons and Sundays and it is a good thing to find this out before loading a moving truck with 2 1/2 tons of trash when it had to be returned by 5:00 that day.

We were wanting to wait until closer to the end of the year to get a dining room set but ended up finding a sweet deal through World Market and they were having friends and family days this weekend so we ended up getting an additional 25% off. Basically it is a table with 2 leafs so if fully extended it can seat 8 people. We ended up getting the table 8 chairs and an 9 x 6 rug for $400 less than it would have cost to get the table and 6 chairs at the normal price. And to make it even better Adam and I both agreed on the table, it has some contemporary aspects that I like but still has classiness about it so that trendiness doesn't outdated it in a few year.

Here is a pic and it even includes the rug I bought, which I didn't realize until we got home and I was looking at it online:

Our house is starting to look normal

2008-09-23T09:16:00.009-04:00

As I promised here are some pictures of the "new" and definitely improved living room with the long awaited carpet installed. It isn't fully decorated yet but you get the idea.

Before:

After:

I don't think I have posted the front door and entry way since it was completed. Below are pictures of the front door with the new trim and the finished slate tile entry.

Before:

After (In the picture at the bottomyou can see some more details of the carpet and tell that it has flecks of darker colors in it. I think this is going to be great with having a pet and potential munchkins down the road, you really can't see anything on this carpet as far as dirt goes):

This is the other room we had the carpet installed in the "3rd Bedroom/Office" it is currently holding some stuff that we moved out of the To-Be-Master Bedroom so that we can start working on that.

Another thing we got done this weekend was installing the first of two windows in the Master Bedroom. Of course the old ones were originally installed completely differently then any of the other we have worked on so this ended up being an all day affair to get the window to fit. At least we know now for the next one.

An exciting thing we were able to do this weekend was meet with a contractor to talk about the closet reconfiguration for the Master Bedroom. I had to run to a Baby Shower, but by the time I got back and talked to Adam they had figured out how to make my side a walk-in closet. These must be two men that know how to make a woman happy :) I was then instructed to figure out any custom shelving/design that I wanted, to make sure it would fit the dimensions they had discussed. I was right on that and I think we got that all figured out yesterday evening. Now we just need to reconnect with the contractor and see when he can start the job.

"So where are the carpet pictures" you say.....

2008-09-19T16:07:00.002-04:00

I guess I'm being a bit of a girl about this one. Since this area of the house looks reasonably like a normal house I want it to be "pretty" before I post pictures. So I will take some this weekend after we get stuff arranged and it looks more of what I want to show everyone.

Oh by the way the carpet is absolutely wonderful, I think we came home and just laid on the floor and talked for 2 evening before we got the furniture moved back in to the room.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and enjoys the nice weather!

Preparation

2008-09-10T13:24:00.002-04:00

Well the carpet is coming this Friday afternoon, so we are scurrying around trying to make sure everything that we would like to be done prior to carpet is done and then get thing moved and the floors cleaned up. Poor Adam has had the raw end of that deal since my abilities to do some of the projects or move heavy objects isn't all that great. I think one of our guy friends and maybe my brother might come over to help move furniture. Adam and I moving heavy furniture together might end in a spousal spat, so I think the guys coming over to help is a wonderful idea.

Friday should be a pretty crazy day, I am taking a 1/2 day off of work that day because I am in my good friend's Kim's wedding on Saturday, so Friday afternoon we are doing the pedicure thing, decorating and then the rehearsal dinner. So I will hurry home to let the carpet people in, then get the heck out dodge, Adam will be home a few hours later to check on them and perhaps be there when they leave. We both have roles in the wedding, I as a bridesmaid and Adam as an usher so we will go to the rehearsal and dinner that evening. A friend from out of town talked to Adam a few weeks ago and asked if he could sleep on our couch or something this weekend due to the wedding, I'm not sure if that means Friday night or just Saturday. So amongst all the madness we will also have a house guest. If he only knew what he is getting himself into, poor guy. Hey but at least there will be carpet, right!

The Carpet Man is Coming, The Carpet Man is Coming.....

2008-09-03T09:23:00.002-04:00

We went this weekend, actually Monday, to look for some carpet. We found something we liked at a good price at McCools Flooring in Avon and I called to set an appointment yesterday for them to come out and measure on Thursday. This particular carpet is in stock so we are hoping we can get it in our house sometime next week, I guess we will find out for sure tomorrow. It is a lighter frisse (sp?) with some flecks in it and it is Mohawk brand. One thing if anyone is looking for carpet, always ask about their in stock items b/c you can usually get at least $1/sq ft off of the normal price. For instance, ours would be a $4 carpet normally but because it is in stock it is a $2.20 carpet, and it is a good quality carpet. Adam and I worked feverishly last night to get the two rooms that need measured to a state of somewhat cleanliness, actually I did the cleanliness thing while Adam continued putting up the trim.

Which leads me to Adam's newest "Man Toy," this weekend while out looking at carpet we also made a trip to Lowes where Adam purchased an air compressor and a nail gun. I only kid when I say a toy this has made the trim go up very quickly and we have a lot more stuff we will need to use the nail gun for such as all the cabinet moldings that still need to go up, the toe kick, the window casings and trim, etc, etc.

This weekend we will work to do all the touch ups that need to be done prior to the carpet coming in, I'm so excited that after 9 months of living in this house we will actually have a room with carpet and trim. Actually, the living room will basically be finished other than decorating.

And just in case you are wondering I don't know if the septic system is fixed yet. While at Lowes we got come of that stuff that is supposed to help get the bacteria back in balance and help if the system is being sluggish. I'm just not worrying about it right now and delighting in the fact that we are getting carpet, and the only thing we can't really use at the moment is the washing machine.

Why do I live in the city and I'm still on a septic system?

2008-08-29T14:44:00.002-04:00

Actually I don't know how much this has to do with a recent plumbing problem, but I have always thought it was weird that we have a septic system and well water and live 43 blocks from the middle of a metropolitan city. I know we are scheduled to be converted in the next few years but why did it take 50 years for that to happen? Questions I will probably never know the answer to. Adam was excited that we were on well water because it reminded him of being in the country, I also grew up on well and septic, so I suppose it is fine.

On to the plumbing problem I briefly mentioned. For some reason the water in the drainage line for the south side of the house is not adequately draining or not draining fast enough and causing back-ups, especially when using the washing machine. Adam spent one evening underneath the house ripping out some of the old cast iron and replacing it with PVC and also making sure the drainage was at the proper angle leading out to the septic line, that has been to no avail. He also looked down the septic line with his flashlight and didn't see an clogs or anything and said he could see for a long way, plus there wasn't any extra water in the septic line coming back to the house, so that wasn't it either. He then spoke with a guy at Economy Plumbing (his plumbing store of choice) and they said it sounded like something was clogging one of your plumbing vents so that lack of air release wasn't letting the water flow fast enough and thus the back-up. So last night my husband climbed on top of our house with the shop vac and try to shop vac out anything potentially in the vent, that had to be interesting to our neighbors. He did get an acorn and thought that was the culprit, but we were still getting the back-up. I don't know what the next investigative step is, but I'm thinking perhaps a professional plumber might not be too far down the list.

Needless to say this has delayed our putting up trim, and thus getting the carpet. Hopefully we will get back on track with that soon. Sorry no pictures, but I don't really think you would want to see the garbage disposal food that was trapped in our line then came out and went all over the floor, and the picutre definetly would not have conveyed the smell!!!

A Lady in Waiting....

2008-08-18T13:16:00.003-04:00

We have been working on stuff, I just haven't posted in a while because there isn't much in the way of pictures to update. We have the entryway and the fireplace tiled and grouted. We are now working on the mantle and trim around the fireplace and trim around the doors and floors. In my extensive Google research I discovered that getting your trim up before getting carpet makes for more finished look then the other way around. So we were cutting and painting trim this weekend. I think we pretty much have it all ready to go for the living room, hall, and office floors, which is where the carpet is going. Now Adam just has to get it up and we have to get more molding for the doors. We also need to go carpet shopping soon so we can get that lined up. Oh I never knew how happy I would be to have floors coming into my house, and so I am a lady in waiting to have a finished living room and thus something in my house will be done!

On a side note we also did some celebrating this weekend. I helped host a shower for my good friend Kim who is getting married next month and got to make party food. I like this kind of hosting/cooking stuff and made Bruschetta, Spinach Artichoke Dip, and Pasta Salad as well as the punch. We also didn't do the normal bridal shower game, instead we played Cranium but made it a shorter version and made questions that dealt with either weddings in general or with Kim and her fiance Eugene. I think everyone had a lot of fun. Most of our husbands/fiances went golfing while we were being girlie, the golfing lasted much longer than the shower so we capped off the evening by going to see Mama Mia. All I have to say is that Pierce Brosnan does not have a future on Broadway, his looks are much better than his voice!!!

Slate.....My New Best Friend

2008-08-04T14:53:00.004-04:00

The last couple of weeks we have been working on getting the entryway and fireplace tiled so that we can get really close to having carpet.

Below is a picture of the fireplace in the living room as it was when we moved in.

Here is the fireplace after we stripped it of anything really resembling a fireplace. First we removed the brass and glass cover. Then we dismantled the mantle and the trim on the sides. Lastly Adam took a hammer and pry and took off all the tile and residual mortar as gently as he could.

Part of our plan was to build out under the actual fireplace to give it a little more presence and also to to help provide additional protection for the soon-to-be carpet that will be installed. I didn't like the idea of just a hearth pad on the floor (this is the few little tiles that sit on or near the floor in front of your fireplace), if we had a gas fireplace that would be one thing but the idea of ashes on new carpet wasn't a pleasant thought. Here (below) Adam just took some 2 x 4's and built what I refer to as "the bench"

We used a brick pattern gobi slate that we found at the Tile Shop. It wasn't the cheapest tile, but luckily this isn't a huge area and we ended up getting just the effect we wanted. Here is Adam putting it up. We just used a normal thinset mortar with a trowel specifically for wall tiling. We also replaced all of the area behind the previous tile with new cement board, as well as put cement board on the "bench".

And after Adam's wonderful work below is the fireplace with all the tile up. It got a little tedious at the end b/c he had to kind of piece the sides of the bench together due to the area not being exactly 12 inches and requiring a partial tile piece. I think it looks great! We still need to seal the tile, since it is slate (a natural stone) you must seal it before grouting or the grout would stick to all the groves and stuff. After that we can grout it and then seal the grout. My participation in this project, other than cleaning excess mortar between the tiles, was to spray paint the brass doors black. I didn't take a picture yet but it looks so much better. Finally we will add the mantle and the trim and have a new beautiful fireplace.

We are also retiling our front door entryway and decided to use slate there also. We used a design consisting of 6 and 12 inch tiles. These we just purchased at Lowes and they weren't anything too special. Here is the tile all laid out we just need to get the mortar adhesive on and then we will finish it the same way we will finish the fireplace with the seal and the grout.

Nothing says "Welcome" like a new front door

2008-07-15T13:27:00.004-04:00

After a long arduous struggle we finally got our new front door installed. Like most things around our place a new square front door does not nicely fit into a 50 year old opening, so the whole process took us roughly 17 hours, yes you read that right 17 long hours. We ended up having to rip off some of the flashing and adjust the rough opening. When Adam started ripping things off I was a little concerned but he just said he'd fix it later, I couldn't argue, it is necessary to have a door on the front of your house. So here are a few pictures of our little project:

T: A picture of the door from the inside right after we purchased the house; B: The old front door after we took it off

T: Close-up of the new front door; B: View of new front door with more of the house

As you can see from the close-up for the new door, there needs to be some molding replaced. We had to take the molding in the pre-hung door off for it to fit and after it was so beat up, Adam said he would replace it with the no-mold molding so there isn't a chance of water and rot damage in the future.

Aunt & Uncle once again

2008-07-11T13:23:00.003-04:00

Adam and I were blessed to become an Aunt and Uncle again last night when Nolan Isaiah was born to Adam's brother Chris and his wife Kacey. He was about 10 days before his due date and weighed in at a "hefty" 5 lbs 15 oz. As you can tell from the diaper in the picture below he is pretty tiny. We are so happy for Chris and Kacey and can't wait to get to know little Nolan, oh and probably spoil him just a little because that is what good Aunts & Uncles do, right??

Arrrrg???

2008-07-09T16:33:00.004-04:00

Do you ever have one of those days that you just want to say Arrrrg and eat a lot of chocolate??? I think today was been one of those. Everything I do at work today seems to have some sort of issue and to my luck it hasn't been anything I have done, I just have the job to fix it, yay for me, huh.

My cell phone suddenly only has a white screen when you flip it open, you can dial and it rings but I can't use my numbers stored in my phone or see who is calling. Oh, and Cingular says I can't get an equipment discount until November. Since there is no way in hades I am paying $200 for a cell phone we just might be making the big switch to Verizon, especially since Adam can get a discount through Lilly.

Oh and this one isn't that big of a deal, but due to the storm last night we again have a large tree limb in our front yard, at this point we just shrug it off and Adam actually probably gets giddy because he can use his manly chainsaw.

It's probably a good thing we have House Church tonight because I need an attitude change. I know none of these are a big deal and they are all little things that just start pushing your buttons at the same time. Ok vent over..... on to Happy Thoughts, especially since I leave work in 15 minutes :)

A little curb appeal..

2008-07-01T14:01:00.004-04:00

So this beauty is what we purchased nearly 9 months ago now, I know don't be too jealous of us!! We absolutely adored those aluminum framed single pane windows this winter when our gas bill consistently stayed over $300/mo.

Its pretty weird when you take out a nearly 8 foot window and have a huge gaping hole in the front of your house. We kept being corny about the whole thing and commenting how clear our new set-up was, that it was almost like not having a window at all. Somehow we made minimal mess on this task which was nice for a change. We replaced the dining room window the next day and were literally trying to outrun a storm to get the thing in, we succeeded but seriously by the hair of our chinny chin chin.
So here is the new and improved front of our house. We still need to get in the new door, which should be arriving any day now, and the final window on the front replaced, which is the one on the far left of the picture. We have also, since this picture, replaced the outdoor lighting next to the front door and on the garage. The lights you see in the picture are literally like 3 feet tall on a ranch house, it looks ridiculous, we replaced it with something a bit more to scale.
This isn't technically curb appeal (see below) but is a change and enhancement on the back of our house. This was the sliding patio door that was in the 3rd bedroom when we bought the house. We didn't like that set-up and wanted the patio door in the kitchen and a window in the 3rd bedroom so we had contractors do that work. During the change the contractors commented that the way we wanted it was the original way it was on the house but a previous owner had changed it! Who puts a patio door in a 3rd bedroom (not the largest so probably not the master) and then just a window off the kitchen???
The contractors weren't able to brick in the opening in the fall b/c it was two cold for mortar and it was really expensive to get brick then b/c the builders aren't ordering anything.

This is right after it was done so the mortar residue is kind of smudged on the bricks, it doesn't really look that grey. The bricks aren't an exact match but we think it is close enough that if we do a little "decorating" of the patio around this area, no one will ever know that difference. You can see where we have installed patio door over to the left.

We are all chromed out....

2008-07-01T13:42:00.003-04:00

Actually brushed nickel or stainless steel might be better description, but the title didn't sound as good. These pictures are a bit dated as this all occurred around the 1st weekend of June (only a mere month ago), but we were able to move our fridge in from the garage, and place it in its proper spot. What you can't see is that it isn't hooked up yet b/c Adam has to do a little plumbing reconfiguration to get the water and ice hooked up. After that we will get it plugged in and move a lot of our stuff from the old fridge (soon-to-be-garage-fridge) to the new sparkly one.

We also got the extra cabinets put up on the wall by the L-shaped cabinet and bar, which was nice to finally have a place to at least store my nice dinnerware, even if it can't be displayed in a hutch. It also houses all of our Tupperware. Does anyone else think Tupperware is like rabbits, at first you only seem to have a few pieces but it multiplies? That might have something to do with my Mom sending food home with us and then us keeping the Tupperware and forgetting to ever return it to her.
Finally we have almost all of the kitchen pulls on. All of the cabinet doors are done, just a few of the drawers still need them that weren't "regulation" size.

Family Pictures

2008-06-30T09:33:00.004-04:00

For a joint Mother's and Father's day gift my brother and I had family pictures taken for my parents. Here is a link if you want to see more of them. They were taken by Loree Sumner of Loree Alayne Photography.

I haven't forgotten

2008-06-27T10:35:00.002-04:00

No, I haven't forgotten that I have a blog, and that the blog should be something I update from time to time. Ever since we moved into our house we haven't really had space for an office or wanted computer equipment out amongst all the dust we periodically stir up, so if I update the blog it has to be at work when I have a few minutes, of course I only would do such a thing during my allotted lunch hour :) Anyway we have done some stuff to the house since we have been back from vacation. One of the most noticeable has been the windows, the house seriously looks completely different. And we should have had a new door but Lowe's ordered it with the handle on the wrong side, so that had to be reordered. I will post some pics soon of our changes and then hopefully we will make some serious progress over the holiday weekend coming up.

Thank you blog readers for your faithful readership, that is if any of you still read my abandoned blog!

Leaks and crawlspaces are not friends

2008-06-12T16:30:00.003-04:00

So last week prior to the Indiana Flood of 08, Tuesday to be exact, we discovered that we had a leak in our pipes that had left the crawlspace with standing water underneath about 1/2 of the house. The leak occurred in the line that runs to our outside spickets, of course the only plumbing we did not redo prior to moving into the house. The good thing is that we have a turn-off valve for the outside spickets only, meaning we didn't have to turn off the main and could still have access to water inside of the house. Adam and I tag-teamed the mess and he went to pick up a little pump from Sunbelt rentals, while I went to Home Depot and grabbed 2 of the industrial fans (the ones they use to dry carpets and stuff after water damage). The little pump connected to our garden hose and the water got pumped out pretty quickly then we ran the fans all night. We thought we were in pretty good shape but knew we had a lot of rain that night. We looked outside to find this in our front yard the next morning:

We obviously had some drainage issue and the water at its highest point was probably 20 feet into our yard and several inches deep. Well Adam made like a mole and headed back to our crawlspace hoping to find it fairly dry, the look of dismay when he returned inside did not indicate that we had a dry crawlspace. This time it wasn't a leak it was just too much water and not enough drainage to get it away from the house. The drainage in the front of our house obviously runs to our drainage ditch, which was flooded, so it didn't have anywhere to go, I assume we live in a high water table area (close to the river), and it just would not stop raining; thus our crawlspace still had standing water. We used the little rented pump again and then decided this was not something we wanted to have happen anymore so we headed to Lowes to purchase a sump pump. That night as I headed to House Church, Adam sat in our crawlspace with a midget sized shovel and dug a hole about 2 feet deep and about 18 inches wide in the dirt (or mud might be the more appropriate term) and then put in the sump pump. This was making us feel better until our 1st one broke after 5 days and Adam returned it for an upgrade. I think SP #2 is doing ok, but we still need to put in permanent piping to get it out of the crawlspace and into our yard drainage, but the temporary stuff will work for now. We did discover one good thing; there is a drainage pipe in our yard that takes our rainwater across the street and down a hill to a pond. This had gotten covered up due to the house being unoccupied for a time and the storm so we were wondering where the heck our water was supposed to go. Once Adam cleaned it off and pulled some sticks and leaves away the water in our front yard started draining a whole lot faster.

Lessons learned - 1.) When buying an unoccupied 50 year old house replumb the outside spickets even if you might not use them right away. 2.) When buying any home with a crawlspace make sure there is a working sump pump, Indiana is a very wet state.

In the end we were feeling pretty blessed that this is all that happened to us considering that just 3 days later we got a call from Adam's mom that his cousin was being evacuated from his home due to flooding and she couldn't leave her house because none of the roads surrounding them were passable. Our hearts and prayers are with everyone that suffered and are suffering from the flood and especially family and friends in Martinsville.

A little slice of Paradise (Pictures)

2008-06-03T12:00:00.004-04:00

As promised I have finally posted some pictures, also here is a link to all of our pics out on Flickr.

Tortola ........

This is one of my favorite pictures. We took a driving tour around Tortola one day and there is a Ridge Road that basically runs along the spine of the island (which is very mountainous), thus you get amazing views such as these!
This little point is called Angel Pointe and was one of 3 areas where we went snorkeling on our day sail. I believe it is a pointe on Norman Island. The snorkeling was great, we saw all kinds of fish and coral. The 4 rocks sticking out of the water are named "The Indians," we also snorkeled here on our day sail and there was this one really tight spot where you felt like you might touch a Sea Urchin, I wasn't a fan of that. I swam all the way around the thing in order to not have to feel like the icky Sea Urchin might get me, Adam in all his tough manhood took the shorter yet scarier route and then informed me that our eyes were deceiving us and we weren't near as close to the black porcupine as we thought we were.
This awesome beach with all the catamarans is White Bay on the island of Jost Van Dyke. Jost is a pretty small island with only a few hundred actual residents. Its beaches are lined with little beach bars and restaurants. Two of the more famous establishments are on this island, Foxy's and Soggy Dollar. Soggy Dollar is actually in this picture you just can't really see it but it got its name b/c the sailboats would come in to the beach, but because there is no dock they would More their boats and then wade to the beach, thus the dollars to pay for their drinks at the bar were soggy. Foxy's which is at Grand Bay on Jost is well known all around the world and hosts a infamous New Years Day party that is supposed to be pretty amazing.
Above is basically our view from the place we stayed in Tortola, Agape Cottages. The bay you see behind us is Cane Garden Bay, it is probably one of the most popular bays in Tortola and has a lot of beach bars and restaurants. We never had to venture very far to get really good food. It also has a really pretty beach that is white sand and relatively flat. The lady in the picture with me is one of the owner of the Agape Cottages, we don't normally take picture of the owners of our vacation lodging but this couple was a really sweet Christian couple and we bonded with them some over our 4 day stay. The cottage that was their home was adjoined to ours.
The blue and white buildings at the top of this picture were the Agape Cottages. As you could see from the previous picture we had a great view but holy moses was that driveway steep to get up there. Lets just say we never walked down to the beach or back up, we were on vacation you know :)

Virgin Gorda.....

So we arrive in Virgin Gorda by ferry from Tortola and we get our rental car. The island isn't too big so we basically just get on this one main road and go until we see a sign for our place. As we round a bend in the road we see this awesome looking resort (picture above) on the pointe of the bay and Adam says lets stop and get a picture, I wanted to see where we were staying and get settled first so I get him to keep on going. We both rave about how great that place is, the location, yada, yada, yada. Shortly there after we both see a sign for Mango Bay Resort and just look at each other, that little piece of paradise we had just oggled at was where we were staying. We knew this place was probably going to be bit more luxury then our last place just on the higher price alone, but we usually stay in someplace that isn't a hostel but definitely not luxury. We felt totally out of our league and just kind of giggled about it like little kids that are used to Walmart and just entered FAO Schwartz.

This our villa at the resort, we are the right hand portion of the building. We had a coverd porch with a grill, a large room that had the living area, dining, and kitchen, an office/hallway, large bathroom, and bedroom. It was pretty spacious and the living area had virtually all glass windows and doors for two for the walls. It was also the place where they didn't give us a key b/c it was so safe.

This final picture is of the famous Baths I think or it might be Spring Bay, they are right next to each other and look very similar. Either way the areas are really cool and there are just these huge boulders everywhere. People that live near here would just have random large boulder formation in their yard. The Baths have caves you can climb through that the boulders have formed. It made for great picture taking.

We were Limin, Mon!

2008-05-28T09:16:00.003-04:00

We are back from our awesome vacation. I highly highly recommend visiting the British Virgin Islands. Here is a top 10 on why we liked them so much:

10. The way people talk down there is just fun to listen to
9. We didn't see a McDonalds, Wendy's, Walmart, or Home Depot all week
8. The villas we stayed in at Virgin Gorda didn't even give us a key for our place b/c it is so safe there.
7. No one is in a hurry or seems to have anxiety about much
6. Never really a traffic back-up and fairly patient drivers. And ferries that get you to another island are pretty cheap and only take about 1/2 hour.
5. The yummy drinks, these people know how to make a mixed drink and I don't even drink that much but we had a drink almost every night with dinner
4. Being able to walk 70 feet to the beach and swim another 50 and be snorkeling in beautiful reefs. The snorkeling was amazing!
3. The food - BBQ's, seafood, rotis, jerk seasoning, everything was so good.
2. Amazing views no matter where you looked and to see the way God sprinkled all the islands in the sea. Crystal clear water and white sand beaches, with amazing colors of teal and blues when looking out over the water.
1. Getting to enjoy a week with my husband without any stresses (most anxiety was deciding where we eating and that wasn't even hard due to all the awesome restaurants).

I'll try to remember to bring my pics tomorrow to download and post some. I wish we could have stayed longer!!

Happy Mothers Day.....and Kaboom

2008-05-12T11:29:00.006-04:00

So I hope any mothers that read this blog had a lovely day, of course that non-stop rain was not helping the lovely part. We had my parents and my brother over for lunch, I can now do this with very close family members and friends since I have a functional kitchen but know they won't judge Adam and I for the way we live in or remodeling mess :) We had a nice time and after they left Adam and I took some wonderful rainy Sunday afternoon naps.

My parents left around 5:00 and when Adam went in the kitchen a bit before 8:30 to get an after-the-nap-snack he exclaimed "What the heck!" At that little exclamation I of course needed to see what was going on in the kitchen. I thought perhaps our beloved little puppy had left some kind of bodily function gift for us, but nope that wasn't it at all, she was still in her crate taking her Sunday afternoon/night/all day nap too and hadn't awoken yet. He was standing at the back patio door and when I finally got there to look out it brought back some bad memories of a the lovely January storm. The big tree in our backyard had another large portion, probably at least 15 to 20 feet in length, had fallen over. Luckily missing our house once again but this time much closer. I don't know how we didn't hear something when it came down, guess we are hard sleepers. It is still attached, but barely and all the leafy area is now laying on our newly planted and growing grass. Adam turned in disgust as he knew this meant more time outside and more delay on getting things finished inside. He also knew this meant nicely begging one of our neighbors to borrow their chains saw again. Since we are leaving for Vacation on Friday he also knew that Monday and Tuesday were going to be his only chance to get this off our newly planted grass and at least dragged to the back of the yard.

One thing was decided for sure, this tree is now so fugly that it will have to come down at some point in the future. I didn't tell Adam this but I'm kind of glad that he made this decision because I thought it looked ridiculous after the storm when it really was only half a tree and I have ever really liked having that big of tree that close to our house, especially give our luck!

Above is picture from the last storm and the tree on the right is the one that was affected. You can't tell how full of a tree it was in this picture but even with half of it gone it was still pretty big and full. Below is a picture we we first planted the grass in the big dirt circle around the tree, it had just really started to look plush this last week. Hopefully Adam can get the tree out of the way before it ruins a section.

Holy Hostas, Batman!

2008-05-09T09:45:00.006-04:00

So now that spring has sprung we are discovering all of the vegetation we have around our place. We had some daffodils that bloomed but have since wilted. We think we have a bunch of day lilies that just haven't bloomed yet. This week we had a bush type thing bloom and I think the flowerings were gardenias. I'm sure there is more to discover that maybe haven't come up or bloomed yet.

We knew when we moved in that there were quite a few hostas, but due to the magnitude of overgrowth everywhere I don't think we knew what exactly we were going to get especially the number of hostas and how big some of them are. The pictures I have posted are actually when they were first starting to come in they are all much bigger now.

All the things that look like tall stalks in the picture above are hostas as well, as I mentioned before they have all opened up and are pretty big.

The picture below is of just a portion of the wood that we cut from our lovely January storm. There is a ton more piled behind this nicely stacked pile and then some over the side that you can't see.

Pretty!

2008-04-22T14:24:00.005-04:00

So one half of our kitchen is pretty much done, except for a few little details (which include the floors, toe kicks, shoe mouldings, crown molding, knob and/or pulls, caulking between the counters and wall, window mouldings, and a whole bunch of touch-ups). Once again for memory sake this is the kitchen before our little remodel.

And Now:

Check out this faucet and sink, are you sick of hearing that I love them? I don't know if you can tell by the picture but it is so deep. I seriously think it is double as deep as any sink I have previously used. The only issue this has caused so far is that you get a little extra sprayage since the water has a lot of room to fall and then redirect, but since the sink is so deep it doesn't usually get all over things. The pump over to the far right is for soap. It is so nice to have this little pump so I don't get have a dish soap bottle that is all nasty and it's nice when you just want something to soak and can just spray in a little soap while you are running the water.

Dish Pan Hands...

2008-04-14T10:35:00.002-04:00

I can officially say I will no longer have to wash my dishes in the bathroom!!!!!! This weekend while I was at a church retreat out of town, Adam finished most of the work for getting the sink in and dishwasher hooked up. When I got home Saturday he just had some finishing things to complete. Last night he was able to get everything hooked up and we were able to put our dishes from dinner (and probably a few dinners before that) in the dishwasher. Even with the few items I needed to handwash, I have to say I have never been so excited to stand at a kitchen sink and wash something.

I really like my sink and faucet. Our sink is much deeper than our previous one and the faucet is one that has a high arch so you could put a pot like 2 feet deep in there and not have to finagle it out. I put my 8 quart stock pot in the sink to fill it up last night and you could hardly see it above the rim of the sink. I know that is probably not the most exciting thing for most people, it is just a fun little convenience I like :)

I am going to take some pictures but I want to get the counter top cleaned off and the cabinet doors back on so it can actually look like it is supposed to and not half done. I think I can finally say I have fully operational house, done.....not yet, but operational...absolutely. Now we can start on all the other projects we have hanging out there that need to be finished. We should also have some contractors coming out soon to finish up the bricking on the back of the house around a window and possibly some other things I have requested we get a quote on (i.e. Husband,.... please let some of this get done by someone besides us so that we can enjoy our summer and maybe even be able to have people over to our house!!!)

Yard work deserves a Vacation

2008-04-09T16:52:00.004-04:00

This weekend we about did ourselves in trying to clean up our mess of a yard. We did get rid of all the brush from the storm (yes I know that was 2 months ago), well actually we have a mountain of mulch in our driveway, and finally got all of the leaves raked and in bags. We also cleaned out our flower beds and cleaned up our porch. I have some pics but no time to post these days (if you are a CPA and reading this, sorry, but you all are a pain this time of year!).

In other news Adam and I have decided to take a vacation in May. We are going to be going to the Britich Virgin Islands, we will actually fly into St Thomas (USVI) but then spend our trip between Tortola and Virgin Gorda. Due to the proximtiy a lot of the BVIs are to one another we will be able to make some day trips to places like Jost Van Dyke and Peter's Island. I'm super excited, we haven't done a lazy vacation in awhile and I'm ready for that more than I ever knew. Plus as much as I want this house to just get done, taking a week off isn't going to wreck our plans to get finished considering we have been doing this for over 6 months now.

Here are some pics of the places we will be going, I can't wait!

A beach in Tortola

The famous "Bath" in Virgin Gorda

Schweet we have a Stove!

2008-04-01T16:31:00.005-04:00

So the stove has moved out of its temporary home in the 3rd bedroom and into its proper place in the kitchen. It is the no-fingerprints stainless steel, and might be a little different than the micro but in this picture it doesn't even look like SS, must be the flash or something. The funny thing is that even though this got moved in here on Friday night we have yet to use the stove top due to our schedule since then. Guess I wasn't as excited as I though to have a stove to cook on?

Here is the 18 inch cabinet that replaced the too big 24 inch cabinet that was in this spot. We are starting to get the shelves reinstalled and cabinet doors back on. I even unloaded 1 whole box of spices and sauces/oils into the cabinets around the stove.

One can now actually walk through the dining room without fear of tripping over a cord or falling over a box. I resituated everything and even got the table closer to its proper place. This validated my though that we need to order a new dining room set b/c this table looks like doll-house furniture in this big of a space. Obviously the fridge will not be there and actually this one will be making its way to the garage as soon as we get a dolly to get it exchanged for our new SS fridge that is currently just sitting out in the garage.
On a change of plans we are going to use the extra 24 inch cabinet to put up above the "L" shaped bar thing on the left wall. We also ordered another 18 inch cabinet to fill up the space a bit. So we will have 42 inches of additional cabinet space which will be nice and kind of balance the kitchen, is what Adam and I decided. The cabinet Lady has to think we are the most unorganized kitchen remodelers ever since we seem to be calling once a month to order something else we decided we need.

The micro and a yellow wall

2008-03-27T16:35:00.005-04:00

So, the most exciting progress you have ever seen....not really..... but an update none-the-less.

We did get one cooking appliance installed too bad it was something we already were using this one is just bigger. It is a pretty sweet little micro all kinds of fun little settings. Even my set-everything-manually-husband has used some of the auto settings. I do like that we got to finally see what the only-missing-their-knobs cabinets look like with our appliances and I have to say I do like what I see.

Here is the long awaited spacer, this is probably the most dull photograph to everyone else, but that darn little spacer not being in its spot has delayed my new oven from entering the kitchen for about 2 extra weeks.

Here is a pic of the wall color that will run along the walls opposite of the green kitchen walls, so basically the dining room area. I like how the 2 colors look together and glad I went with something other than a variation of green and brown. I think my Mom was starting to think they never taught me about any other colors in kindergarten. I never realized how amazingly unorganized and chaotic our house looks to the outside world until I take these picture and look at our mess!

Here are couple of items we ordered today from Overstock (see below), our kitchen faucet and the light that will go in the dining room. Adam actually spotted the light and I liked it, I think he is getting better at this interior decorating thing, he sure is getting more experience than he probably ever wanted!

Until further updates adios, hope to be making a new entry soon (i.e. "Please husband, move my oven range into the kitchen and then finish the plumbing so the new sink can go in and I can try my mad skills at becoming the next Rachel Ray" j/k on that last part)

A cute little bunny....

2008-03-25T09:05:00.002-04:00

My dad sent me these pictures from my niece's, Camryn, first Easter Egg hunt that she had with her Grandma and Grandpa on the other side. I think she makes about the cutest Easter Bunny I have ever seen in my life!!

On a side note we have made a little progress in the kitchen since the last pictures I posted, I'll try to take some pictures tonight and get them posted soon.

1st Quarter Review

2008-03-17T14:38:00.003-04:00

Since I live in the financial world, time basically seems to operate on quarters. Since we are nearing the end of the 1st quarter here in a few days, I thought I would summarize the happenings of our year so far (can you tell we did nothing on our house this weekend and I'm trying to at least have an updated post?). Anyway.... on to the happenings of 2008:

The Good:
1. We moved into our "new" house and finally do not have to move anymore for awhile.
2. We finshed our bathroom to the point it is usuable and no longer had to live by frequenting gas stations and other convenient restrooms or using our friends for their showers.
3. We got to celebrate our nieces 1st birthday.
4. I received a decent bonus this year for last calendar year, which allowed us to payoff a mixture of residual Italy expenses, Christmas, and some house stuff.
5. Our kitchen is nearly finished which will mean that Adam will have a very happy wife that may not complain as much about the shape our house is in!!!
6. Our House Church (the small group we are a part of) has grown the last few months with some new faces which has allowed us to have some new friendships and for the group dynamics to be influenced by these new personalities and experiences, which is always fun to see how God works.
7. This coming weekend we get to celebrate the wedding of two of our bestfriends, Adam is actually a bestman and I am a Matron of Honor, we are super happy to be apart of this celebration.

The Bad:
1. On January 31st a crazy storm blew through and made a big mess at our house. We lost several trees and even had some fall on my car and the house. We still have some residual mess to get cleaned up once we have a few nice days.
2. At the end of February I was leaving my dentist appointment when my driver's side window fell completely down in the door, mind you it was probably 10 degrees and I was driving with no window at least 5 to 10 miles, brrrrrr. My window got scratched in the fall and so I had to get a new window and plus get it fixed. A dealership visit is never cheap, but I did find out that since the issue was caused by a build up of ice on my window it was covered under my comp coverage, thank goodness for insurance. My deductible is fairly low so we only had to dish out about 1/2 of the cost.
3. Last week on my way to work I hit a pothole, I mean crater, and totally messed up my tire. Not only did I get a flat, that has now been fixed, but we are still hearing a sound when I drive the car in the wheel somewhere.
.................................................Do you see a trend here???? Yeah we are planning to trade my car in this fall, that was decided before all this occurred, for a more family friendly vehicle. We love the Honda Pilot, but the thought of filling an SUV with $4/gallon gas makes me shudder. Yes I know it is a Honda, but still its an SUV, I wonder if I can get Adam to look at the Toyota Highlander Hybrid.

The Ugly:
I think the thing this year that has been "ugliest" is watching one of our very dear friends go through having breast cancer. She is basically our age with a great husband and an infant. In January she had a mastectomy and is now going through Chemo. She just finished her 2nd round and was hospitalized b/c her WBC got so low and she caught something, so her fever spiked above where it is supposed to be and she has to stay until they feel comfortable with the WBC. I can't imagine what it is like in a time when they want to be playing with their baby girl, watching her discover new things, being active as a family, and just learn how to be parents. They are amazing as they try to keep life as normal as they can, but it just seems like if something is going to happen it will happen to our dear friend. They have an awesome faith in God and that has been their strength. The "good" that has come out of this is just to see how people respond when someone they care about is in need. This friend has touched so many peoples lives that those wanting to help, give encouragement, and pray for her has been a huge number of people. One can only hope that they are loved like our friend is!

WooooHoooo

2008-03-10T13:55:00.002-04:00

Adam just called and our needed cabinet and spacer is going to be in tomorrow. So excited that we can finish this darn kitchen soon. Well at least get it usable, finishing in totality might take a bit longer. Adam has a test at the end of this week and is going to the Big 10 tourney on Friday evening so I don't know if it will get done before Saturday, but at least we will have everything we need to get it finished.

On a side note, the bar area is nearly finished, just need to secure the counter top down to the cabinets and put the veneer backing on the cabinet where the bar hangs over..... so I started clearing out some of the closets with stuff I want to store in or on there. It allowed us to get some random stuff out of our bedroom and I feel a tiny bit more organized.

Hopefully pictures can be put on here this weekend of a fully installed kitchen.

It's all coming together

2008-03-05T16:38:00.005-05:00

So here are some more pictures of the kitchen progress; we were able to make some progress while we patiently wait for our cabinet and spacer to come in. Don't mind the complete mess that you can see :o)

Here is a picture of the kitchen as the final layout will be, of course missing a few items, but you get the general idea. We put the "bar" cabinets in place last night and Adam put the bar stools together so we could get a basic idea of how everything would be situated. Of course the dining room chair and table will not be in the spot it is in the picture. Oh and also notice the can lights are in their proper position with their nice brushed nickel covers, thank you brother-in-law Chris!

I'm so excited about the additional counter and cabinets space we will gain from having this little L-shaped bar thing. It will also be a nice place to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner when we don't want to sit at the dining room table. Our condo had no counter space, so this truly exciting. I think it also helps define the kitchen and dining areas as two seperate spaces, since they kind of share a general area.

These were additional cabinets that we got up this weekend, and is where the microwave and stove will be once we get the counter top firmly in place.

New Brown.....Old Brown

With the help of my parents we got about half of the "brown room" soon-to-be office painted with the new brown color. It looks so much better then the brown-almost-black flat paint that was previously on the walls. The picture above is of the new color, and the picture below you can see the new color vs. the old.

The solution.....

2008-02-26T09:22:00.003-05:00

At the end of last week we came to a solution with the cabinet company. We are going to order an 18 inch cabinet for the wall cabinet to the right side of the window. Currently in the pictures it is a 24 inch cabinet, we will just use the 24 inch cabinet in the Laundry Room so that it is not a waste. And then we ordered a 6 inch spacer for the bottom. This way we don't have to get the counter top cut, and it will allow both of the upper cabinets to be far enough off of the edge of the window that we can put some moulding up around it and make it looked more finished.

Now it is just waiting for the items to come in; they put the order in on Tuesdays (so today) and then it can take up to 2 weeks for it come in. Cabinet Lady Nancy did say she would try to put a rush on it. So maybe by Mid March we will have a usable kitchen, hallelujah!!

Our Kitchen is on pause.....

2008-02-20T12:11:00.002-05:00

So we got our corner bottom cabinet installed and then wanted to space everything out to make sure we had it all right so that the countertop would fit properly. Below is our attempt at spacing out the bottom cabinets, except one is missing in the picture on the bottom right side.

We then got our countertop out and put it up as it should go. Before I explain the reason we are on pause, I must say I really like how the paint color, cabinets and countertop all coordinate, you can't tell totally what it looks like from the picture.

So when we put the countertop on we looked to the left side and the counter top was hanging off by about 5 inches, this is where the stove should fit in, the countertop and cabinet should be flush. So we looked around trying to see if we were doing something wrong. We hadn't added in a 3 inch spacer that they had given us, but if we did that it means we needed to move the upper cabinet about 6 1/2 inches off the window on the left side when the right side only has about 1 1/2 inches of room between the window and cabinet, that would look really dumb. The reason the upper cabinet matters is because the micro should be directly above the stove so whereever the bottom cabinet sits the upper wall cabinet needs to be at the same place. We started measuring and looking at the schematic the kitchen designer had done and those 2 measurements don't match either.

So currently this is our reason for pausing (see below). We called the kitchen design company on Monday and they are running back through some of our measurements. We basically just want it cut to match how our bottom cabinets are currently set-up, but we are complying with their request in hopes that they will see that they screwed up and will come out on site to fix it, wishful thinking I know. The reason I don't think they will come out is we didn't pay for delivery or installation, we picked the cabinets up and have been installing them ourselves, so even if they will make it right I'm thinking we might have to get it back to them for it to be fixed. A nearly 12 ft piece of countertop isn't so easy to transport! Oh and since the guy that did the initial design was let go not long after we ordered our cabinets that kind of makes everything a little more complicated too, so hopefully "Cabinet Lady Nancy" will be a honest and integrity laden employee and help us out to get out countertop the way we need it.
In the meantime we have started painting the "brown room" which will one day be our office and Adam started working on finishing the linen closet in the bathroom.

Hopefully this gets resolved soon and we can finally have an operating kitchen. Oh the joys of remodeling :)

As I promised......

2008-02-11T13:55:00.000-05:00

We did have progress and a few cabinets are up on the wall, of course we are hitting a few snags along the way. What would a home improvement project be without a few snags that make you want to pull your hair out. Adam did have some helpers with this project, his brother Chris and our friend Steve. You can see Steve's face resting against the side of the cabinet in the left of the picture.

Our mains issue is that we need to reroute some wiring which isn't fun but shouldn't be too bad of a fix. The stopper currently is that the microwave wire is coming out of the drywall on the opposite side of where it needs to be and too low to get the outlet box into the cabinet that will be above the microwave. Hopefully that won't be too awful to fix. The other issue is that the outlet box that houses our exhaust fan switch and a GFCI outlet will currently be cut in half by the top of our oven range. We need to move that to the other side of the stud. Adam isn't too happy about that move but it is a much cheaper fix than the $1600 it would cost for a specialty stove that is only 42 inches high. I'm excited that there is something up but I realize with the couple of fixes we have it won't go as fast as we had hoped.

The Perfect Storm.......but darn messy

2008-02-05T09:37:00.000-05:00

I don't know if it was really the perfect storm, we would have preferred to not have one at all, but for the destruction it caused we were so lucky with the small amount of damage that it caused our house and vehicle. Also I think we are going to save all the brush and rent a brush chipper to make our own mulch. This should save us some $$$$ in the spring when we need to mulch a ton of stuff.

This picture is of the portion of the tree that fell on my car. At this point Adam had moved my car out of the way, but you can also see how close it got to the house. Also it is harder to tell in this picture but there is obviously some trees that fell on our garage. These types of trees in this tree line were the only ones that actually made contact with the house.

The large tree branch to the right in this picture is the one that missed the corner of our house by about a foot or so.
The 2/3rds of a tree you see laying on the ground is the tree that could have done some major damage had it fallen towards the house. Its hard to tell by this picture but it was a large part of a large tree. In the background of the second picture you can see that we only really have 2 of the pine trees remaining of the like 6 that we had between our house and the neigbors.
To the right of this picture is the 1/3rd of the maple tree that is left, we are hoping if we do some trimming we are able to save the tree because it was a very pretty tree, especially in the fall. You can also see a closer view of the trees on the house on the left side of the picture. The tree that is actually lying on the ground is the one that took down our power, cable, and phone lines. All but the cable has been fixed.
The picture below must have been one that Adam took while walking around the neighborhood but it is an example of how strong these winds where, they just knocked down these mature trees like they were nothing. There were several on 44th street that were down like this and the root system and trunk size that got pulled out of the ground was probably the size of a small car.

This is another picture Adam took while walking around, this tree was lying across the street at the end our our block and was one of may of the reasons we didn't get power back for over 24 hours.

Starting to finish the Kitchen

2008-02-04T11:24:00.001-05:00

This weekend we actually did get some interior house stuff completed, even though a lot of our time last week was picking up after the storm. We got the entire kitchen, including ceilings primed and ready for painting.

Again just for memories sake this is what the kitchen looked like before, the firey orange walls and all.

I spent most of Saturday, along with my parents finishing priming the walls, priming all of the ceiling and then putting textured ceiling paint up. Can I just say putting textured paint on the ceiling has got to be the messiest painting job I have ever done. Just ask my husband what I looked like afterwords, it was ridicoulous. We had to retexture the ceilings in the kitchen since we took out the bulkhead and had new drywall that had a flat finish right against the already textured ceiling in the rest of the room. It does look better now.

While we were at it we decided to go ahead and texturize the ceiling in the full bath, as well. I'm not looking forward to the texturing I will have to do in the laundy/mudroom eventually b/c there is no natural break from the kitchen.

On Sunday I finally got to the fun part and actually got to put color on the walls. The picture below shows the kitchen with the first coat of paint. It is much greener than it looks in these pictures. The funky paint job is because we will be putting cabinets on this wall so no need to waste a bunch of paint.

Adam spent most of Saturday splitting the large wood we cut with his brother Chris. At one point I went out to ask them what they wanted for lunch and Adam's large ax came flying out of his hands and went about 15 feet behind him. Luckily Chris and I were on the other side of him. He also mentioned Chris had just done the same thing. After that experience I decided to not visit them out in the yard anymore for the sake of not getting an ax in my head. They also laid some of the cement board in the half bath and laundry room so eventually we can get the tile down back there. Unless we have any major setback you should start seeing cabinets in the kitchen this week.

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

2008-01-31T12:03:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-29T16:02:00.000-05:00

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.....

2008-01-18T16:57:00.001-05:00

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.

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????

2008-01-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-09T14:35:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-04T16:19:00.000-05:00

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 .....

2008-01-04T14:56:00.000-05:00

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...

2008-01-04T12:28:00.000-05:00

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!!!

2008-01-04T12:13:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-04T12:02:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-02T14:17:00.000-05:00

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.

Moved in ........now I need to catch up on blogging

2007-12-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

We are officially moved into our not-completely-finished house. It was a incredibly nice day on Wednesday, for being December 26th, so we felt blessed to get such a nice day to move. We had the help of several friends and family members, without them I don't think I would be able to move my tired old body today. My uncle Chris, who not only helped us move, but also lugged away all of the brush we have had in our front yard for like 3 months to his compost pile. The thought has even crossed our minds to finally rake up our leaves. That requires that is stops raining for a day or two and isn't sub-zero weather....we'll see when that gets done.

I described our current living situation as a nice camping trip. I wash my face and brush my teach at the water spouts for the laundry with a bucket to catch the water and our toilet should be going in as we speak. We luckily have had use of other facilities thus far, but I don't think I will ever be so glad to see a porcelain throne in working condition. Our bathroom is so close to being 95% done and once it is our time can finally be spent doing other things. I do have some pictures to update the blog with. I will try to get that done in the next few days but it isn't likely that we will have Internet available at home yet so it might be next week before that happens.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and got some R&R and great food, I know we enjoyed those things, especially this Christmas, even if it was only for a few hours at at time.

Its starting to look like a finished house....

2007-12-10T08:42:00.001-05:00

It finally feel like we are getting stuff done. Here is a list of what has been completed so far in the last few weeks:

Kitchen has drywall up with the exception of the area on the ceiling and around the patio door.
Can lights have been installed in the kitchen.
Kitchen and bath areas have new subfloor and underlayment of some type.
Full bath has almost all the drywall up and now has a ceiling (woo hoo for not heating the attic!!), we just need to finish getting drywall/cement board up around the bathtub and then we will be ready to tape, mud and sand the drywall.
The purple room is no longer purple and after 3 coats of primer is now white, we'll decide on a color later.
And probably one of the most visual changes from this weekend is documented below:

Here is our living room area before we started painting you will notice a portion is an nice light robins egg blue, while the other wall nicely coordinated with a deep avocado green

Below the ghostly looking room is in the process of being rid of those nasty colors. With the help of my parents and good friends Michelle and Steve we were able to get 2 coats of primer in this room and the dining room on Saturday.
And then finally on Sunday we were able to paint it the finish coat. It is Ralph Lauren paint in the color "Sisal." I would highly recommend this paint it is only a few dollars more than the Behr or Valspar paints and it went on so easily and covered great. They also have a great palette of colors.

So this room is fairly close to being done. We just need to change all of the outlets and covers and get the baseboards up. We are leaving the floor to the professionals, we are not going to try our hand at installing carpet.

Stay tuned for more updates they should start getting more fun in the changes that you see :)!!!!

The bathroom stuff

2007-12-06T15:42:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention in my last post that I also purchased our full bath vanity top last week at Home Depot. I had looked at it before but went down the aisle and noticed it was $100 off so I went ahead and picked it up. It is one of the ready to go granite tops, I don't know how else to explain it but here is a picture.

And here is the vanity cabinet we plan on getting

Progress.....we have some kitchen walls

2007-12-03T16:39:00.001-05:00

So we at least got some of the drywall up this weekend. On Saturday we had a bunch of people come and help. My Uncle Skyler helped Adam with some odds and ends and then was on the drywall crew once that started going up. Our friend Chad came and lended a hand to the drywall, also due to his above average height he helped me with some taping I was doing so I didn't have to use the step ladder :) My uncle Mark and cousin Daniel were back to help with the electrical. Also my friend Michelle came and helped me tape the other bedroom for painting and then wipe down walls in the living room. We got a lot accomplished and hopefully by the pictures below you notice progress. Poor Adam spent half of Saturday on his stomach doing and army crawl through the attic (our attic is not very tall), the poor guy has either been beneath or above this house for 80% of the time so far. Prior to everyone arriving on Saturday we also got some underlayment done in the dining and kitchen, as well as, can lights installed and ready for wiring.

I say it looks like we live in that thing that they put E.T. into because he was sick (oh come on 80's kids you know what I'm talking about). Anyway we had put in the insulation and then covered it with this 6 mil plastic sheathing as a vapor barrier, the drywall then goes on top of that.
Ta da we had 12 feet of wall at this point a vast improvement over zero!!
Below is the room were we are keeping all the stuff, and I tried to get a picture of one of our cabinets (you can see the side in the left part of the picture). Thanks to Adam's Dad we picked up all of the cabinets and counter tops, as well as our stove and microwave. Now it is all just waiting for installation.
And here is a quick picture of our counter tops.

This week we will be trying to complete as much drywall as possible. I am planning to start painting the ceilings and priming the walls in the rooms we aren't doing anything to from a wall perspective.

Pictures -- Warning: They may be boring!

2007-11-28T09:19:00.000-05:00

So I took some pictures of progress, they probably aren't very exciting to anyone but Adam and I, but progress nonetheless.

Purple room before anything, and after being cleaned up and taped, ready for painting.

Bathroom with new window installed and new subfloor; to replace the icky stuff that was in there.

Above is the before of the kitchen and below is what is currently looks like-- new windows again.

Now these are the most exciting ones below, not really. But it is the now organized and working utitlity room with our new water softner and the infamous (nearly-blew-up-our-house) water heater, that is now fixed. Also my favorite-- the new furnace!!

Heat....glorious Heat!!!!

2007-11-27T10:30:00.000-05:00

We now have been blessed by the Citizens Gas gods and can run our furnace due to passing the inspection and being able to turn on the heat.

The inspector initially came out on Friday morning to run a test on our line to make sure there were no leaks. Well... there was a small leak that he thought might be coming from a fitting on an old union. There were only about 3 parts from the meter to the furnace/water heater that were not replaced so we figured it was one of those. Thus I make a mad dash to the black pipe aisle at Home Depot and in the meantime John, Adam's dad, arrives to help out. John brought with him a pipe wrench that was seriously the size of a 3 year old, it was the largest wrench I have ever seen in my life. Well the toddler size wrench must have done the job because when Citizens guy arrived the next day there were no leaks. I have never been so happy to hear a furnace running. It was ridiculous we were putting our hands in front of the vents like it was blowing out the answer to the fountain of youth or something.

Then the Citizens guy went to light the pilot on the water heater and about got his eyebrows singed. I guess the control box had some loose screws so when he went to light the pilot there was some built up gas and it basically backfired a bit and scared the bageebees out of Citizens guy and Adam. Adam made a very firm request to Sears to get someone out ASAP to take a look at it and/or replace it, since it was obviously a problem with the manufacturing and not anything we could have done. Sears guy came on Monday and replaced the box, also stating he had never seen anything like that before (lucky us!!).

So now we have both heat and hot water and are no longer living like the Amish. Now we can ask people to come help us and we don't have to preempt it by saying to make sure you wear 4 layers to stay warm :)

Other things we accomplished this weekend:

1. Adam and my dad finished setting all of the new windows and sprayed the "Great Stuff" for insulation and then caulked them all.

2. Mom and I have one of the bedrooms completely taped and are ready to go in with the paint sprayer and prime that room.

Our goal is to start hanging drywall this weekend, so if there are any of you out there that would like to get a workout this weekend and just a little bit dusty we would be more than happy to help you accomplish your goals.

Sparkling floors, new pipes, and our first casualty.....

2007-11-21T09:02:00.000-05:00

Well it has been a while since I blogged but a lot of work has been going on that I thought I should report. I have forgotten to take my camera these last few time to the house, but will try this weekend so I can have some pictures for the blog. Here is a rundown on what has been going on:

Adam and his Dad have finished nearly all the plumbing the only thing left is something to do with the outside spickets. We are now ready to test all the plumbing to make sure we don't have any leaks.
Our furnace was installed and is just waiting for the gas to be turned on. (Luckily with the weather this last week a furnace hasn't been necessary).
The house is finally rid of all wall paper. While "escavating" the wall near the front door I noticed that there were 2 layers of wallpaper, I then started seeing a portion of what looked like a picture of an old Roman statue. I took pictures with my phone so I will try to get those up b/c it has to be the most interesting wallpaper I saw during my time with this little project.
I have taken the old layer of wax off of the original hardwood floors in both of the bedrooms. The floor in the "purple room" has also had new wax reapplied and buffed back to a shine. I want to put another coat on but I am waiting for the heat to come on. The other room has a few damaged wood planks so we need to replace those before I can finish that floor.
Our deal of the week last week was our toilets( I know who braggs about a "deal" on a toliet). We had gone to Home Depot for something unrelated and we decided to see if they had anything in the toilet aisle on sale, low-and-behold they had a toilet that was originally $269 on clearence for $47.50 and it was an American Standard. There was only one left at the 38th St. HD so we asked my parents to pick up another one at the C,ville HD. We got 2 toilets for under $100!!
Our windows are kind of in.....I will elaborate on that a little further in a minute :(
Nearly all of the subfloor in the full bathroom has been replaced and we have dry fitted the tub.

And now for the casualty....

My poor dear husband has been having a heck of a time with the windows. A 54 year old house that had the old aluminum windows is not always the easiest when it comes to the replacement process. First of all not all of the rough opening were level so he had to rework those a bit to get the window to sit in the framing plumb (and yes I now know all these "technical" words and actually what they mean). Then he had to take a layer of brick off and mortar back in the limestone sill so the window could sit properly on the sill. A small casualty was that one of the sills fell during this process and broke into about 3 pieces, but he was able to get it back up and it doesn't look too bad, nothing a flower box can't hide :) Then for the big one......... last night he was trying to get the windows pushed out to where they needed to sit on the sill. The one in the laundry room was "stuck" but I'm guessing when Adam turned to get a tool it got "unstuck" because on my way back up to the house from taking the garbage out, I heard bang, the crash of many pieces of glass breaking, and a number of words I should not type on such a famiy friendly blog. The window had gone to meet its maker so soon after arriving out our house, and so goes our first casualty. Of course the part of the window that broke was the permanent panel and not the moving panel that could probably be ordered seperately as a replacement piece. The worst part is that the windows have to be special ordered and can take 2 to 3 weeks to get back. At least it is just the laundry room and not a big deal if we have a few finishing things once we move in. Right now we put the window back up and then just covered the broken side with plastic.

So as you can see we have been busy and so far the process has had a range of emotions from exciting and fun to exhausted and frustrated, but we are getting there and hopefully soon the pictures I post will be something resembling an almost finished house.

Doors, Wallpaper, and Windows.......Oh My......

2007-11-06T08:37:00.000-05:00

I have really slacked in blogging lately, but most of the changes have not been something where you can "really" see a change. We have the electrical almost completed and the plumbing should be getting there soon. The new water heater is installed, so now it is just getting everything hooked back up. Our new furnace should be delivered any day, so hopefully that will be installed in the next week. As soon as we get the furnace, then we can have running water in the house, don't want the pipes to freeze and burst right in the middle of the remodel.

Two weekends ago my parents came up to help. My mom helped take a ton of carpet staples out of the hardwood floors in the master bedroom, she decided that she would prefer to never do it again. My dad did a lot of clean up on the outside of the house. I wish the sun stayed out a little longer in the evenings so I could have gotten a picture last night to post, but it does look a lot better and no longer like a jungle.

This last weekend we had a full on work crew my Uncle Mark was back to help with some electrical stuff, my cousin Daniel and his wife Hyra also came to help, as well as Adam's brother Chris and his Dad. Everyone had different jobs so we got a lot of loose ends wrapped up. The pictures below note some of the progress we have made since the demolition, again not a ton yet, but once that drywall goes up there should be world of difference.

This is the before of the back door, although it doesn't look terrible from the inside the exterior of the door was pretty weathered, do we decided to replace it.

Here is the after of the back door, which ended up being a pain to get installed. I guess a door should be roughed in so that there is some wiggle room to work with when installing a new door. Adam's comment after 2+ hours of working on this, with the 3 Phillips men, was that they must of hung the door and then framed the house, that is how tight the door frame was. It ended up being an episode of MacGyver trying to figure out how to get the door to fit. As you can see they triumphed the nasty framing, and I think they would have all gone for a cold one after that mess.
Here is the before of the Kitchen where we were replacing the window with a patio door because it logically made more sense for the flow of the house.
Here is the after with the patio door installed. We had the contractors do this one as we figured it might be a bit more complicated. Adam was jealous and said they got the easy one, after the fiasco with the other door. I am really glad we made this decision, and it is so nice to have all of the natural light in the kitchen and dining area.

Here is the bedroom where there was a patio door and it is being replaced by a window. The windows are all special order and have not come in yet, so right now it is just a piece of plywood.

Now it is on to the wallpaper, oh the glorious wall paper. I think I have spent that majority of my working hours on this house steaming and scraping wall paper off of the walls. I will never, and I repeat never, put wallpaper anywhere in my house. The thought of ever having to take it down makes me shudder.

This is the before of the master bedroom, and after getting the steamer, this room proved pretty easy on stripping the wallpaper.

And here is where hours of my labor have been spent, the after, no more wallpaper!!

This hallway has been my nemesis over the last several days. A previous owner had the bright idea to just paint over the 40+ year old wallpaper. I have scored, steamed, stripped paint, and scraped this hallway and am still only about 1/2 done with this mess. My goal is to be gone with all the wallpaper in the house by the end of this week.
This picture (below ) is where the contractor came in and took down the wall between the kitchen and the dining area. It was load bearing so they had to put in a beam for support. It really opens up the space and makes the dining room much more usable.

Making decision and spending a lot of $$$..

2007-10-26T11:31:00.000-04:00

Last night we went to make the final design decision and order our cabinets and counter tops. We also made a pit stop to Lowe's afterwards and picked up a bunch of stuff since we had a 10% off coupon, which included tile we are going to use in the bathrooms. Below are some pictures of the stuff we have picked thus far:

These (pictured above) are the style of the cabinets we decided on, and the medium finish (pictured below) will be the finish of our cabinets.

The counter-top (below) is the same as ours WilonArtHD Deepstar Bronze, ours will have a finished edge that looks more like a solid surface edge.

We didn't purchase these yet but this (below) is the style of pulls that we both like for the cabinet hardware.

We will be putting in the Bellawood Brazilian Cherry Hardwood from Lumber Liquidators (below) in our Kitchen and Dinning Rooms.

This is the tile (below) we have chosen for the full bathroom. We will use 6X6 tiles on the shower wall and the same tile but in the 12X12 size on the floor.

And finally this was our last decor purchase last night (below), this tile will be in the laundry area and the half bath.

We also got a bunch of electrical stuff since my Uncle Mark is coming back this weekend to help finish up the electrical to-do list. Another semi-decor item we purchased were can lights for the kitchen. This weekend we plan to keeping working on stripping wallpaper and get walls in shape for primer and then also work on electrical. Hopefully in the not too far distant future drywall will be going up and things can start coming into the house instead of heading out to the trash :)

The changes are a comin.....

2007-10-23T14:10:00.001-04:00

I don't have any pictures but I will definetly get some this weekend if not before. A lot of what has been going on lately you can't really see but they are needed changes.

This last weekend Adam worked on a lot of electrical and plumbing, meaning he was acting like a mole and lived most of the weekend under the house in the crawl space. Thanks Chris for leaving the coveralls, they have definetly come in handy this last week.

I spent most of my weekend taking off wallpaper in the master bedroom. I intially started using the Dif product that you spray on and then scrape, I think my dear husband felt sorry for me when after nearly an entire afternoon I had no more than a 2ft by 2 ft area where you coudn't see any remanents of the wallpaper. Everywhere else had these little spots of the paper stuck here and there, it was going to be a long process. At the idea of taking nearly all my time on this one project his keen judgement said lets go buy a steamer to take that stuff off. Thank God for wallpaper steamers, it was amazing! During approximetly the same time it took me to get the 2X2 area cleared I had almost the entire rest of the room completed. If you are ever removing wallpaper and need a steamer please ask to borrow ours, don't even try to use any other method.

Yesterday was a busy day around the house and some visable changes were made. The contractors came to take out the wall between the kitchen and dining room and installed the patio door in the kitchen area. I went by last night after work to check out the progress and it looks awesome. It made me so excited to start seeing transfomations in the house. Adam is going to think I am a nut, but I could start to think of hearing pitter patters in and out of that door to the backyard to play, one day down the road. I will definetly post pictures. Yesterday Adam's cousin Jason also came to look at the 1979 furnace we currently have and give us an estimate on updating. I think we have decided to go with a 93% variable speed furnace and hopefully can get that installed soon, before these tempatures decide to drop!

Also thanks to Steve for coming by to keep Adam company and pulling probably hundreds of nails out of the overlayment so we can get that removed and put the new stuff down.

Tonight we are going to meet with the cabinet guy and try to nail down our order for cabinets and countertops in the kitchen so we can get that completed. We are also going to investigate what they can do for us in regard to bathroom vanities as this has been an area where I have had a hard time really finding something I like.

Other things we hope to accomplish this week:

Order the hardwood floor
Order bathroom vanities
Get new overlayment installed in kitchen, dining and bathrooms and any subfloor that needs replaced
Find tile for bathrooms and laundry area
Determine where to place can lights in the kitchen
Finish the electrical work
Get any plumbing done that we can get to

Our Progress ~ Weekend of Demolition

2007-10-18T15:11:00.000-04:00

We did a ton of demolition this last weekend. Thank God for friends and family that are so willing to help with this project of ours.

Earlier last week my father-in-law, John, was passing through the area and offered to go by Menards with us in his truck to pick-up some supplies. We were able to get some overlayment for the floors and drywall.

So during demolition weekend we completely gutted both bathrooms down to studs and floor boards, took out all flooring except the hardwoods, 1/2 of the kitchen walls are down to the studs, removed the framing for the bulkhead in the kitchen, and started on stripping wallpaper in the mudroom and master. We had shifts of people coming by virtually all day to help. I think Chris, Adam's brother, might win "Destroyer of the Day." If you put a crow bar in his hands watch out, I found out he likes to rip things apart. Of course he does have a process to it, which makes sense in that he is an engineer.

Here are a few pictures from our day of demolition:

No it wasn't raining in our house, although by looking at Adam's outfit you might think that was the case. He and Chris were actually about ready to head into the crawl space. Since he couldn't find his coveralls he opted for this nice yellow full body rain gear that he found amongst the tools he had in the garage. You can also see in the background my sister-in-law, Kacey, working on cleaning the drywall she knocked down in the kitchen , while Adam is posing. (That wasn't nice of me; Adam has worked a lot more and much harder on the house than I have so far, so just kidding hun!!)

Now Chris gets to show off his fashionable coverall outfit, I do have to say it did look more respectable than Adam's. Our tried and true Rubbermaid trashcan got some major use as we took that thing back and forth from the dumpster all weekend long. You can do anything to those things and they don't get destroyed. Ok, perhaps running over it with a vehicle or dropping it from a ridiculous height might do the trick, but our abuse did nothing to it. This picture reveals a lot of the progress we made in the kitchen.

This was what was left of our half bath, not much as you can see.

And this is what is left of the full bath. I think that guys that were removing the tub determined that cast iron tubs may weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 pounds. Probably not something they want to do ever again.

On Monday, Adam used a vacation day to continue the work and we were able to then get rid of the dumpster. I think we are like 95% done with the demolition. Then on Tuesday an electrician came to install a new breaker box, you don't even want see what was in there before. That evening my Uncle Mark came down to Indy and helped Adam map out the wiring and other stuff that is way over my head.

We are so grateful for all these people that are willing to help us and that we have been blessed with great family and friends.

Humpty Dumpty ~ The Before Pictures

2007-10-15T14:07:00.000-04:00

So here are some pictures of our "beautiful home," these are the before picture that I took.

This is part of the master bedroom. One nice thing is that we found hardwoods still in pretty good shape under the carpet. The closet you see is actually the length of the wall and shared with the bedroom through another door this size on the other side of the wall. We are going to make this a wall to wall closet for the master, and install sets of bifold doors so that it will be more like a his-and-hers closet. Oh and the lovely wallpaper is a pain to get off, I might be working on that until the day we move in :0

This is the bedroom that is on the other side of the wall and this is the closet entry that we plan to drywall closed. We will then build another closet on the opposite side of this room as it would still be a spacious second bedroom. The harwoods in this room were the only exposed hardwoods and in great shape.

This is the lovely 3rd bedroom which will initially be an office for us, and maybe down the road a room for a little Phillips. For the exact reason that child might someday be in this room we are taking out the sliding glass door and just having a regular window in here.

Hello 1950's bathroom tile!! We are completely gutting this bathroom and installing everything new. The floors and shower walls will be tile the rest will just be painted. This bathroom had a fairly decent cast iron tub, but it was seriously the most shallow tub I have ever seen. We decided to replace it with a new one.

Doesn't this pictue of the tub make you feel supa clean?

This is a portion of the half bath which is also being gutted down to the studs. It had some interesting 70's type of decor on the walls and this stunning goldish bronze stripped wallpaper.

This is the Laundry/Mudroom area which is larger than this picture is able to show. I know you are all jealous of the wallpaper and carpet, try not to covet too much. We are replacing this exterior door due to the weathering the door has sustained.

Who ever came up with the trend and thought that it was a good idea to wallpaper doors???? This was done to more than one door in the house. We are replacing all of the interior and exterior doors.

This was what the kitchen looked like, it actually wasn't that bad based on the age of the house, but since kitchens are one of the areas that really add value to a home, we decided to gut it and start over again. The wall you see to your right with the cabinets attached to it is getting knocked out so that the kitchen and the currently small dining room are an open concept. We are planning to replace all the cabinets and countertops, replace appliances with stainless steel, and put an island where the current butcher block thingy is located.

This window (above) is being taken out and replaced by a patio door. I seriously think the previous owners were trying to match the paint to the cabinets or something, it almost matched perfectly:) Our new dishwasher snuck into this picture.

This is our currently very small dining room and the wall to the left will be coming down which is what I was saying earlier about the kitchen being opened up.

Here is the front door which is getting replaced by something probably in the cream family unless I decide to venture out and accent with some color for the outside portion.

This is the fireplace that you are looking at if you turn to your right upon coming in the front of the house. I'm not a big fan of the current fireplace's look, but it is definetly not something we are worrying with right now. One funny thing to note is that there are two working outlets on the top of the mantle, kind of weird?

This is looking out of the big picture window in the great room.

This is the beautiful exterior of the home that still partly resembles the Amazon. There are so many overgrown plants and tree items around the house that I think we might be prunning and pulling weeds for a few years before its all looking tidy. As you can see in this picture, we had already trimed some of the front yard trees so that you can actually see the house now. Also take note of the nice dumpster located in our driveway. That should be making itself disappear very soon.

This is our incredibly overgrown backyard. But we love the tree line, it gives us some privacy but also we just like having all the trees around.

So that concludes this blogging session, and I will be putting up some more picture of our progress. I can't wait until I can make a side by side comparison of the before and after.

The Big 3.....0......

2007-10-12T08:39:00.000-04:00

So today is the last day of my twenties, actually based on what I have heard from my Mom I think I get until about 6:30 tomorrow evening. Honestly I really haven't thought about it too much; that might have something to do with selling a condo and moving everything into storage, going to Italy for 2 weeks, closing on a new house, moving into a temporary apartment, and starting the remodeling process on the new house.

My wonderful husband and some of my closest friends thru me a surprise birthday party last weekend and it was great to get to be with a lot of old friends all at the same time. Kim, Laurie, and Michelle a huge thank you to you for organzing the party and how much your friendships mean to me. They actually put together a little slide show and managed to get pictures from about the last 15 years of my life (Courtney I know you helped them). Some of these pictures I had never seen before which was really interesting!!

This evening Adam is taking me to Eddie Merlots and then has a surprise for me of which I really, this time, have no clue about. I am notorious for figuring surprises out, but I really haven't had time to be a detective on this one :) Tomorrow we are going to dinner with my parents and brother at McCormick & Schmicks to celebrate my and my dad's birthday (My Dad's b-day is today, Happy Birthday DAD!!). During the day tomorrow we are going to be working on the house again and try to get the demolition completed so we can get the dumpster out of our driveway. I am sure my muscles will let me know what being 30 feels like on Sunday.

I will try to get the before pictures and the after demo pictures up of the house early next week.

Totally not house related ...... OUR ITALY TRIP (Part I: Rome ~ Day 1)

2007-10-11T14:13:00.000-04:00

Last month we had a wonderful vacation to central and northern Italy. We spent 15 days and 14 nights discovering the beautiful scenery, delicious food, and at least once a day gelato! We started in Rome, traveled up into Tuscany, over to Florence, and ended our trip at our most northern point in Venice.

Here are some pictures and commentary on our trip:

The picture to the left is one of the first images we saw as we began walking around Rome. We stayed on the West side of the Tiber river just over the Ponte (Bridge) from the central area of Rome. This area is called Travestere, and is said to be the "Romans Rome." We loved the area because it was a great mix of being tourist friendly but also getting to live more like a local. The nightlife in the area is also very fun as it is lively and has become somewhat of a trendy area for the twenty and thirty somethings. We were also pretty close to almost everything and if we needed to we could always grab a bus or metro to get somewhere that was a little farther then our lazy American legs could handle. The picture is of some ruins on a little island that is in the Tiber as you cross the pedestrian bridge, it is part of the Jewish Ghetto of Rome.

We walked over to the building that houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and went to the top of it where you had a panoramic view of all of Rome. In the picture above the Roman Forum ruins are to the right and the Colosseum is obviously in the upper left hand corner.

Next we went over to the Trevi Fountain and then the Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain was cool to see just in it magnitude and detail of architecture. We were a little disappointed with the Spanish Steps we just felt like it was a lot of people setting on some steps. Maybe we completely missed the amazingness of it or something. Although at the Spanish Steps we encountered our first of many times in seeing people fill up their water bottles from the fountains. Of course most American fountains are disgusting and we would never even consider drinking the water, but everyone else was doing it so we even tried it a couple of times. I must say the water did taste good, wasn't discolored, and never made us sick.

Then it was on to the last major site for our first day which was the Pantheon. This was definitely our favorite of the day. It is unbelievable how well this building has been preserved and by a long shot is the best preserved building of all of "Ancient Rome". The doorway into the building was huge and I believe I read that the large doors were the originals for the building. The domed ceiling has some pretty cool architecture and a large circle in the top that lets the natural sunlight illuminate the interior. The inside is basically just a circular room with several statues and paintings, it is used as a Basilica which can be see through the cross just outside of the main building.

We did pretty well with our jet lag and managed to only take a couple of breaks in the room during that afternoon. We went to a small Trattoria that evening for dinner and had our first infusion of real Italian pasta, it was very good. During our dinner we met a very nice but opinionated couple from New York and a couple on their honeymoon from Norway. The Norwegian couple was very sweet and close to our age. The husband spoke excellent English and they asked if we would like to walk around with them and grab some drinks or something. We spent the evening with them exploring the lively piazzas and Adam and Ror discussed episodes of the "Simpsons" and "Family Guy". I never knew these 2 shows were a universal discussion topic and the bond we all have internationally:)