Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Weirdo

I'm sittin' at work today and my google chat agent tells me my husband is trying to send me a pic. I open it and here is what I see.



She's so silly.

Thanks honey, made my day :)

Monday, September 29, 2008

Wedding Cake #2

I finally got the pics of the wedding cake from last weekend.

Cat

I told you my kitty was bored with me taking pics of her the other night. Here's my evidence.



and then she fell asleep.



:)

Progress

Ladies and Gents, we have made some progress! Thanks to everyone who came to help we got some major projects close to being finished.

Friday my dad came down in the afternoon and they got the living room particle board pulled up, the closet flooring started and one of the big pine trees in the back yard cut down. (Pictures of backyard further down)

Saturday started off bright and early when a friend of one of Adams friends showed up to start tiling. Yes! Adam and Dad pulled the vanity out of the bathroom to get the rest of the drywall pulled out and the bathroom ready to be re-assembled. The rest of my family came also and my brother-in-law started in on the drywall in the bathroom.
Bathroom progress pics:








Early on in the morning Adam and dad cut down another tree on the outside of the fence that was growing into it.


My sister painted the bedroom we are sleeping in.

My mom and I worked on the backyard all day.
We cleaned up all the rocks/"landscaping" that was up against the house. This seems simple enough but it really is a big job. We found a TON of spiders living in there and some GINORMOUS ones too.
When we first moved in:

Saturday morning:

Now:


We also raked the rest of the yard. There had to have been at least 3 years of pine needles back there. We found plastic bags with cones in them that someone had picked up and never thrown away buried beneath at least an inch of dirt, needles and more cones.
When we first got the house:


With big pine tree cut down:

This makes the yard feel much bigger. We might leave the other one and see if it fills back in next year.

Just some of the stuff we raked up:

Now:


This corner of the yard we also cleaned up some.
When we got the house:

Now:

The tree seen in the before pic here also got cut down last week.


My dad tore into the closet that had mold in it from the leaking roof. We thought we were just going to have to tear down some drywall and put up new stuff. I should know better than that. Here is what we found:


This used to be an outside wall so some of these boards had to come down. and the 2x4's were all wet and crumbly and you can see more mold on the drywall behind it. That drywall is in the stairwell going downstairs so it shouldn't be too big of a deal to take down.


My nieces kept themselves quite busy.

Aren't they cute?

The flooring in the big closet finally got finished too so I can organize!


We got the wallpaper border off of the living room.


Saturday night we went to a friends house to watch the football game.
Here's Vanessa. She has a Canon Rebel. We played with our camera's a little.


Here's her fiance Nick, coaching the other Nick on the values of family.
"If you really are family you'll drink this HUGE shot I just poured for you"


Sunday morning Adam and I finished some more drywalling. The bathroom is finally enclosed again!



We had an issue with the drain backing up in the basement a little so we rented a rotoRooter thing and Adam and his dad put it to work. (No, he's not going to the bathroom)

Looks like the tree out fronts roots got into the pipe.

We took care of that though!

We had a visit from Trey. He ate some licorice, okayed the tile work

and did some laundry.


And that's where we are. Still nothing DONE but a lot more progress than we had at the beginning of the weekend.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Yotify.com

On Wednesday September 24th, 2008 Yotify.com went public.



This means anyone can register.

Why is this important news?

Because this is what my husband pours his genius into Monday through Friday.

Check it out people! Use it! Love it! Send in suggestions!

And you will in a round-about way contribute to the renovations going on at 118 W. 6th St.

http://mashable.com/2008/09/24/yotify-search/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/stop_searching_the_web_let_yotify_do_it.php
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/24/yotify-launches-its-google-alerts-on-steroids/

It's useful to anyone who's on the web. Don't miss out.

Nikon D60

It's here! Nice and shiny and new!


Unfortunately I didn't do anything cool last night to take pics of. By the time I got home from exercising it was time to sit my butt on the couch, watch Ugly Betty and Greys and fold laundry.

Oh, I did take 100 pictures of my kitty trying to figure out how to make her look awesome and yet have a blurry background. She was posing for me. Really. She was. She normally runs away if I get right in her face but last night she sure looked like she was more bored with me than anything. I'll post a picture later so you can see what I'm talking about. This camera won't be making the trip with me back and forth to work getting jostled around in my purse. No Siree. By the time I was done folding laundry it was time to crash so I didn't do any uploading.

My sister is coming to help with the house this weekend and she's gonna teach me a thing or two. Help...........I need to know how to utilize this camera!

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Slow Night

Last night we didn't do much. I pulled up the tack strips in one of the bedrooms and did lots of more laundry.

Adam and his dad cut down a smaller tree outside and worked a little on the big pine ones.

There is a bad smell coming from our dishwasher. I don't know why. It smelled fine when we first got into the house and you'd think that if it was going to smell that is when it'd do it. So we also took apart the dishwasher last night but I'm not sure that we found/solved the problem. Ugh. One more new thing to buy??

I have a few new ideas for the bathroom to save space. One would be to get a vanity and do my hair and makeup not in the bathroom so that I don't have to have storage for all that stuff in the bathroom. Isn't this one pretty?

$500! Yikes. I think Adam would be building that instead of buying it.

We also could use one of these for hanging towels and storing towels. It's called a train rack. I didn't know that until today.


I think this might be a very good option for hanging a hand towel and wash cloth and keeping a few extra towels in the bathroom.

I think that we may just put up hooks in our new little cubby that will be created by moving the wall over to the next stud instead of a towel bar. I kinda like the idea of them hanging back there.

My new camera should be ready and waiting for me when I get home. Why oh why do I have to sit here til 5? :(

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Bathroom Demo

Last night we demo'd the rest of the bathroom. We left the sink and toilet in place until the last possible moment :)




There is some more insulation in this wall because the house was added onto and this used to be an exterior wall. We might leave it. Maybe not though. Right below the light was this medicine cabinet.

Adam remembers it as being the same one that was there when he was little.
The other day I realized that the light above it wasn't turning on with the other one. I searched to find another switch and didn't see anything. Then I stumbled across this:

Pretty nifty. The switch part of it was covered up when the med. cabinet was closed.
We tore out the cabinet and drywall - you can see where it was:

to find that the 2x4's that were framing in the med. cabinet weren't attached to ANYTHING. Nothing. I just pulled them out. The screws from the med. cabinet were holding the 2x4's in place I guess and the drywall was holding the med. cabinet in place. Really odd thing #9087 found in bathroom :)
I think we'll keep the light. There is a lot of oak in the house and it matches to it's just fine.

We also got some of the particle board pulled up in the living room.

This is actually really tough because it just kinda crumbles and you can't get many big pieces out at a time.

We also came home to a note on the door from the gas company saying they did some stuff and turned off the gas. We found they moved the meter. It was pretty much half buried before.

Looks nice.

And we got lots of laundry done and folded.
1 ton left to go...

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Laundry

I have my new washer and dryer! Wa Hoo!

Here is the spot where it sits that we cleaned out on Sunday.


And here is my pretty new washer and dryer.


They are the Frigidaire Gallery pair. They are the Consumer Reports Best Buy. That works for me :)

This is MAYBE 1/2 of the laundry I have to do. Since the apartment smelt like smoke, now our clothes do also. So I got started right away.

It's kind of fun to be able to watch :)


Front Loading washers have a learning curve to them but I've done my research so I'm not worried. You have to use a high efficiency detergent because they are low sudsing. Since your clothes tumble, way to many suds would be created with normal detergent.
You also need to leave the door of the washer open a lot of the time to let it try out because the seal is airtight and if you close it when it's still wet in there mold will grow. We DO NOT need any more mold in this house.

Here's what our clothing situation looked like at the beginning of the night.
In bags.

In tubs, random drawers and laundry baskets.


Here's the closet now.

Yes. Some organization around this place!

Yesterday it rained. We went to the car in the morning to go to work and had a surprise. We left the windows open. Darn! So we had to air it out last night.


More water also appeared in the basement.

It looks like it's starting from here.

So I set up our new dehumidifier

Which is awesome because it tells us what the current humidity is.

The humidity in your house should depend on what the temp. is.

Outside temperature (0°F)- Recommended relative humidity
+20° and above - 35% to 40%
+10° - 30%
0° - 25%
-10° - 20%
-20° - 15%

Here's the basement now. Much better than it used to be.


A also took a ton of cable out of the basement. Before the people who had their cable hooked up had it split a lot of times and it was pretty ridiculous.


We got some salt in the water softener and got that running again.

We need to get a special kind of salt that helps to treat the iron in the water. They didn't have it where we went last night so I'll have to keep my eyes open for it and I'll let you know if I see a difference when we find the other stuff.

I put up the blinds that were in the house when we got it. It works for now until I can sew some curtains. We can walk around the house at night w/o anyone passing by seeing our every move.


We got our new home phone last night.

No answering machine. I despise checking messages. If I'm not at home you don't need to leave me a message anyway. Call my cell phone.

And of course its "National Stay At Home Week" so we got to watch the season premiers of some of our favorite shows. We had a few glitches since we are still learning the ins and outs of our new DVR system. Monday night will be tuned to CBS in our house! If you've never seen The Big Bang theory, WATCH IT!