Happy Belated Christmas, and Have Some House Updates!

Hey Everyone!

Wow, I know I say this like, every time I write, but time has really flown!  Here we are in 2017--I can hardly believe it!

We officially moved home to the house on December 22nd.  Since then we've had four Christmas celebrations, packed, unpacked, painted, moved crap an endless number of times, and ordered pizza.

Here are a few pictures from our Christmas celebrations!  :)


For some reason I don't have any pictures at all from when we were with Kurt's family.  It must be because his mom made so much awesome food, I was single minded-ly focused...sorry Scott family.

Kurt and I at Uncle John's in front of the tree.

My mom and Kurt finishing the annual puzzle.  Poor Kurt didn't even stop to eat all day!  We just sat at that table and worked on the puzzle.  This was the first time ever (we think) that we started and finished a puzzle in one day! 

Kurt got my parents tickets to the IU Nebraska game for Christmas.   The pictures I took are pretty terrible, but it was definitely a good time!

They ended up losing the game in the last two minutes, but it was still worth the trip!  In the hour it took for us to get out of the parking lot at Assembly Hall, we got to have our leftover cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory, where we had lunch.  And luckily we made it home (mostly) without incident.   Did you know that police officers aren't really in uniform without their hats?   We do now! 

Now most of you probably don't care too much about what we did for Christmas, because you were there with us.  So, I hope you just skipped over that part  :P  Here are some updated progress pictures of the house--and there are really a lot of updates!  

They replaced the flooring in the upstairs bathroom, and I really liked it, so I decided I'd order a piece to do the entryway downstairs.  Silly me, I thought that a piece that was 12' x 7' would be rolled on the 7' length....and I was wrong.  This came pretty close to being the only purchase so far that didn't fit in the Fit!  The guy at Menards just shrugged, and told me to roll down the window, that it would be fine.  It was, but I felt like I was car jousting all the way home!  Lucky for me (and everyone else) it's a short drive.  :) 

Getting the actual flooring in was more difficult that we'd anticipated, (take that to mean this took us two hours lol), but in the end, I think that it looks really good!  

Here's a shot of it all installed!  I think that it really goes with the grey paint, and that everything is really starting to come together in here!  

Our next big project wasn't our project at all,...it was totally 100% Kurt's.  We knew we'd want/need to replace the flooring in the kitchen, so Kurt wanted to do a practice run in the laundry room.  

These vinyl tiles are pretty cool, they just snap right together, and seemed to go down pretty quickly. 

Another nice thing about them, is you don't have to take up your old floor if it's pretty clean and level. So, I figure this will be kind of like a time capsule for whoever pulls all the floor up someday--kinda like when we pulled up the carpet in the dining room and found that sweet linoleum.  

You just buy a couple of boxes of this stuff (bonus points if you snag them during the Menards rebate period ;) And then go to town!  

Here's the finished product!  Overall, it only took a few days, working a few hours at a time.  Kurt says now he's ready to take on the kitchen floor!  :D   

In other news, we finally have living room furniture! I mentioned in my last post that the couches were being delivered, and they arrived!  Yay! If you could just ignore the stuff still piled up around the edges of the room, and look at how nice this furniture is, that would be great lol 

But the biggest project of all is, we got the jumbo record shelf my dad bought us moved into the living room, painted, and all stocked with our collection!

Here's a quick reminder of what this room looked like, two weeks ago.  (So we really have made some progress lol), and in the very back, you can see that jumbo record shelf, turned on it's side.

Again, Mom for scale...

All moved into its proper home...

Once we got the shelf into place, and got a few coats of paint on it, it was time to start the most daunting task of all....alphabetizing our album collection.  Now, at this point, it's important to note that Kurt and I have different approaches.  I think approximate alphabetical is good enough--ya know, all the As are together, all the Bs, yadda yadda.  Kurt however is a stickler for exact alphabetical.  I hope it's obvious to everyone how much I love him, because I can't think of anyone else in the world I'd exact alphabetize for...

The cats were big fans of the alphabetizing process. 

It looks like a lot when they're all spread out on the floor...they look much nicer on the shelf! 

Here's the shelf with our records sorted and in place!  It only took us about two hours to alphabetize everything. 

And here's the final product!  There's still trim to be painted, and books to organize, and undoubtedly a hundred other things to do.  But, Kurt got the speakers set up, and they're so loud you can hear them almost everywhere in the house!  I know I say it all the time, but this guy....he just gets me, and I appreciate him so much.  All his hard work here in our house, and his endless support through moving twice, and the fire, a new career, and so many other things--I just couldn't ask for a better partner in all of this.  I just love these guys!

Sorry this post was so long....I still have more updates, but there's a paintbrush calling my name!  I'll be back later with updates from our trip to Ikea, the kitchen, and the bedroom (insert eyebrow wiggle here!)

K