Colorado Catch Up!

Hey Everybody,


Wow, it's been like a month since I've written a blog post. I am really not a great blogger! It's not like things haven't been happening. It's more that, things have been happening, and I've just been trying to experience them, and not get too focused on trying to photograph every stage of it.  Don't worry though, I've taken plenty of pictures of all of the excitement, and they'll be coming.

But for now--VACATION.  Let me tell you, I needed this break, and it was totally awesome.

So last weekend, Kurt and I headed out to beautiful Denver, Colorado for vacation!  It was really just  a long weekend trip (Saturday through Tuesday), but it was great.  Before this trip I'd never been west of St. Louis, so this was like, half way across the country to me! Luckily for Kurt, there was less screeching about how far west we were than there was when we were in Canada, and I'd never been that far north.  Poor guy.  How does he put up with me?!

Anyway, we headed out there to see a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater to see Old Crow Medicine Show in concert, hit a bunch of new record stores, hike, see the mountains, and just hangout.  Well, the concert was AMAZING, we had stellar luck at the records stores, and we even got to see a snow storm in the mountains!   I'm just a mid-western girl--these things are super fascinating to me!

We crossed off a lot of firsts on this trip! When I think about it, it's kind of funny (funny hmm not funny haha) how something can feel so familiar and so new at the same time.  This trip included firsts such as: our first plane ride together, our first out west, first concert where we got to stand next to each other, the first time Kurt saw me hungry cry, and the highest elevation that either of us had ever been to!  It was my furthest trip west, and the first time Kurt has ever had dessert at the Cheesecake Factory.  Whew!  Talk about an adventure!  

You know how it is after vacation, getting back into the swing of things can be a daunting task.  It's hard to believe that we've only been home a week!  It feels like so much has happens--and I guess it has. I know that I owe you guys an update, but I'm just not quite ready yet.  One is coming, but probably not today. If you've met me, you know how I am.


K


Old Crow Medicine Show - Humdinger

Old Crow Medicine Show - Take 'Em Away

That will be 8 check marks please!

Holy. Hell.  This was quite possibly the longest weekend in recent memory.  Don't get me wrong, it's not an entirely bad thing, but I am exceptionally glad that this weekend's events are over.  So, I hope you're ready, because big things have been happening!


It may be commonplace to show the "after" pictures first, but you know how contrary I can be.  You'll just have to bear with me.


Ooooh yeah, all the way back!  Brown paint, blue carpet, poorly painted and chipping white trim.

 Ripping up the carpet helped, and stripping all that woodwork made a huge difference!

 Goodbye red paint!

 Tearing up this last bit of blue carpet was soooo satisfying.  I can't even begin to tell you.  Such a dirty job shouldn't be so satisfying.

Getting everything sanded was a filthy chore. 

 

 It'll be worth it.....when you see how it looks now...

I'm a big fan of this stain.  Varathane in dark walnut.  I had to stop half way to go buy another gallon from Menards.  Oops.  At least it's rebate time again!

Here it is in progress....

And here it is with two coats of stain, two coats of poly, fully cured, and ready to walk on!  Plus the cat.

This is better right?  Right.  Remember when we started this, and I kept telling everyone to try to see the potential.  Well here it is.  Potential fully recognized, and looking great, if I do say so myself!

You know I can never resist a before and after picture of people.  People change as much as houses during the remodeling process!  This weekend was really hard, but now I know that I can do it.

I am exhausted, and it's probably because in between coats of stain and poly for almost 1200 square I went to the grocery store, Menards (twice), mowed the lawn, and weed whacked.  Woof.  No wonder I feel like I could use a nap!  But, the good news is, by completing these tasks, that crosses eight - EIGHT things off of the list.  We'll get there guys!  Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't even take five years to straighten out this cluster!

K


Alabama Shakes - I ain't the Same

Post Weekend Check-in

Hey All,

Is anyone else ready for fall to hurry up and get here already?  I miss the days of sweaters, tights, and being able to spend more than thirty seconds outside without wanting to die from heatstroke. Obviously you all already know that the heat has been brutal, but I just wanted to complain for a minute.  You know how I am.

Now, on to updates!

We had planned on staining the floors this weekend, but that didn't happen.  You know why, and let's not talk about it for a while yet.  I'm still feeling a little tender about it.  So, with staining off the table, we moved on to completing a handful of smaller tasks.  Gotta get Kurt those sweet, sweet check marks for the list! ;)

We started with the chandelier for the dining room.  I'd been slowly working on getting it together since I scored it as a primo Prime Day deal.  I'll just run you through the pictures real quick...

The box on the right contained all the parts...its size wasn't promising...

After reading the instructions I started to worry.

So basically, you put 18 of these arms into the ball.  Easy enough, right? 

Electrician cat!

Boom.  Now on to tackling the wire situation.

Soooo now it's just a matter of connecting 18 white wires, and 18 black wires, all in a space as big as my fist.  

And finally, here's the finished product! Oh, what's that you say?  This looks like a different light?  Welllllll now that you mention it.  It turns out that when one of the reviews for the lovely Sputnik light said "It should come with an apology to husbands everywhere.", they weren't kidding.  The pieces wouldn't all fit together for the actual hanging bit, it was still 1000 degrees, my ankle was killing me from standing on the ladder, and we gave up.   There's no shame in that.  We went to Lowes, picked up this puppy, and we were done in no time.

In the end, I'm much happier with the brushed nickle finish, and I don't think I would've been happy with the black Sputnik light after all.  So, back to Amazon it goes!

In this picture you can see that with a lot of scrubbing (read a few hours on Friday night) most of the white paint came up off the floor.  I need to sand a few spots, but really, it's no big deal.

In other news, we switched out all of the outlets in the living and dining rooms!  Talk about another task that was harder than it ever should've been.  Woof.  Oh well. It's done, and that's all that matters!  That was definitely a little thing that makes a big difference.  Now all of the outlets are grounded, and have three prong holes, where most of them only had two before.  There's also the added bonus that these have never been painted-let alone painted multiple times!  (I really think someone should call those people and tell them it's dangerous to paint the outlets.  But instead I'll settle for a promise from all of you that you'll never commit such a sin. :)


The ceilings in the living and dining rooms have officially been spackled, sanded and painted.

I can never get over how good looking this guy is.  Insert wolf whistle here!

It'll come as no surprise to you guys, but I'm terrible at painting the ceilings.  It hurts my neck to stare up at them, I get whiny, it's really a bad scene.  Kurt on the other hand, never whines.  It's an admirable trait I'm hoping to learn someday.

Finally, we hung up the curtains in the master bedroom.  We're like three checks on the to-do-list away from being able to call it completely done!  I'm sure that will be a relief to some of you.  Once we get through a few more things we'll be ready to do a great big reveal!  I'm sad to report that the John Cena fathead is gone, but maybe I can find an action figure or something to honor his memory?  I'll work on that.

I'm starting to feel tired, but there's no rest for the wicked-or for those who tore most of an 1800 square foot house apart with little to no idea for how to put it back together... In five years or so, this is going to be a really nice house! It'll get there, I'm too stubborn to stop until is has!

K

Steve Miller Band - The Joker

There's no use crying over spilled paint, but that's never stopped me...

Happy Friday Everyone!

Is everyone else as happy as I am that it's Friday?  Woof, this was a log rough week.  Well, that's not entirely fair...the beginning of the week was wonderful, and yesterday was a train wreck.  After a looooooooong emotional day at work, I decided I'd try to get a jump start on painting the ceilings before Kurt got there.  But you know me, and you know what they say about good intentions.....I swear, I was only home alone for ten minutes--max!  And yet:

Has anyone ever dumped most of a gallon of paint on the floor?  What the hell are you supposed to do?!  How do you even begin to clean it up?! In the end, I still don't know, and I ended up wearing as much paint as there was on the floor.  Let me set the scene for you: there I am, in the dining room, on my hand and knees.  I'm literally dripping with paint, from my elbows to my hands, and my knees to my feet.  It's in my hair, it's on my face (because apparently when I'm in a panic I touch my face-who knew?). It's also on three walls, all the baseboards, the dryer, an end table (which was covered with tool, tape, and whatnot's).   In the process of trying to clean it up, I also ended up covering the kitchen, because, ya know, that's where the paper towels, bucket, and water were.

I thought I was doing an okay job, not of cleaning-that was a lost cause, but I was at least keeping it together!  Poor Kurt, what a scene he walked in on.  I felt so bad for making a mess, and being a mess that of course, I ended up sobbing in a puddle of paint.  You know me, and I assume you can absolutely imagine exactly what this looked like.

Here's the after picture.  This is after three rolls of paper towels, a few buckets of water, one king size bed sheet, and a whole lot of scrubbing.  Oh, and I'd been hosed down in the driveway before taking this picture.  Woof.  

So, "It's kind of a good news bad news situation here"  (that's how I greeted Kurt, but it still seems appropriate today).  

The bad news is, the floor is still a mess.  We couldn't get all of the paint up, and I'm not 100% sure yet how we will.  I'm totally open to suggestions on that one.  That means that the ceilings didn't get painted last night, so we're not staining the floors tonight.  There are other things we can work on, but this is a frustrating setback.  

The good news is, (and this is going to get mushy so go ahead and skip this part Mom) Kurt could not have handled this situation any better than he did.  I mean, damn.  He was calm, and kind, and there was no yelling, or jokes, or any number of things that could've made me feel worse.  Someone should give that guy an award for being able to calm me down--because you all know that is no easy feat.  It makes my eyes all misty just thinking about it.  He's a keeper for sure! 

Today, I feel a little silly, and my hands and legs still have some paint on them.  But I'm feeling fine about the whole thing.  Kurt made a really good point, that if this was going to happen, there really couldn't have been a better time.  We didn't just lay down new carpet, the floors weren't just refinished, and this situation is totally workable.  And hey, if I only dump one can of paint out of 20, then really, that's not terrible, right?

Someday, this will probably make for a really funny story.  That day probably isn't today, but I'm looking forward the day when we can laugh about this, and my hands aren't all covered in paint!

K

Tracy Lawrence - If The Good Die Young

Slowly but surely

Hey Everybody!

People always say, "Slow and steady wins the race."  I'm not entirely sure that that particular colloquialism applies in this case, since the only thing I'm really racing is my own self-imposed five year timeline, but I've been trying to internalize it just the same.

The last few weeks/weekends have been mostly work, and very little play, which makes Jane a dull girl.  (Sorry, apparently I'm very into proverbs today?)  So, this weekend I put an official ban on any housework for Kurt and I.  I'm not sure if he'd agree, but I know that I definitely needed the break!!  Between Friday evening, and Saturday, it was pretty much a perfect weekend in my book! I usually try to only/mostly write about house stuff, but I feel like it's okay to chronicle our adventures here too....skip ahead if this doesn't interest you--but my memory can't be trusted unless I write stuff down!


Friday Afternoon:
We had intended to go to the Essen Haus for pie, and then hitting the county fair.  Luckily, Kurt can somehow read my mind, and we ended up taking a nap, and then heading to the fair.  Waiting until it had cooled off outside was DEFINITELY the right call here.  We ended up getting corn-dogs, and some awesome wood fired pizza. Being the sweet man that he is, he offered to split a pretzel too, but I was afraid I'd explode  that would be a megacarboverload, so we skipped it, in lieu of our dessert intentions....

The thing in the top left corner is deep fried oreos...you can see where this is going...

This is a taco of sorts, with deep fried oreos inside of an elephant ear.  

Watching him make and eat this masterpiece should really confirm for anyone out there that he's the one for me.
I won't post the picture of him actually biting into it, but trust me--he liked it.

As penance for posting that picture of him , here's a suuuuuper flattering shot of me shoving funnel cake and deep fried oreos in my mouth at the same time.  (I wasn't willing to make mine into a taco.)

All in all, it was a FANTASTIC night at the fair....and Kurt bought me cotton candy as we were leaving....which we took home and ate while we watched Netflix.  ::Insert heart eyes emoji here::

Saturday: 

I still feel a teeny-tiny bit bad....like we did exactly what I wanted all day, and nothing else. Hopefully Kurt didn't mind toooooo terribly much.  

We woke up reasonably early (for us), and headed to Goshen.  Hit up Goshen Floor Mart, and found the flooring I like for the laundry room, got Kurt's approval for it, and found out it's pretty significantly cheaper there.  Boom!  

This is a terrible picture, but hey, it's what I like! 

After that, we cruised downtown, to one of our favorite spots--Ignition Records! This place was a lucky find from a couple of weeks ago.  We've found some real gems here!  

Then we headed to Das Essen Haus for lunch, and PIE!  Sadly, there are no pictures.  I was too hungry to stop and take any.  Our waiter sold me on trying Raspberry Chocolate Cream pie--and it was totally awesome! 

Once lunch was over, we headed to Fort Wayne to hit the other three record stores, and chase some Pokemon.  We're totally adults, I promise...usually.  Which is why we decided to go see the new Ghost-busters movie!  We loaded my purse up with gas station candy, and hit the theater!  As a side note, we dumped a box of sno-caps, and a box of milk duds.  It turns out that neither of us loves caramel, but the sno-caps were a total win!  The movie was pretty hilarious, and a perfect end to a perfect day together!   

On Sunday, after Kurt when home, I decided that it was time for me to get back to work.  As usual, it doesn't look like much, but I promise that this took hooooouuuuurs of work.  

Here's a quick flash back to what it looked like when I moved it....

I dare you to tell me that this doens't look infinitely better!  Sure, it may be unfinished right now, but dang.  In less than two months, to have made this much progress, I'm feelin' pretty alright! 

I think that this is about as good as it's going to get for scraping the varnish off of the stairs.  Now I just need to hit them with the sander!  This is such a filthy job.  Ugh.  The varnish just turns to dust as you scrap, and that crap gets everywhere. If you happen to be sweaty, forget about it. The dust will get on you and make a sticky-varnishy, itchy mess.  Bleh.  Oh well, the bottom part of the stairs is done, and ready for the next step!   I'm just going to pretend that this didn't take five hours....and that the top portion of the stairs (above the landing) won't take another five hours, or more.  In the end, it'll all be worth it.  Slow and steady, right?

K

The Raconteurs - Steady as She Goes