Six Months Ago ...

...I was here.  With the dark days and the wind howling and the rain pouring down I like to look at this picture and remember the warmth of Bora Bora, the fresh coconut water and a wonderful, relaxing perfect honeymoon with my sweetie.  Can I go back now?

*Our hut was the third one in from the right.  No, it did not suck.

Barbie's Dream Hearse

I passed this vehicle on the way to work this morning.  Why, oh why, don't I have some event planned where I need a limo?  I think I am going to have to create an event of some sort just so I can rent this bad boy out some day.  This would have been perfect for our wedding.

Bits and Pieces

• I have been running again.  I managed to get out there four times in the last week including running Sunday night at 9:00 because I promised myself I would run last weekend.  Kind of proud of dragging myself out there for that.  My pace is slow and the runs are challenging right now but I am so happy to be out there running again and being consistent. My legs feel a little noodley at the moment but I know that will go away soon. 
• I also went back to yoga class on Monday for the first time in almost a year.  Man am I out of shape.  Simple poses I had no problem with a year ago were really difficult.  My muscles were shaking in some poses and I couldn't hold a lot of them for the entire time.  My muscles are a delightful combination of tight and weak right now.  All the more reason to keep going to yoga class I guess.
• We finished the floor and more or less put the house back together to host the pumpkin carving party, then we lost all momentum and have done very little of the other things that need to get accomplished.  We are hoping to have the remainder of the baseboards painted, nailed, puttied and touched-up by the end of this weekend.  Then we can hopefully work on getting Kevin's office unpacked so we can get the crap from his office out of my office so I can get my office back.  Someday......
• "Walking Dead" anyone?  We started watching it this week and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  Everybody seems to think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread (sliced brains?) but I don't know.  It is poorly written and formulaic but I still can't stop watching.  Kevin, being a zombie freak for probably 20 years, feels the same way but is much more enthusiastic about it.  He is the Barbara Mandrell of zombies: he was zombie when zombie wasn't cool. 
• There is a lot of baking in my future and I am sooooooo excited.  I haven't done any baking in awhile and I am getting the urge again.  Luckily, this coincides with the opportunity to bake three cakes in the next week and a half.  Woo-hoooo! 

Progress!

The kitchen has gone from this blah, white on white, yawn inducing color scheme to this:

We couldn't be happier with the way the color turned out in the kitchen.  Of course now it makes the gold knobs that were only mildly ugly before, full-on ugly.  They will be replaced soon.

The floor is starting to take shape too.  After all day Saturday (and the help of my brother) and all day Sunday and Kevin working for about six hours tonight we have a good section of flooring installed.

OK, actually we have more than in the first photo but I am too lazy to go downstairs and take another picture.  The living room and dining room are done and the little entrance to the kitchen is done as is part of the hallway heading towards the front door.  Soon the memory of walking around on perpetually dusty, nasty feeling concrete will be a memory.  We will have a floor!! 

Of course along the way we discovered that we have another leaky heater and so two of our six heaters will need to be replaced.  This has also necessitated more drywall work than we anticipated but it has to be done. 

New gold paint and floor, glorious floor!

Old boring white paint and a section of the old flooring.

Hallway!

Watching Paint Dry

The house is starting to look like borderline insane people live here.  We painted the living and dining room last weekend and the color turned to a most unfortunate shade of pumpkin when it dried.  It didn't even mildly resemble the paint chip we chose.  So we went to a real paint place instead of a big box store and had them do two color samples and threw those on the walls. One was how the original chip was supposed to look and one was a pillowcase we had.  One looked great in the lighting in the dining room and one looked great on the living room walls.  So back to the paint store to have them make the bastard child of both of the paints.  And then we threw that in a few different spots on the walls tonight.  The colors aren't exact on the camera but you get the general idea.

We have spent far too much time sitting around watching the paint dry and contemplating colors.  I was going for a warm gold and Kevin is OK with any of the three so it is up to me to choose the color that will be on our walls for the next 10 years or so.  I will wait to see how the spawn of the other two (the middle one) looks after it dries completely and then see how they all look again tomorrow in daylight and will make a decision.  The rest of the weekend is painting, painting and, for a change, some painting.

Kevin finished drywalling the closet and is just waiting to spray texture on it. 

The old closet stopped where the white on the floor is.  You can see that we gained quite a bit of extra storage.  Heck, since the walls were ripped out because of the water damage we might as well take advantage of it. 

The other thing we got done today was to have the crack in our concrete slab fixed.  We discovered this when we ripped up the flooring in the dining room and kitchen.  Luckily, it wasn't a foundation issue so we could just seal it instead of having to have the floor jackhammered out and re-poured. 

The flooring will be delivered next Friday so we can start laying it on Saturday.  We have 1000 sq. feet of cork underlayment piled up in Kevin's office just waiting to be put down under it so we are almost all ready to go.

A River Ran Through It

By now I should have a post filled with beautiful pictures from our fabulous Glacier/Canadian Rockies (amazing, stunning, jaw-droppingly gorgeous place by the way) trip.  Unfortunately, our time has been a more than a little consumed with some unexpected home renovations. 

The day after we got back from our trip I noticed some warping of the laminate flooring in our hallway.  We poked around a bit, saw a little bit of water near the warping and then heard the floor actually make a squishing sound when we stepped on certain sections.  Turns out our radiant heater in the hallway sprung a leak and let loose a lot of water that got under about a third of our downstairs flooring.  Luckily we think we caught it fairly early before it ruined cabinets or more walls.  Because they don't make our old laminate anymore and it would be too hard to color match we ended up having to rip up all of the downstairs flooring:  the hallway, Kevin's office, the bathroom, the understairs closet, the living room, dining room and the kitchen. 

So for the last week and a half we have been dealing with plumbers, insurance adjusters, water mitigation people and a whole slew of other fun stuff.  Even though it is mostly covered by insurance we have decided to do most of the work ourselves to a) save some money and b) because Kevin is really excited about putting down the new flooring himself.  Since we were going to paint the living room, dining room and kitchen anyway this fall we just pushed up our schedule and are going to do all the painting before the new flooring goes in.  It will be so much easier to paint without a floor or baseboards or furniture to worry about.  And since Kevin has everything out of his almost-an-episode-of-Hoarders-but-without-the-dead-cats-or-feces office we figure it is a good time to paint that and install a new light.  And since we were going to paint the downstairs bathroom at some point anyway we are going to just go ahead and do that now too.  You know, 'cause there wasn't enough on our to-do list. 

So instead of blogging about vacations and enjoying our pretty fall weather we have been moving everything out of the downstairs, which included boxing up all nine of Kevin's floor to ceiling bookshelves (why didn't I marry an illiterate man again?) and putting it in the garage.  We have been tearing up the remaining laminate flooring (which is actually really fun and satisfying) and have picked out new laminate and some tile for the bathroom.  The next few days are about removing all of the crap on the walls and prepping them for a marathon paint session this weekend. Hopefully, the new floor will be ordered and ready in the next two weekends.  We ordered the tile last night so Kevin will be quickly learning how to tile a bathroom floor.

While it kind of sucks to have had the "water event" it is kind of fun to get to completely redo the downstairs.  We are both excited about the way we hope it will look in the end.  

Just wish us luck and some strong backs for the work that awaits us. 

I'm Still Here

Good gravy, these have been a busy two weeks.  I haven't had time to do laundry, let alone turn my computer on at home.  Good thing that I have a few moments here at the old jobey-job today to catch-up on my crazy last two weeks.

I fully intended on some blog posts about some of this fun stuff but instead you get a list and maybe some pictures later.

In the past two weeks I have:  been to a Brandi Carlile concert at the zoo, ate Minnesota style pizza and drank bad beer before the Dave Alvin show at the Tractor, went to the Slow Food Roots Music Festival in Stanwood for tasty chow and more Dave Alvin, had a picnic at Chateau St. Michelle with friends, went to a baseball game, had two dance lessons, had a podiatry appointment (news flash:  my left foot is wonky), met with our new cat sitter, had to go down to Mom's place after work to help her after she threw her back out, hosted dinner and vertical wine tasting at our place for a couple of friends, back to Mom's place for a day of deck cleaning and power washing, hike up to Spray Park at Mt. Rainier, back to Mom's again after work on Labor Day (not a holiday at my job) for the rest of the power washing project to prepare the deck for staining.  Whew!  No wonder I am feeling a bit tired right now. 

Anyway, we are leaving for a camping/road trip to Glacier National Park and the Canadian Rockies this weekend so I won't have time for a proper blog post until we get back.  Hopefully I will come back with some beautiful pictures and tales of (safe) bear sightings and maybe mountain goats too!  Then we can commence with a slightly less busy life and get down to painting, decorating, running, yoga-ing and other healthy pursuits.

I hope everyone enjoys these beautiful September days!