Monday, June 27, 2011

Belly Photos!!

We've been taking belly photos since the beginning. I've made a little time line of them and plan to continue. But I thought I'd post what I have so far :-)

belly timeline upto 19

We have our anatomy scan on Friday!!! I'm so excited! I plan to announce on facebook once we know the sex.

Here are our ultrasound pics from around 12/13 weeks


So many people say "oh it looks like it is sucking it's thumb!" but actually it wasn't it was waving it's arms back and forth and moving all about. It was moving so much it took the US tech a while before she could get a recording of it's heartbeat. It just didn't want to hold still! (arg I can't wait til Friday, I HATE calling it "IT")

New Interior Doors

When it came time to start thinking about the baby's room, I knew the time had come that we needed to replace our interior doors, due to a hole on the back of the baby room door and just the ugliness factor of them all. We have three in the hallway (bathroom door, baby room door-old office, & guest room door) we also figured we'd replace the dining room closet door while we were at it. That would cover all the interior doors in the house except the linen closet and 2 bedroom closet doors... which we'll deal with later.

Here's an old picture of the hallway back when we had just painted the walls:
hallway painted2

And the dining room closet door back when we had finished painted that room:
after view 2

We knew we wanted white panel doors, which meant we'd need to paint all the trim in the hallway white. That of which we were not replacing. Again, we wanted to get the old doors out to throw in the dumpster we were getting, while we had the opportunity.

I had worked on getting the door trim off throughout the week leading up to last weekend (our door project took place on June 18th). We are putting new trim up, but since we are painting and trimming the basement ourselves once it's finished - to save about $1500 off the project, we are just going to do all the trim at once and rent a nail gun. So all the pictures you see of the new doors are indeed without trim. I promise they will look better in a few months.

So here's a before picture, but after I took the door trim off:
old hallway doors

Friday night, June 17th, we made our trip to Home Depot and picked out our four doors. We needed two 32" doors for the bedrooms, a 24" door for the dining closet, and 28" for the bathroom door. We just went with the hollow core, six panel doors which were wonderfully priced at $50 a piece. I never even considered solid doors until a few weeks ago at a friends house and they had just put in solid oak doors. Honestly it is not worth the price to me. The panels on these doors make them feel sturdier and I would rather buy them white at this point than deal with painting more. Did I mention we have enough projects to do before November :-P

Okay so we had our doors all ready for us the next day
new interior doors preinstallation

I had started painted the trim Friday of that weekend. So we just had 2 more coats to do. We were also painting the upstairs window trim, remember they put new trim up there for us with the new windows we just needed to paint them white. Saturday morning, Kyle worked on putting the second coat of white on the upstairs window trim and the existing hallway trim. While I finished getting the door trim off the insides.

Next step was getting the doors off and the door frame out
kyle install closet door

This was pretty easy, but by this point it was already noon and we hadn't put in a single door. But it was time. We decided to start with the baby's room door. We shimmied it through the hallway to find it was TOO BIG! Well shit! The actually door was 32" but the frame was bigger and wouldn't fit in our 32" door frame. Ooops our mistake for not measuring better and just reading the box. So we set those two aside and checked the others.

We got the closet door in and the bathroom door in just fine. Ran for lunch, returned doors to Home Depot and got the right sized ones. Luckily they had what we needed up on a pallet. Came back home and did those two doors in under an hour!

Closet door, remember trim to come:
closet door after

And hallway, notice the lovely white trim now:
hallway doors after 1

hallway doors after 2

The hallway looks so much better with the white.

The baby's room door and the bathroom door, the two you see in that picture above. Were not 'perfect' so Saturday, when Kyle's friend Enoch came over to help load up the basement junk, we asked him if he'd help us with the baby room door. We fixed the bathroom one before he got there, we just wanted the hinge side to be a little closer to the wall as there was a little rub on the knob side. The baby's room door was hitting the floor so we needed one person to hold the frame up, while the other two helped get it level. Now I am very happy with the status of all the doors :-) They will look so good once the trim is on!!

So here's our projects to come:
1. Basement finish (to be done by contractor unless I noted)
  • adding a half bathroom
  • adding a wetbar
  • tile in wetbar and bathroom area
  • carpeting and having a big open space for living/TV area and moving my office/sewing/craft room down there
  • **painting and placing basetrim** {Kyle and I}
2. putting up new white trim around our new interior doors
3. Removing the parque laminate tile in the baby's room & guest room, hiring someone to come sand and refinish ALL the hardwood floors in the two bedrooms, hallway, & dining room. This project cannot be started until the basement is finished because we have no where else to put the furniture. And we can't hire anyone outside of our contractor to do work while their project is taking place.
3. Baby's ROOM! (by November! - baby is due mid-November)
  • Install new ceiling fan to replace the ugly old one that is there now
  • Paint the window trim white
  • replace the floor trim to white (probably do when we do the basement trim and door trim)
  • Paint - preferably before the hardwoods are done
  • DECORATE!
One great thing about having to wait so long to do the baby's room is that I won't buy a ton of crap since we don't really have a place to put it. The only livable space we have right now is our living room couch, the baby stuff we generously got from my brother is in the living room and that is probably where anything else will go that we get until the room is ready to furnish... so we don't want to crowd ourselves too much. Oh it's a headache just thinking about the hardwood floors because we're going to have to move ALLLLLLLLLL the furniture in three rooms. AHHH okay well two rooms, because the office needs to get emptied out anyway. Hopefully they can do it all in one day, and it's a nice sunny day where we can just put some stuff outside while they do it.

We've decided not to touch the guest room until child #2 comes along in 3 or 4 years (or if we have to sell the house - whichever comes first) :-P so the trim will stay brown, the closet doors will stay ugly and we will deal with it later!

Side project that came up

So the first weekend of June when we were sitting at my brothers, I had a thought. Kyle and I were sitting with Alyson at the breakfast table in Brad's kitchen. I was thinking about how it was nice to just sit at a little table, informally eating breakfast with the kids. And then I thought about the cabinet and counter in our kitchen that is really just a junk collector. Granted I did have things stored in the cabinets: phone books, nutrition books & logs, cook books, and one cabinet designated for Harpo stuff. All of which could find a new home somewhere else.

You may remember a LONG time ago in this post, my brother suggested that we paint that contraption white. Because it first looked liked this:
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kitchen painted 2

{a little intermission note: when I first started my blog I was posting pictures via the blogger website, about June 2009 I began to post via Flickr... well all my pictures posted through blogger got lost. I spent all last week updated ALL those old posts to add the missing pictures. It was fun going back through pictures of the house of what it was like when we first moved in. We've come a LONG way! It's really starting to come together. After our basement project, we only have the kitchen and bathroom remodels then this will be a completely different house from when we first moved in! the only photos I haven't got around to replacing are my honeymoon posts. I did the first day, but there are a LOT of pictures missing. I'll get around to it eventually, hopefully before the baby comes in November. Although maybe that'll be a good project while I'm home with the baby this winter :-) }

Okay so that's what it did look like before we painted it white a year or so ago. We were wanting to get it out before the dumpster came so we could add it to the dumpster. But I thought "I'd like to try and post it to craigslist first instead of just throwing it away" the green in me always wants to be heard. So I did.
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And within 40 minutes I had 20 emails!!! Gesh! We ended up getting rid of it that night. And it left a not so pretty spot... which I expected.
kitchen counter gone

And wall paper AGAIN, which I expected.
wallpaper kitchen

A while ago in THIS post I talked about all the wall paper I had to remove in the kitchen!

Now it looks like:
kitchen after

I'm really happy that it only took two coats to get it matching. (we ALWAYS keep our paint so we have extras for times like this) We plan to get a little round table with three chairs and drop leaf sides so one side can be flat and pushed against the wall while the other side is still rounded. We aren't in any real rush to get it as we have MANY other things on our list to do :-)

Basement Demo

We took all the knotty pine wood paneling off and gave that away on craigslist (gotta love craigslist!) I didn't capture any pictures with the paneling off. There was more white paneling behind it, which was nailed to drywall, that was glued to the cement blocks.

One night while I was working, Kyle had a friend come over to help carry the couch and the treadmill upstairs, since those were two heavy things I couldn't carry (we got rid of all the other workout stuff on craigslist like I mentioned in my earlier post). One thing lead to another and they ended up getting all the demo'ing done that night!

Wait let me back up. So Kyle and Enoch demo'd the end of May. Beginning-mid May we had some contractors out to take a look and begin the process. Kyle had planned to demo it all from the beginning, but then we got to thinking about where were we going to put it and did he really want to do all that work? Well to save $1000 he decided he'd just do it himself (with the help of wonderful friends of course) so we looked up dumpster costs. The contractor we decided to go with said he'd just roll the dumpster cost into our project as he could get a better deal on them anyway. Since we didn't want a huge one to kill the grass during the length of the project (2 months) we decided to just get a 15 yd dumpster for a weekend - and Kyle would load it up with the remains. Then our contractor would get a smaller one that could go in the backyard patch of grass that is just weed anyway to have there during the actual project. This was a good idea and we decided to go with it. So Kyle went ahead and prepared the basement so all that was left was taking all the scraps to the dumpster when it arrived.

So that leaves us to a NEW layout of:
skeleton layout

stairs going down, this is kinda what the basement looked like after the pine paneling was taken down (which I didn't get pictures of)
May11 demo 1

standing at bottom of stairs
May11 demo 2

standing at south wall, next to stairs facing northwest
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standing at south wall next to west wall facing northeast
May11 demo 6

standing in northwest corner looking back to stairs
May11 demo 4

May11 demo 3

standing next to the furnace & laundry shoot facing the west wall
May11 demo 10

So that is where it all sat until this past weekend. The plan was for the dumpster to get dropped off Friday and picked up Monday. The dumpster came Friday:
dumpster drop off

But with all the rain we had the grass was pretty soft, and I was a little worried. He ended up pulling back, just enough until his tires began to hit the sidewalk. He ended up stopping and leaving. I shortly found out via our contractor, that the guy said it wasn't going to work, he was afraid he was going to break the sidewalk. Which was ALRIGHT with me! Because his tires left HUGE treads in the foot-2 foot space he had pulled back in and I didn't want my whole yard to end up like that. So plan B was to just get those bags and fill those and they should be picked up today (monday)
June11 cleanout 1

And here's our basement NOW! (sorry for the blurry-ness, I took these in a hurry)
June11 cleanout 2

June11 cleanout 3

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June11 cleanout 6

June11 cleanout 7

Basement Before

Last October, when the idea came up that we wanted to re-do our basement I got some 'before' pictures. At this time we were mainly using it as our workout space. When we lived in the apartments we had a YMCA membership, when we bought the house we needed to cut back $$ as much as possible and purchased a lot of workout equipment off of craigslist, or got it free. Well last fall we joined LA Fitness because we could work it back into our budget. Since then we've sold all our workout stuff on craigslist again (pretty much for what we bought it at!)

Here is the layout of our before basement:
basement before

Hopefully this can kinda help you guide through these photos, I know it's kinda hard to wrap your head around if you've never physically stood in our basement.

Going downstairs to the basement
oct10 before 1

looking at north wall
oct10 before 3

Standing at bottom of stairs (doorway) looking northwest
oct10 before 6

standing in north west corner looking east
oct10 before 7

looking at south wall
oct10 before 8

I did not put any picture of our laundry room and furnace area as we do not plan to finish that area.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Missouri Trip

We went home a few weekends ago (June 4th-6th) for my High School reunion. Of course I got some fun pictures of the girls.

Here we are Saturday morning, hanging around the house.
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Aliyah was having her first ballet recital that evening! Since I had my HS reunion, we went to the noon dress rehearsal
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Sunday morning we got up and played around the house as well. Brayden wasn't feeling good all weekend, fever and running nose. And I think the girls were starting to catch it at this point. But here they are all playing together, I had to snap it quick because they didn't stay in this spot for long, lol.
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Alyson LOVES her blankie and binkie!
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Sunday evening we went for Andy's ice cream and then to a park with my mom, "Grandma Judy". The kids had a blast!
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I think I took these actually Sunday afternoon. Alyson was so funny, she was laughing and smiling spinning on this and then when Aliyah or Brayden came close she'd yell "LEE-AH GO AWAY!" "NO" then immediately go back to smiling at me, lol.
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This was as we were leaving Monday morning. Alyson came up to me holding these sunglasses to her head so I put them on her. Then she just kept running around with them on, it was SOO funny!
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