Hot water!

Since we moved in on June 24, we have not had any hot water. I have been wondering when it was going to happen, feeling a little blue about it when lo and behold they showed up at OUR HOUSE today! Maybe we will get hot water this week!! Stay tuned...

Drumroll please...

No, not pictures of the house but I thought I would throw in one of a handsome, hardworking husband and a cute, smiling baby! ;)

Here's the kitchen after the tile work was finished...awesome job Dad! Tom helped cut most of the tile so it didn't take as long as it could have!
Another view of the kitchen..........
The bathroom, we didn't have a toilet or sink in there until the week we moved in! Talk about cutting it close!
Living room, before the floor was refinished and before any painting or trim...
The "master" bedroom...another "before" shot
Kira's room, painted and getting closer to being ready...no carpet yet though!
Jim working on some electrical stuff...he rewired the two bedrooms so that we were able to have a center light with ceiling fans. He also helped Tom put together all the cabinets which was a tedious job. I realize now that I uploaded these pics that I have NONE of Dad working and he has done so much of the technical things. Boo to me!
Moving day pics...can you say "CHAOS?"
Goodbye old apartment! We enjoyed making you our home for the past 5 years but it was time to move on...
The new kitchen...that box on the floor is the remaining two kitchen chairs for my little drop leaf table...I spent 2 HOURS putting two chairs together last night and just couldn't do the other two, I was too tired! So I guess I will finish it tonight!
The living room, floor looks nice now with the refinishing done! Notice no curtains or rug yet...curtains I wanted are backordered until Aug 6. Also, nothing hung on the walls but it has still been less than two weeks since we moved in so I got to cut myself a break I guess!
Another view of the kitchen! *Sigh* (of happiness)
The bathroom-sorry all these pics are side views...I am too impatient to rotate and save all of these the right way I suppose!
The master bedroom...I forgot to take a pic of the new carpet for you to see...well, next time I suppose!
And...no pic of Kira's room as she is sleeping at the moment and that is the reason why I have been able to post finally!

We've moved!

Since our last post, we are still in a continuous state of exhaustion but as of Thursday, we have been living in our house!!!! We couldn't have done it without the help of so many family members though.

My Uncle Dan (who is a teacher and thus has his summers off) graciously offered to help us move. Since we were moving on a weekday when most people who would normally help us would be working, we quickly said "yes" before he changed his mind. Bright and early on Thursday morning, we rented a UHaul and starting packing up our things. Uncle Dan showed up at 8:30Am and began helping too when, much to our delight, 6 school maintenance workers showed up to help us load up all the vehicles! Tom has a good relationship with the head of maintenance at the school and he happened to see us moving that morning and sent over his workers to help us load up! With their help, we had everything packed and loaded by 10:15AM! Thanks to the Uhaul, we were able to load everything up and make it down to our house in one trip! So renting that UHaul and spending $80 for it was totally worth it.

When we got there, my wonderful Dad left work to come and help Tom, Uncle Dan and myself move everything in to the house. My Grandmom and Grandpop were already there, Grandpop was working on our plumbing and Grandmom was cleaning my frig! Tom's Mom came over and whisked Kira away so I could focus on getting things in the house without having her under foot. My Mom offered to provide us dinner that night since we were working all day...she made yummy spaghetti! MMMMMM!!! One of my favorite meals!

Now to unpack....

So.TIRED.

You know that whole body tired feeling when you get when you have been going nonstop for a while and all you want to do is crawl under the covers and sleep for a week? Yeah. That's how I feel. I'm sure Tom would concur. 2 more weeks of this. Pray for us! :) Move in date is June 24th...

FYI...bought our cabinets last night! Bathroom was tiled on Tuesday and Kitchen floor is getting tiled tomorrow. That means once that's done, the cabinets will go in and things are really going to start coming together!

Thankfulness

Feeling very tired lately from all the constant work on the house but also extremely thankful....thankful for family that has helped and encouraged us during this time. My Mom, Mother in law, friend Sarah and sis in law have all graciously offered to babysit the little munchkin' so I am able to work on the house...this weekend was no exception. Kristina had Kira on Saturday, and took her to the aquarium with Jason and Grandmom Sherf. Looks like she had a good time! She really is quite a happy girl!

Afterwards, they went to Paneras and gave Kira a loaf of bread to gnaw on...

Here's a video from a couple weeks ago that I just found...

Getting there...

No, we did not fall off the face of the earth...we have just been busy seemingly every single moment of every day! :) We are making progress on the house though and it is exciting to see it coming together! Since making settlement last Tuesday, we have worked on the house almost every night until 10 or 11PM! Poor Tom, he is walking around exhausted and ready for the work to be finished I think. We are very blessed to have family helping us fix up the house, it would be pretty discouraging working on this by ourselves since there really is so much to do and we want to get as much done BEFORE we move in.

Here's what we've done so far...

Tuesday, May 18-Settlement...Tom changed the locks and moved in the gas dryer

Wed.-Tom starts ripping up the carpets in all the rooms!

Thursday-Tom decides to rip up beat up Pergo in kitchen b/c he smells something "funny" in there...

Friday-Tom discovers water stains/damage and extensive mold on the plywood below the pergo and now decides it is necessary to remove all the cabinets and rip up the plywood to get rid of the mold.

Sat-we had a wedding to go to and a bar-b-que later that day so we didn't get to the house this day...

Sunday-Tom, Jim and Dad work on removing the base cabinets, digging 6 foot ditch to fix the plumbing and ripping the T-1-11 off the closets so they can be sheetrocked. While removing the base cabinets, 2 of them essentially fell apart and we discovered mold growing up the back of these cabinets and on the sheetrock in the kitchen as well. So at this point, the decision was made to gut the kitchen to eliminate the mold damage. I also walk through the house with my friend Sherri and picked my paint colors for each room with her help...

Monday-I went to Avalon with my Mom to pick out the tile for the kitchen and bathroom. Found some beautiful tile and also picked out the carpet for the two upstairs bedrooms as well.

Tuesday- I drove over to my parents house at 11AM this day and ate lunch with them...then my Dad went over to the house and started working on the kitchen. I came over as soon as I put Kira down for a nap to help him lay the new plywood flooring and backerboard for the tile work. My Mom babysat Kira for the afternoon so I could help Dad. When Kira woke up, she brought her over to our house and we went to Home Depot and got some gardening essentials. I don't think I will be able to do any gardening until after we move in though...there is still so much work to be done on the house....Tuesday night, Tom was burned out and exhausted so I told him he should just get away and he went surfing for a couple hours and felt refreshed.

Wednesday (last night)- I mowed the lawn for the first time (not bad, took me about 45 min to do the whole lawn!) and worked on "shopvac-ing" the whole bottom floor while Tom and Jim worked on fixing a hump in the kitchen floor and punching out the last of the moldy sheetrock in the kitchen.

Tonight the plan is to work again on the house but then I think Tom may take a break for Friday and Saturday...he is seriously killing himself working all day and then going straight to the house to work more at night and he needs to rest for a few days. We have the majority of the demolition done though so now things are really going to improve soon...

Here is the kitchen before we pulled the plywood up...

Here is the kitchen pretty much gutted now...I need to take more pics tonight when I go back b/c now the new plywood and backerboard is down and it already looks different!

There are two bedrooms next to eachother on the top floor...this one will be Kira's room since it is the smaller of the two...we had to move the stove and dishwasher in there for the time being while we work on the kitchen! ;)

A view of the living room.....

The yucky bathroom...you can see where I started pulling up the sticky tile, but I need the men to remove the cabinet and toilet to get the rest of it up!

Another view of the bathroom...we decided while we are at it, we might as well redo the bathroom along with the kitchen, then the whole top floor will be done and we will do the bottom floor when we get more saved up.

And here's a view of the master bedroom. I wish I had gotten pics of it BEFORE Tom pulled the carpet up...b/c it already looks so much better without the ratty carpet!

One more view of our bedroom...there is no center light, just this lamp that you basically almost hit your head on when you walk in the door so Jim is going to rewire it so there is a center ceiling fan and light in our room (an easy job for an electrician, or so he says!).

This is the view from the kitchen, there is a deck out the back which will be nice for bar-b-ques in the summer!

Well, I just realized I haven't taken any pics of the bottom floor so I need to remember to do that tonight when I go to the house!

Trip to the Beach

Since Tuesday's settlement, things have been a little crazy with trying to get things done at the house so there has not been much downtime....that is why I jumped at the chance to get away with our friends the Gleasons for a trip to the beach with her and her two kids. We made a plan to drive together and leave for the beach at 8:30AM. Amazingly, we were both ready to go and driving away at 8:30AM, anticipating a 50 min drive to Belmar. We were going along at a pretty good rate until we hit 195. Ugh. We finally got to the beach a little after 10 ish after waiting for what seemed like forever in traffic and having to endure many "are we there yet?" questions along with Kira throwing a fit for the last 15 min of our drive. I was seriously at a loss as to what to do with her. She is entering this phase of developing into her own independence but along with that comes opinions about what she does and does not want and she very clearly did NOT want to be in the car for that long and let us know.

I felt bad b/c I knew she was missing her morning nap, I knew she was tired and hungry...but watching her wave her arms and kick her legs in anger for 15 min while Charlotte's two kids just looked at her was disconcerting. Guess I really need to start listening to that CD "Loving Our Kids on Purpose" that Christy gave me a while back. Anyway, as soon as we got to the beach, she was fine...I nursed her and held her while she slept in my arms for a 20 min catnap which seemed like just enough to take the edge off because when she woke up, she was happy and ready to play!

Here she is still all sweaty from her nap in the car...

Charlotte, Meg and Reid Gleason! Reid was unhappy about something, I don't remember what, but that's why he's frowning!

This was Kira's first time in the sand since learning how to crawl...I didn't know how she would react to the feel of the sand so I just kept her on the blanket at first and let her look around at all the scantily clad people! And there were quite a few! Actually, I guess that was more me looking disbelievingly at the number of girls with measly patches of fabric barely covering their body parts...it amazes me that these small patches can be tied together and called a bathing suit! Ha! I suppose I should buy myself a bathing suit, I was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt and was very comfortable the whole time thank you very much!

I finally decided just put her down in the sand and see what she would do....and, surprise, surprise...she loved it right away! She immediately started rolling around in it, took a couple of handfuls of sand, put them in her mouth and munched away like it was the best thing she ever tasted!

Here she is looking at the ocean, she kept trying to crawl into the water...I had to keep picking her up and put her back down away from the water, otherwise I think she would have crawled right in!

Going for the mouth......

What a beautiful day it was!

There will be no stopping this girl

at the beach once she starts walking! She seems to love the beach as much as her mommy and daddy!

After spending a couple hours at the beach, we packed up our stuff and drove back. Thankfully, the drive home was traffic free and so we were home in no time! The kids were exhausted and Reid fell asleep...I kept Kira awake b/c she if she falls asleep in the car, she won't take a nap at all for the rest of the day!