New Deck

If I haven't mentioned it yet (and you know I have)  we've been VERY busy this summer!  To kick summer off, we decided a new deck was needed.  Hubby and a friend tore down the old gross rotting accident waiting to happen of a  deck.  I think they did an excellent job.  My husband had 2 friends help and his father come for a weekend to finish it off.  Thanks to all who chipped in!!

This is the deck when we first moved in.  It has gotten pretty crap over the 3 years we've been here, as they did not treat it correctly.  

Everything's ready... O and they killed all 5 of my bushes in the process of building this deck!

It's a start!

We're getting there!

Hard at work. This is my FIL and our friend Kaleb

Just standing around I guess.... haha just kidding!

The railing is going up!

Almost finished!

Finished product!  Isn't it beautiful?!?!  I just love it!

Thanks for everyone's hard work that helped us out!

Rain Rain go away!

It was my complete intent on writing a post this morning catching you all up on pregnancy related news, but alas something else came up.  I'll be 17 weeks tomorrow, I can hardly believe it! We had an appointment last week and all went well.  We're scheduled to find out if it's a boy or girl on August 2nd! CAN.NOT.WAIT! We are super excited and these three weeks cannot go by soon enough!

Anyway,  this morning, I woke up to head to a dentist appointment and looked out the back door as I was letting Bear out.  Turns out, we had a creak running through the backyard.  We've had so much rain in the past couple days, it isn't even funny.  We've had about 7 inches of rain int he past two days and are suppose to get another 1-3 this evening  Talk about not fun.  Anyway, we have one corner in our basement that gets a little bit of water in it when it rains very hard.  Well, because of the amount of rain and the quickness in which it came, we got a LOT of water in our basement.  I mean, we probably had an inch in the "unfinished"* portion of our basement but it went further and was much more than we have ever had before.  The drain in our basement wasn't draining because the water table was full and that is also why our backyard had such a large amount standing water in it.  I had to leave to go to my dentist appointment, so I did what I could and hubby had to come home from work for a few hours to clean most of it up (bless his heart!).  I got back home after my appointment and helped clean up, then we cleaned the gutters (yes, in the rain) and finished cleaning the basement as best we could.  What a pain I tell ya! 

So, the basement is drying up, slowly but shirley, however; we are still suppose to get more rain tonight, so I have a feeling we'll be doing some clean up again tomorrow.  :-(

*I say "unfinished"* because it has those sticky tiles in it and now because of the water, they are all coming up and it doesn't really look very good. 

It's been yet another week, so I'm going to have to postpone the belly updates until week 18! so sorry!  Hope you all have a great rest of the week!

Our antique find

Awhile back, I posted that we attended an antique show.  Since hubby was out of town for a week & 1/2, I was unable to post about it, given he had the memory card to our camera!  Today I am here to unveil our find!  We were very excited about it, because we had been searching for a dresser with zero luck. 

Without further ado:

We purchased a dresser with mirror, bed frame w/headboard and foot-board and another dresser. We were quite proud of this find.  It is from the 1920-1930's era.   Please excuse the mess, we were in the middle of rearranging and I didn't have time to pick up! :-)

So, do you like?

Office Transformation

Hubby and I have been off for about 2 weeks now and we have been very lazy unproductive.  On New Years Day, I got the itch to do something.  We have a lot we need to do, but time just seems to get away from us.

Anyway, we bought our home 2.5 years ago and have never touched the office.  It has the same paint and the same window treatments (left by the old owners mind you). We've just had other things to do and we hardly spend any time in there.  Finally, it got to me.  I couldn't stand the hideousness that was this office anymore.

Friday morning I set off to remove the wallpaper boarder.... Yes, wallpaper boarder.  Look at how completely necessary, modern and fun this boarder is....

 Isn't it beautiful??

By the way, the painting above was done by my hubby in high school.  It's very good, I'm quite impressed myself.  When we have a baby, I'm going to try to get him to paint something on the walls for us! :-)

It wasn't that hard removing it, just a spray bottle full of vinegar and water did the trick. 

Look at that paint job! :-)

Ok, so after all of the wallpaper was off, I went to town on the glue.

We then removed the beautiful curtains! Take a look at these babies, they are for sale if any of you would like to purchase them?? No?  What?? haha I kid. I kid.

It's hard to see, I know

Ok, so then it was on to priming.  If you would like to enlist my services to help paint, just let me know.... Being just 5'0" does help when trying to paint, so hubby is stuck doing everything I cannot reach.

Case in point

See how good I am? haha

Then we painted the 1st and 2nd coats

It looks so much better

After all of the painting was finished, we set out to find some window treatments.

Here's what we settled on.

You can't really tell, but they are brown curtains with swirls.  :-)

View from the kitchen

View from the other doorway

And the other side of the room

So, a little over 8 hours of total work and we are very excited with the final product. Sorry, I'm still figuring out how to work my camera correctly, so some of these shots are hard to see with the lighting. 

What do you think?  Do you think it's a big difference from the before shots of the 90 year old grandmothers room? :-) We're pretty proud of it.

We have yet to find things for the walls, but we put up what was there before for the time being.

**Don't forget about my giveaway!  It ends January 11th!

Weekend Recap

This weekend was a short one for me.

Friday:

We headed to Old Navy for their sweater sale!  I scored:

Aren't they fun!?!?  I've never had a red sweater before, so I figured I would try it out.  Best part is, I got both for $32.00!!

After sweater shopping, we headed to Home Depot & Lowes.  Jesse will be spending the entire weekend installing a new window in the basement.

Saturday:

I worked from 11-6 and then stopped by Victoria's Secret & Bath & Bodyworks.

I got my favorite IPEX bras on clearance for $12.99.  They had 3 in my size!  That is a huge deal to be getting bras from VS for so cheap! 

We ended up staying home on Sat night and watching the movie Push.

It was ok, but it was very different.

Sunday:

We were able to sleep in, hit up Hyvee for their breakfast and head back home to do some things around the house.  Jesse finished up the basement window, which looks sooooooooo nice and I powerwashed the front stoop to try and get all of the old paint off of it.  We decided to repaint it, but put sand in it for the winter.  That way it won't be so slippary.

I ran errands and we went for a ride on the motorcycle, grabbed dinner and picked up a movie.

What a great weekend!

This weekend is the BIG weekend!  I'm super excited.  It's our first anniversary and my husband is planning most of it!  Stay tuned for Tuesday's post about how it all went and hopefully some pictures!

Have a wonderful week!

Just as soon as I said it....

So the other day my co-workers and I were talking about having broken bones and all of that jazz. I've never had a broken bone in my life; I've had one sprained ankle and that's it.

UNTIL LAST NIGHT!!!

Recap: Ok, we had an exhaust fan in our bathroom that was VERY loud and by loud I mean that you never wanted to turn it on. Only thing is, it's tied into the light, so if you want the light on, you have to have the fan on...

Hubby thought it would be a QUICK fix to just change out the fan. Boy was he wrong.... It was a lot more work than he had anticipated. Instead of taking about an hour it took about 3! So, as I'm running back and forth trying to get things that he needs while he's in the attic, I manage to stub my toe on one of his tools. (A saws all or however you spell it) anyway, I didn't hit the sharp end but I think I kicked the crap out of the other end! I've stubbed my toe before but nothing has ever felt like this.

I knew it was broken! I had just broken my itty bitty little pinky toe... :-( Not fun. After my dramatic reaction, I got up and it was pretty numb so I couldn't feel it. Well, I woke up this morning and it was swollen and black & blue! So, I am no longer in the "I've never broken a bone club" :-( It's a sad day for the little piggy... I can only wear sandals, so it's a good thing I can wear flip-flops to work!

On a good note, our fan in the bathroom is now quieter :-)

Kitchen update

So, I told you awhile back that we got new countertops and a sink in our kitchen! They were defiantly needed.

This was before we did anything to the kitchen.
Don't mind the mess, we had just moved in.
The walls were a light tan, no valances on the windows and
it's a bit hard to see, but the sink is very small and the countertops
are a light cream color.

This is after we removed the countertops and sink
(P.S. Please don't mind the red hearts on the cabinets below the sink,
those are being removed, it was a test to see if I liked the red color or not... and
I just realized how horrible it probably looks! haha)

This is the new sink and countertops, still kind of hard to see, but I love them!!

And just for good measure, here's hubby doing a great job as usual!

We had to install the sink all by ourselves, which was a challenge. It was the first time we'd ever done a major plumbing job and by WE I mean that hubby did all the work, but I was the runner. I had to go and make about 4-5 different trips to get pipes, hoses, etc...

I'm glad we did it though, the kitchen looks much better... And as you might be able to see in the above picture we painted the walls a light butter cream yellow and put up red valances. I am loving the new look!

Wordfilled Wednesday

Remember when I posed here about wanting to eat healthier and exercise more.... Well I just failed miserably! I had McDonald's breakfast today! Yuck! I haven't had fast food in over 6 months and I just caved! Everyone in the office was ordering and I thought it sounded delicious..... That was, until, I finished and then felt completely guilty for caving under pressure! That delicious sausage burrito was calling my name and I let it!

Good thing I worked out last night and am running 7 miles on Saturday! No more failing, I will not stand by and watch it happen!

Dinner tonight will consist of a salad, nothing more, nothing less :-)

On a side note: last night was by far my worst night in a long time. (I'm starting to sound very negative and I do not like it!) But wait until you hear this!

We just bought a new John Deere lawnmower, loved it! Well silly me was in a hurry while cutting grass and wasn't paying attention and ran over this stupid 2inch tall old steel flag pole..... Needless to say, we will be spending extra on that lawnmower to get it fixed. Hubby took it apart and found where the problem is, I bent some sort of barring...? Anyway, he would need $$ expensive parts to fix it and it would take him quite sometime to fix it. So, we'll be taking it back to my hometown this weekend to get worked on. Hopefully the guy can fix it, otherwise I'm SOL and very upset!

After that fiasco, we needed to tear off the kitchen countertops because new ones are being installed today (yeahh!). Since most countertops are easy to remove with a little over a dozen screws, we decided to wait until 9:30 pm to tackle this project. (Most of you know I am NOT a late night person) Anyway, the poeple before us decided it would be a good idea to use over 100+ nails to NAIL the would countertop to the actual cabinets!!! It took hubby and I 2.5 hours to remove this countertop in pieces. It takes about 1/2 hour to take most countertops off... Needless to say, I was not a happy camper!

On a happier note, we are getting new countertops installed today! I cannot wait. I will take pictures and post them later after everything gets hooked up!

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

It's just another manic Monday....

Wish it was Sunday....

Sorry, I know you guys do not want to hear me sing, and that is a promise! Anyway here's the scoop... By the way, this post has nothing to do with it's title... I just have that song in my head for some reason!


I've realized that through the course of this blog, I have not mentioned much of anything about our home. So, I'm here to update you. I do not have pictures on this computer, but I will add some later tonight.

We moved into our home August 2007.....

We have since done the following:

*First things FIRST!! We tore up the disgusting carpet in the bathroom (really, who does that!!) I refused to walk on it w/o shoes and it was the very first thing for the hubby to do.... (within a week of living there! haha) Then my hubby tiled the floor all by himself! It looks amazing!

*Then, what he would call the most important thing, we turned our basement into a theater room. He is a huge speaker/movie/loud music kind of guy and this was a must have in our home. I have to say, I do enjoy it from time to time. Make a bowl of popcorn and you actually do feel like you are at the theaters, only you get to cover up and recline in your own couch... W/a lovely dovey puppy, named Bear, curled up next to you.

*Tore up the carpet in the living room, entryway, hallway and master bedroom.

*Refinished the beautiful hardwood floors that lay beneath said carpet.

*Redid the entryway

*Hubby completed the new trim in almost every room, we still have a few walls to do though.

*Painted: the master bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. We are currently working on painting the basement and the hallway going downstairs. It was this disgustingly nasty burnt orange color and we are only now (just two days ago) getting to it for some odd reason. I do not have ANY before pictures because we really don't want to remember how nasty it was.

*Installed a new garage door and replaced a wooden door heading out into the garage with a steel door to help with our heating/cooling costs.

*Added sconces in our living room for more light since there was NONE

*Ordered new kitchen counter tops, which have yet to be installed... (It is starting to really tork me off if you cannot already tell)

*And a few other small miscellaneous things.

We always find ourselves wishing we could do more to the house, but not having enough time. We both work full-time jobs, with hubby working 55-60 hours a week for the last 8-10ish weeks.... Needless to say, some home improvement projects have been put on hold. I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. There's so much we could do, but not enough time. We're planning to spend another 2-3 years in this home, so we're trying not to put a ton of money into it that we won't get back out of it.

How about you? Have you guys done any minor/major home improvement projects? It's time consuming, but definitely worth it! So, there you have it. I will try to post some pics later tonight or tomorrow of our home in case anyone is interested, and if you aren't, deal with it! :-)

My Mother In Law

So, as all of you know, I had LASIK just two days ago. My MIL offered to come visit and take care of me while I recuperate from surgery. She came on Thursday afternoon to take me to my appointment, then took me to my follow up on Friday as well. She spent all day Friday with me, lounging around and we watched The Secret Life of Bee's (which was great by the way!!) We had a huge storm Friday morning at 4:00 am and tons of branches fell in our yard and she kindly picked every single one of them up for us and put them in a pile, while it was raining! Then, Saturday, she helped us paint our basement for 5 hours straight!!! Needless to say, it was great to have her company, but it was amazing to have her help with everything as well!! She also, folded a couple loads of laundry, did dishes, helped cook food, and we were able to have a girls night out on Friday for margarita's and Mexican food!

So, THANK YOU to my amazing MOTHER-IN-LAW who drove 4 hours to come help me out. It was so nice of her and I can't say enough great things about her!