Painting adventures

So we haven't posted in awhile because not much has changed.  Last week was the indy 500 and Frank really wanted to watch that, so he was here briefly on Saturday and then a couple hours on Sunday and then he didn't come this weekend as his wife wanted him to finally finish installing the floor in their mudroom.  So the bathroom looks roughly like it did before.  Frank did put mud on the walls and texture and then my mom came and painted primer and a coat of color.  When I bought the paint color I thought for sure it was going to be too light.  My mom was convinced it would be too light too, but as she painted she quickly realized it was going to turn out to be too dark. 

 

It was much more blue than we wanted.  The accent tile is gray with hints of blue in it.  As the paint dried it turned out to be about two shades darker than we wanted.  So we went back to the paint deck and tried again.  This time we're going more gray. 

We picked these three samples to experiment with.  The top is a gray that turns blue, the middle is a gray that turns purpleish and the last is a gray that turns brown.

 

I like this one the best.

 

This one is my mom's favorite.

I think we're going with my favorite and hoping it turns out okay. 

Peter also spent Saturday on a really tall ladder painting our living room ceiling and then cutting in on the walls.  We also made our usual stop to Home Depot to buy more supplies for next weekend.  If all goes according to plan now...the bathroom will look a bit closer to done by the end of next weekend.

Valentines Day and House Progress

As tradition in my house growing up we had giant Valentine cookies.  I didn't want to make giant cookies, so I made smaller bite sized cookies.  Connor had a great time helping.

We raided my Valentines from school to find candies to add to the cookies.  I had bought the cinnamon pieces ahead of time, but thought we had sprinkles at home as well...we didn't.

Peter made his cookies look like they had the chicken pox.  Connor thought that was a good idea, so he decorated his cookies quite similar.

He also had a great time sampling the frosting.

This weekend we worked on the house as usual.  We made several trips to Home Depot and a trip to Lowes to pick up our bathroom vanity that finally came in.  Then today we worked on painting the downstairs.  I painted as far as I could reach in the living room while Peter and Connor made a trip to Home Depot for more supplies.  When they came home, I was nearly done with the room.  Peter used a super extended pole to reach all the high areas.  When nap time rolled around someone refused to stay in bed.  He crashed on the floor around 4...it's hard work fixing up our house.

This gray room will be Connor's room.  We finished removing the baseboards and tack strips today.  The wall has a few holes that need to be patched up and then Frank will re-texture it so we can paint it.  It will have a jungle/safari theme to it.

This is the closet area.  The previous owners removed two of the closets in the upstairs rooms.  We will put them back in.  The floor will also be carpeted.

This will be the nursery-minus the toilet of course.  It will generally look like it did in the condo.

Here's the closet space.  We'll repaint and add more shelves and baskets to hold stuff.

Here's the pergo that we started ripping up.  The upstairs will be all carpet.

Here's how the bathroom is coming along.  Frank is going to come by sometime this week and texture the walls.  Then we will have until Friday night to get primer and two coats of color on the walls.  Since the vanity is here, it will be installed on Saturday as well as the flooring I think.  Once it is installed we have to call our granite people and have them install the counter top.  Then the back splash can be installed and the bathroom will nearly be done.....aaahh I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Here's more of the pergo being removed.

These next three pictures are the living room.  They were taken at the same time of the day, yet all three look quite different.  The color is Toasted Cashew from Behr.

Here's Peter painting the downstairs hallway.  My mom painted the closet Cottage White over the weekend.  The walls are Toasted Cashew, which when done will really make the closet stand out.

We thought about having a painting party, then realized we only have two rollers.  So we did it ourselves today as we had the day off work and were very surprised at how fast we got the first coat done.

Our little gummy bear

We interrupt our weekly updates on the house to bring exciting news...

We are expecting a gummy bear!

Our little critter is affectionately being called a gummy bear as it resembles one...it has a head, a body and four nubs.  This picture was taken at 11 1/2 weeks.  As of yesterday I am 13 weeks pregnant.  Our little critter is due on August 19th.

Other exciting news:  I don't have gestational diabetes yet!  I failed the 1 hour test, but I passed the three hour test...woohoo!  Unfortunately, I get to look forward to taking the test each month until I fail.  But until then I'm thoroughly enjoying treats, just limiting the amount so as to not over do it.  Though I have stocked up on the all natural peanut butter, sugar free jam, sugar free pudding/jell-o and splenda.  For after all it's not a matter of if I'll get it, it's a matter of when I'll get it.

So how am I feeling?  Tired, hungry, tired, did I mention tired?  Yes I like naps.  They're a bit of a luxury during the week.  Often times I take a 20 minute power nap while Peter cleans up the dinner dishes.  Or if he's reading Connor a bedtime story, I often cuddle up under the blankets of the bed and am soon out.

Any differences from the first pregnancy?  I'm not nearly as sick.  With Connor I threw up nearly every night.  So far with this one I have thrown up twice.

Kind of on the weird side....I told Peter that I could feel it wiggling at 6 weeks.  He told me it was all psychological...yeah he basically called me crazy.  I told him I was not crazy and I knew what I was feeling.  He brushed it off saying it wasn't possible.  I went to my appointment and the nurse practitioner totally believed me.  Since I'm skinny she says it is very realistic that I am feeling it move.  HA take that Peter!  Well our little gummy bear is particularly active in the evening after I lay down so I had Peter feel my stomach the other day and he felt it move too! 

You can go wild

Those are the words Peter said to me while I was at Andersen's yesterday.  I called and asked if I should pick up a blueberry bush or some ollalieberries.  His reply, "you can go wild."  I even warned him that I had his car and his trunk could hold a lot more than my trunk.  So yes I had fun at Andersen's yesterday.

I ventured out looking for a dwarf apricot tree.  I didn't find one there, but I found one that could be pruned so it only got 10 feet tall at maturity and it only needed 100 hours of temperature under 45 degrees.  It sounded perfect so I bought it.  It was also the last one with such a small chill hour requirement.  While looking through the rest of the trees the only dwarf trees I found were plum, nectarine and peach varieties that all had a chill requirement of about 400 hours.  Our area gets about 300 hours, so these varieties wouldn't work well for us.  On another side of the nursery I ran into the bare root berries.  Last time we were here we bought thornless boysenberry plants.   I looked again and they were all sold out...bummer.  You can't buy boysenberries in the stores here, so I hope the three plants I bought last time produce enough to satisfy our want for boysenberries this year.  Instead I picked up two ollalieberries and a blueberry plant.  Pleased with what I had I headed for the check out.  To my surprise I had hedge points on my account, so I saved $22 on my trip.  I was well pleased!

Back at home I showed Peter the loot.  He has no idea where we'll put a big apricot tree, technically I don't really know either, but I'll enjoy the harvest.  I suggested it go on the side of the house, so we'll see.
Here are some garden pictures:

Connor has been busy plucking all of the ripe strawberries

 Helping water the blueberry bush

 Look at all of our peas!

Our beans haven't done terribly well this season.  

Not sure what the problem is, though we have plucked a few.

Saturday Peter spent much of the day running errands and fixing the front walkway.  I played in the dirt and removed most of the grass and roots in the front yard.  I am eager to get the front yard looking nice.  Frank and his son Randy came over and worked on the bathroom.  They installed some of the drywall, the tub and a few other things.  Frank also helped Peter with the front walkway.

Peter's masterpiece

Electrical fun

So this weekend was electrical weekend at our house.  Frank spent 1 1/2 days in our attic cleaning up a crazy mess of electrical wires.  At one point on Saturday he comes downstairs to tell us there was a previous fire in the bathroom and he wants to show us.  He shows us an outlet that he has removed.  Shows us the first sign of electrical fires is a yellowing mark, then he showed us the blackened wires...lovely!  Then he starts spouting out electrical terms while I pretended to understand.  "These people had two 110's feeding into a 220, what idiot would do that?  You're just asking for trouble there."  While trying to make sense out of all the wires, he drew a map of what it should look like on our subfloor, then he just ripped everything out and put in everything new.  He also laughed about the wiring in the upstairs hall.  So there's a switch on each end of the hall that turns both hall lights on.  Usually you only need 3 wires to connect to the switch plates.  This house had 15 wires just to turn on two hall lights.

While Frank was busy in the attic, Peter and my mom started painting primer on the living room walls, a portion around the window and sliding glass door in our bedroom and a linen/game closet.  Peter also put primer on the upstairs hall.  We might just get some color on the walls next weekend.

Frank also finished installing the subfloor in the bathroom, added two can lights and the exhaust fan.  He turned it on to help get rid of the paint fumes he was breathing in.  He was surprised at how quiet it was.  He said we got a really good one.  Our house also has a whole house fan upstairs.  The motor was burnt out, so he replaced it and got it in tip top working order.  He said come summer we will be glad to have that working since the house doesn't have AC. 

Bathroom update

So Connor's latest favorite thing to do is to take plastic bags and put one toy in each and strew them on the floor.  He's also big into photography and took this picture himself.

This weekend Frank and his son came over to work on the bathroom again.  They were going to work on the stucco on the house, but their plans changed as Frank was determined to figure a way to reroute that silver water heater exhaust pipe.  Well since Frank is Frank, he figured it out and the pipe is now gone.  No more small wall there.  He also fixed a major hole in the garage ceiling where the pipe originally went through.

They also fixed the floor joist that was badly damaged and replaced the floor in the bathroom and part in the bedroom.  I think more flooring will be replaced as there are at least 3-4 more big planks of plywood in our garage.

While they were working somehow the light on the front of our house turned on for the first time.  We thought there was no power to that light, and it all of a sudden was on Saturday afternoon.  Well as luck would have it, no one knows how it turned on and by Sunday evening/afternoon it was off.

Next weekend Frank plans on spending a lot of time on the electrical mess in the house.  The bathroom had wires going everywhere.  In our house inspection the inspectors noted that there were wires in the attic that weren't properly contained. So Frank is going to be fixing all the electrical stuff.

Bye Bye Bathroom

So this weekend's adventures involved finishing up the downstairs texture on the walls.  All downstairs walls are now ready for primer and then paint.  So we decided the next order of business was to tackle the upstairs bathroom and see how much damage was really there.  From what I understand the toilet had a major leak and rotted all of the sub floor in the bathroom and some of it in the adjoining bedroom and the hallway.  One of the floor joists is also badly damaged and needs to be replaced.  The shop talk at one point was about using supports in the garage to hold up the wall which would hold up the roof...lovely don't you think?  The other main order of business was did we or did we not want to install a second bathroom upstairs.  Our current situation is we have a 5 bedroom, 2 bath house.  The master bedroom is located downstairs, but while I have small children I want to sleep on the same level as them.  So there's a large bonus room upstairs with a walk in closet that could easily be the master bedroom.  Then there's the bathroom that everyone would share and then down the hall are three more bedrooms.  So option #1 we leave everything as it is.  Option #2 we leave everything roughly the same except add a door from the master upstairs to the bathroom so we don't have to walk in the hall to get in.  Though we still share the bathroom with the kids.  And when the kids are teenagers we can move back downstairs and they can have the upstairs bathroom to themselves and the downstairs one will be shared with guests.  Option #3 we take out roughly half of a bedroom to add another small bathroom that will back up to current bathroom.  Current bathroom will then become the master suite.  Smaller room would then only be good for a very small office.  After discussing the topic and then asking the neighbors across the street who have the same floor plan and have three older children what they did we came to the conclusion to go with option #2.

Here's various stages of bathroom gutting.  Above: the shower portion and walls have been removed.
Lower: two sink vanities are missing.

This is the adjoining room.  The dark area at the top is the damaged sub floor, actually most of the floor in that room is damaged, it's not showing up well in the picture.

All the fixtures are missing and a bit of drywall too.

We were asked if we wanted to save the tub....Hahaha do you really think I wanted to save that?!  YUCK!  Besides falling apart it was just downright disgusting. 

So that's where we are at. 

On a funny side:  While Frank was making us a list of things we need to go buy for next weekend he said to buy a fart fan.  We were like a what?  So he repeated himself..."a fart fan, you know for the bathroom."   Man he had us rolling with laughter.  We've always called them exhaust fans.  Apparently we didn't know the proper lingo.

Hallelujah!

After weeks of extremely cold temperatures and frost warning for a few nights, and a bit of complaining, this beauty was ordered and installed today!

AAAAHHHH our freezing cold house is WARM!  Have we mentioned how much we love Frank?  He got the number of a heating guy from work, called them up and ordered us a furnace this morning.  He said we wouldn't be able to find a cheaper price.  It was delivered around noon and installed by 4:30.  Oh I love the sound of heat.  I got so excited when I heard it fire up.  Here's a picture of the thermostat.  It was 65 degrees in the house.  Now I know that's really nothing to complain about-today is supposed to be the warmest day of the week after all.  But here I am sitting on the couch, with a sweatshirt on and I'm comfortable.  On any given day without the furnace, I would be in a sweatshirt and jacket with three big blankets on and still freezing.  Then going to bed I would have big ski-like pants on, fuzzy socks, sweatshirt with hood on underneath big heavy duty comforter that contains the summer comforter and the winter comforter combined so an eskimo would be comfortable...and there I'd stay until morning where I would make a mad dash to a warm shower and then dread getting out.

Yes I love today! We are finally warm at night.

As for other house news.  Frank came over yesterday and I called my dad up and they prepped the living room and upstairs hallway for texture all day long.   Then this morning at 8am Frank showed up with another guy, my dad and Peter were here and they finished taping and putting up plastic and then they sprayed texture all over the living room and the upstairs hallway.  In a couple of days we will be ready to paint! 

Thursday prepping the windows, even Connor helped.

 

Connor really wanted to use the tape too.  Here's a video of Frank teaching Connor to tape the ladder.  He was told he may only tape the ladder so that he wouldn't pull paint off of the walls or mess anything else up.  He was a good listener and taped the ladder well.  (The radio was on in the same room.)

 Friday's Fun

 

 While the guys were busy inside the house.  Connor and I kept busy in the back yard.

Freezing and Christmas Adventures

We lived with this gap under our front door for about a week.  Frank and Peter removed all of the mortar from under the tiles and cleaned up the floor which involved removing the threshold for the front door.  Frank was then out of town for a week on a business trip.  We shoved towels under the front door to try to stay a little warmer.  It was really cold that week!  Frank has since returned and fixed the threshold and we are much warmer at night.  Still cold, but not freezing anymore.  A new furnace is on our priority list (current one is tagged by SDG&E DO NOT USE!).

While Frank and Peter were cleaning up the mortar mess, they taped off the family room but forgot to tape off the stairs and close all the upstairs doors.  This is how thick the dust was on the stairs.  There's a thinner layer on everything in all of the rooms upstairs as well.

Empty room

We got reprimanded by our...err ahem I mean my genius way of plugging in all of the Christmas lights.  I apparently did a major no no which could've resulted in a house fire.  Frank says this is a common mistake amongst all people.  I had three extension cords connected to a three outlet thingy that was then connected to another extension cord and then plugged into a timer into the wall.  I thought it was a good idea.  Frank explained why it was not.  He then sent me to Home Depot with a list of supplies and he would fix it.  He installed two of these four plug outlet boxes.  This one under one of the eaves, and the second in the garage.  Then he used heavy duty extension cords and wired them together and somehow they are all on the same timer which is located in a different outlet.  I don't know how he did it, but it works wonderfully!  They are specifically designed to be used for Christmas lights so we won't have any problems hanging them up next year.

Christmas Eve Connor enjoyed eating colored popcorn.  We spent the holidays amongst the families as usual.  We spent most of Christmas Eve shopping and spending time with the O's.  We also opened all of our presents from the O's then as well.  Everyone received jammies amongst other items.

We also did our traditional drive by of the luminaries in Westwood.  There's something so neat about seeing streets lined with luminaries.  When we got home it was bedtime and then Santa came.  At 10:30 there was the sounds of power tools in our family room.  The instructions were clearly misleading, there was no way someone with a regular screwdriver could puncture plastic enough to drill screws in.  It was a late night followed by an early morning.

 Connor enjoyed cooking breakfast

Gotta love the hairdo.

 So this video is two videos in one.  I don't know how I did it, but when you get to the end of the first video, then the second one starts.  The first is of Connor being let out of the room to see what Santa brought him.  The second is him playing with the kitchen.


After opening the kitchen at our house we went to my parents' house to see the stockings and the rest of the kids gifts.  Connor got a rocking horse from us.

A tricycle from his great aunt and uncle.

And a toolbox from grandma and grandpa. 

We also enjoyed blowing bubbles in the front yard.

After brunch we drove to Chris and Mary's and enjoyed some fun with them.   We had dinner there and arrived home late.

Today we went to my parents' again.  Abbie and Rafe arrived and we opened the rest of the presents and had breakfast.  We hung out and enjoyed building a 3D puzzle, playing the Logo game and just chatting.