July Update

Lauren and I went to Tallahassee, Florida, for the Fourth of July to visit her sister Mandy and Mandy's boyfriend Rob. We left after Lauren got off work on Wednesday and stayed that night with my cousin Lauren in Atlanta.

We finally got to Tallahassee on Thursday at around 4 after going shopping a little in Atlanta before leaving. It was an interesting drive, the last part of which was on a state highway that seemed very similar to the stretch of Highway 49 in Mississippi between Hattiesburg and the coast.

We ate at a Cuban restaurant on Thursday night, which was delicious, and then drove around Tallahassee, looking at the campuses of Florida State and Florida A&M. Friday, we slept in a little and then went to Wakulla Springs State Park, where we took a boat ride on the Wakulla River. We were hoping we'd get to take a glass-bottom boat ride, but it turned out that the water was too dark in the area, so we just took a regular boat. We did get to a see a pretty wide variety of animal life, including alligators, birds, and even a manatee and her little calf.

After the park, we went to a lighthouse on the coast and saw another alligator there. We went back to Tallahassee and ate at a pizza place called Momo's, which serves pizzas that are enormous (XL), and one slice was enough to fill each of us up, so we just ordered by the slice.

Saturday, we drove down to St. George's Island and had seafood at a beachside restaurant called the Blue Parrot, and then spent the rest of the day on a rather uncrowded stretch of beach in the state park down there. We all got rather burned, but we all enjoyed it thoroughly. We had a pretty hard time finding anything open for dinner after we got back, but at some really good barbeque at a place called Famous Dave's.

We left around noon on Sunday and went over to Jacksonville, under the impression that it would be an hour quicker that way (stupid GPS). We ended up getting into a heavy bit of traffic between the beach and Columbia, SC, and our 8 hour return trip turned into 10 hours. By the time we got home, I'd called our friend Richard to take Connor out again (he stayed at home by himself and was remarkably well behaved) and our neighbor who'd done most of the dog duty was actually at the house after taking Connor for another walk because she'd noticed we weren't home yet. It was a great trip, and we thoroughly enjoyed it (except for the traffic).

Before we left, I was between projects and had time to paint Lauren's closet, pictures of which are below. Not exactly my favorite color, but the room turned out nicely, and most importantly Lauren loves it.

Fortunately, toward the end of last week, I got a call from the company I'd worked for the last couple of months, and I will be starting a new project this afternoon, which hopefully will keep me going for a while, and maybe even lead to other projects to get rolled onto so I don't have a lot of downtime. Lauren's parents will be visiting us for her birthday next weekend, and I'm sure I'll have pictures from that in a couple of weeks.

June Update

I didn't really lie in the last post about not doing anything to the house in the next couple of months, plans just changed. So last week, Lauren and I decided that it might be a good time to try to replace the cracked tiles in our master bathroom (started with the smaller and less visible one so it would be easier and mistakes wouldn't be as obvious to visitors). Last Saturday, we stripped out the tile:Patched the holes in the tile, especially the part behind the door, which had been the main source of cracking in the tile:Removed the toilet, which we then stored in our shower: And finally removed the cracked marble threshhold:

Then once the floor had dried (which took several days because of the thickness of the mortar we had to add, even with our fan we bought for our mold/cabinet project on all day and night) we cut a piece of plastic sheeting in the shape of our floor and cut out a piece of vinyl from Home Depot in a slightly larger piece. We trimmed it once we had laid it in the bathroom, and then attached it to the floor with special tape made for that type of flooring. Then we added some baseboards/moulding and replaced the old, gross A/C vent:Then, we started to reinstall the toilet after I'd painstakingly cleaned it since it was taken apart for the first time in years. Turns out it had a crack, so we got another from Home Depot that was cheap and much smaller, which is a good thing because that bathroom is tiny. But, once we got it home we found out that the base was broken, so we had to take that back and get it replaced. When we installed it, we discovered that we needed to not only level it out with some shims, but because of the gap between the bottom of the toilet and the vinyl, we need to put wood under each side to stabilize the toilet as well. It is working great, so for now it appears we did it correctly:Then, we replaced the threshhold with a wooden one from Home Depot, which I had to cut to fit around the door frame, as well as prime and paint before installing:So we then celebrated by going to a concert last night. The concert was headlined by No Doubt, which is touring again after years of doing their own projects. Before them was a band called Paramore, and another band called The Sounds, which I'd never heard of but I've heard a song of theirs on a commercial. We had a lot of fun until the very end of the night when I started to get a major migraine from a combination of the lights shining in my eyes constantly and the incessant smoking of the people around us. It was at an outdoor venue, so there wasn't any way to prevent people from doing that, unfortunately. Here's us before my head starting killing me:We ended up leaving during a song, and thought we'd left early, but we got to hear the end of the song as we walked to our car, and then the show was over, so we beat the rush and we got to hear the entire concert, which was perfect timing.

As for work, the project that might have started several weeks ago ended up fizzling, which is ok because I got put on another project for the company I'd work with and been cut from the project, except this time I was brought in from the beginning and it was expanded, so I'm on the short list now and worked all last week, even though half the team was asked to stay home the last few days. The company is going to be expanding their presence here, and are actually looking to hire a few people on a permanent basis, so I'm going to do some asking about that. Two of my friends got hired by firms recently, too, so hopefully things are turning around.

Early May Update

Lauren and I haven't been able to do much work to the house the last few weeks because I was working on a project (which was then cut in half and I was on the losing end) and we were busy on weekends.



Last weekend, we went with our friend Richard and several other young adults to work build a shed on a property for Habitat for Humanity. Unfortunately, the economy is affecting them too, so their projects are limited to corporate projects and one house that is being worked on by ministers from a variety of denominations, including our own associate pastor. The shed was actually fairly easy to construct, and I think that we should be able to do one of our own as long as we have the money and manpower to get it finished.



This past weekend, we went on the youth beach retreat and served as counselors. It was a blast, but I got very sunburned and spent all of today in bed recovering. Our friend Kerry and I slept on couches in the living room of the rental house because of a lack of space in bedrooms, so our sleep was short and not really all that restful. However, we all had a lot of fun and a lot of the kids made new friends. The waves were pretty intense, the roughest I've ever seen. I ended up with a sizeable headache Saturday night because I spent the entire day in the water with ten foot waves pounding me in the head because they were breaking at random points in the water. Still, it was some of the best body-surfing I've ever seen and I can't wait to go back.



I still don't have a project to work on, but I'll be going around this week to law firms to see if they're hiring, plus a friend tipped me off to an upcoming project for an actual law firm in Charlotte starting soon, and hopefully I'll get staffed on that. I've heard that the job market is starting to turn around, but I think I'll probably have to wait in line behind the attorneys who were laid off in the last six months. At any rate, things are starting to look better and hopefully that will mean I get to start practicing soon.

MORE WORK!!

Ok, so I kinda lied about doing things around the house. Only now, they're going to be of an external nature, for the most part. The last of the inside stuff, for now, was painting my office, which is now a medium gray. I also have recently purchased a new chair for my room, which is in the first picture. Wednesday, when I came home, Lauren was out in the front yard and told me to come see what she'd done. When I rounded the corner of the house, I saw that she'd hacked up the bushes in the front of the house. All that was left were the trunks and the roots. So, I came home a little early from work yesterday and took out the remaining parts of three bushes, and then took out the last bush Saturday and also took out one of the large shrubs on the side of the house. Meanwhile, Lauren laid some plastic retaining wall and then planted some flowers, with topsoil put around them.

And then, because it would have looked odd to have a coiled up white cord in the flowerbed, we got a pot to put Connor's tether in the front yard. It is a "faux-distressed glaze" black pot (Lauren's words).

Our next project is going to be putting the other flowerbed in (the bushes are gone from there too) and putting some stepping stones down so we can put our trash can on the side of the house instead of behind it.

New House Pics

As promised, I'm posting pictures of the improvements to the house since the last pictures were posted. But first, I'm going to post better pictures of previous improvements. First, we painted the living room beige, with red accent walls opposite the window seat and inside of the window. We'll be adding crown moulding and some moulding around the accent wall to create sharper edge.

The guest room is a light green that is very soothing and looks much better in person than in pictures. We're using the closet doors as a headboard for the bed. Lauren also painted the inside of the closet a darker shade of green and we made some shelves to go in there to display her dolls from around the world.

I painted the master bedroom a light blue (not quite Carolina blue, but close). We're going to put some fabric behind the bed as a space-definer at some point.

I also painted the master bathroom the same beige as the living room and scraped all the junk off the tiles in the shower and on the floor. The room is so much better now that Lauren actually uses it!For several months (since before we moved) Lauren has had her eye on a certain counter-height table and chairs at Garden Ridge (a discount home decor superstore). I've been fighting it until recently because I didn't feel we needed a new table. We finally decided to get one last Friday that we'd seen at Ikea on our previous trip. We got it home and realized that it was too brown for the room (the accents are all black). We returned it on Saturday and went to Garden Ridge, where we found out the other table was on sale for almost 50% off! Lauren was so excited, she actually let me get a new glider/recliner/swivel chair and ottoman for my office/guy room. Even including that, we ended up saving over $200 by buying at Garden Ridge. The table looks great in the room, although we've only used it once or twice since we bought it.

My latest project was to touchup the black outside doors and then paint the door frames white, rather than the ugly brown/maroon color that they used to be. The all look much better, but the front door looks especially good. We're eventually going to get storm doors for all of the doors except that one, so I took particular care in redoing that one. This will probably be the last time for a while that home improvement pictures get posted, as I will be starting a new project on Monday, which is slated to last between a month and two months. The company intends to have a permanent, constant presence in Charlotte, which will hopefully mean I'll be consistently employed. That would mean a much slower home improvement process, but given where we are, we can afford to stop or slow down for a bit.

Spring has Sprung

It has been a while since the last post, primarily because the blog has become more of an update on the house rather than on how things are going for us, and we haven't taken many pictures of the house recently. I am currently between projects, and have been for over a week, so there has been some progress, which will be photographed and posted soon enough. A new company has decided to move a lot of its business to Charlotte, and I'm apparently near the top of their list. They'll be starting a new project in the coming weeks, which is supposed to last a couple of months at most, but it is similar to my last big project which was supposed to last a month and lasted 5. Hopefully, this one will be similar, but the start has been delayed for a week or so. Hopefully, I'll be working again on Monday.

Lauren is doing well and still enjoying her job. She's got evaluations coming up soon, so I think she's a little bit concerned about that, solely because she doesn't know when its going to happen. She's obviously going to get great reviews, so that certainly isn't the reason. She has been bugging me to get a new table and chairs for the kitchen for the past few months, because our old table didn't match the decor. I finally broke down and we got one this past weekend. We originally got one that we saw at the new Ikea, but we ended up finding out that it wasn't dark enough for our dining area, so we took it back and got the one at Garden Ridge. We ended up saving $300 by doing that and the table looks great. I'll include that with the pictures.

Connor is doing well also, and has fallen back into his old habits of sleeping in until around noon when I'm not working. We've started saying that he's a teenager in a tiny dog's body because of that and his insistence that he do things his way rather than ours. He's still a little baby about some things. I made the mistake of hammering some nails back into the wood on our deck while he was on it. The shaking freaked him out and now he refuses to go out onto it. That is good in a way because he won't run away out that door, but its annoying if we're sitting on the deck on a nice day and he starts whimpering at the door.

Spring has been fairly good so far. We've had some very nice weather that has allowed us to keep the windows open for several days at a time. We started to clear out the back yard a little, but I ended up getting poison ivy and bug bites, so we stopped that for a little bit. We need a chainsaw badly. Other than that, we're just trying to make the house look better, bit-by-bit. It's a process, but we're making good progress. I'll include pictures of the newest changes soon.

House Update, February 10

Lauren and I finally painted the guest room, and we've decided to use one of the closet doors as a headboard. Lauren found the idea online. She also got pillows that match the wall color, and the room has turned out really well. We're going to turn the other door into a desk in the closet, and then put some shelves in so that Lauren can put her "dolls of the world" on there for display.

We also painted the living room. Because everything in there has a dark red color on it, we decided to go with a dark red accent wall and beige for the other three walls. We're going to put some moulding in the corners to give cleaner lines, and eventually get some for the ceiling too.

We also painted the walls of the window seat in the living room to match. Eventually we'll get a cushion for the seat, probably the same red.

We also painted our bedroom, and this past weekend the master bath, but we need to get the floor replaced in there and we may do that soon, so I'm going to hold off on pictures.

Snow Day!!

Last night we got snow, and because of the resulting ice, I wasn't able to go to work today (the office was closed), so I stayed home. Unfortunately, Lauren wasn't so lucky and had a full day of work. (that's her car leaving the house on the left)

We're supposed to get even more ice tonight because all of the melted snow from today will ice over in the 15 degree temperatures. Lauren's hoping she gets to go in late because of that. At any rate, the pictures below are of the snow, including one of Connor. Its amazing how much better you can see him when there's a white backdrop. Problem was that there was very little light. He actually has a lot of snow on his mouth, but you can't see it even if you zoom in.

I thought this last picture was interesting. That's actually our backyard, although it looks more like I stopped on the side of a country road to me.

Lauren's Hair and more Home Improvement

So first things first, Lauren got her hair cut and colored. I knew shew as getting something done, but I didn't think she'd change it this much. Fortunately, it looks GREAT!

On to home repair. I finally was able to repair our master bathroom shower, with the help of Lauren's dad. We had to go to a shop in the middle of a bad part of town, in the back of a building, underneath a "performance" auto shop. It was an interesting store, and they seemed to have everything. The shower doesn't leak now, though there are other things that need repair later on.

As for the painting, we finally finished the painting of the hall bathroom. It is the same color as the half-bath downstairs, but its bigger, so the color looks better, I think. We still need to replace the tile on the floor, but the bathroom looks so much better than it used to.

We also painted both the front hallway and the hall/stairway that goes up to the top floor. We went with a beige color called "Toasted Cashew" which looked a little pink to me at first, but after painting the stairs, it looks more beige.

I think our next project is going to be our bedroom. To this point we've been painting common areas so we could have friends over if we wanted, and now we're ready to do something painting-wise for ourselves.