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.