Sooo.... it's been a while.

It's been a long, long time since I updated with our renovation progress because, well, there hasn't really been progress until recently. I think we may have had the winter blues because we really didn't have the motivation to do anything to the house, and crazy work schedules had us exhausted at the end of the week. Spring is here though, and we're trying to kick things back into gear!

As of the 11th we survived our first year of home ownership!

We haven't really been doing anything that is interesting to photograph, but this week I'll add pictures of the work we're doing on the front/side yard and backyard.

For now I have to share two amazing additions to our home, the fridge and elliptical!

We have been saving for a nice, full size fridge for a long time, and we have been using a dorm size fridge in the meantime (which means a full year, I can't believe we made it that long!). Thanks to the help of friends and family through birthday and Christmas gifts we reached our goal and were ready to purchase the fridge of our dreams. We waited and waited and finally the time was right this weekend - the refrigerator we had picked out and longed for was 20% off! We rushed to the store and ordered it, and they were able to deliver it the very next day (at 7:30 am, of course!).
Of course we had to take pictures with it, and yes, we are extremely huge dorks :)

Although this is nowhere near as exciting as the new fridge, I'm pretty psyched about the elliptical we purchased yesterday too! We are both trying to eat healthy and exercise more, and although we've had a stationary bike for a few years we have been on the lookout for an elliptical to add more variety and more of an all body workout (both are doctor recommended too because they're easy on my knees and will actually help strengthen them).

I had been on the lookout on Craigslist for a used, but in good condition, elliptical for a few months but everything was either ancient, broken, or too expensive and when something perfect was posted it was snatched up in no time. On Saturday evening I found the perfect elliptical - newer model, hardly used, great price, and not too far from our house. Seemed to good to be true so I sent and email and crossed my fingers. When I didn't get a reply back by late Sunday morning I figured someone had beat me to it, again. Right before I left for work the phone rang and the buyer wanted to know if we were still interested. Woohoo! After work I rushed home and we headed a few miles down the road to check out the too good to be true elliptical. The buyer bought it last year and hardly used it, and now she is moving to a smaller place so she can't take it with her. It is in perfect condition and I already worked out on it last night!

Talk about a home grown meal!

Tonight for dinner we had fish which was seasoned with a lemon from our lemon tree and rosemary from the backyard. As a side we had sweet potatoes which we planted shortly after we moved in, and I am currently eating a persimmon from our tree for dessert. All of it was delicious and it is a great feeling to know that we (and I mean we, I actually helped with this meal, shocking as it may be!) pulled it together quickly using almost all extremely local ingredients!

And because I was too hungry to take a picture of our awesome meal and a post is not a post without one here is a picture of James and I at Disneyland 3 years ago that I found today:

Small kitchen update

We've been working on the kitchen in little bits at a time. Here is the recent progress:

The cabinets above the stove are fully primed and painted! The space in the middle that's not painted will not have a functioning door on it so we're not bothering painting the inside. The wall color above is still the old color so you can't see the complete change yet.



We had two spare cabinet doors from the cabinet we removed that used to be above the refrigerator so we're testing to see what we'd like the door style to be. Here we've sanded and we're filling in the indentation to see what it will look like as a smooth cabinet with no design.



Primer is making its way around the kitchen!



James started pulling up the ugly brown linoleum while I was in DC and we're working on finishing that up this week. They're both really ugly, but at least the linoleum underneath is lighter. Once we get it all uncovered and do a deep clean we'll decide if it will do until the big remodel or if we want to cover it up with something cheap and less ugly.



And here is our cool free Craigslist find:



We got two of them and we're planning on putting one in the doorway between the kitchen and laundry room and we'll probably store the other on in the garage until we find a use for it.

Kepler hopes that everyone had a happy and safe Halloween

Working on the porch

Working on the porch was probably not the best idea because just a few weeks later the rain started and we had uncovered a lot that we weren't expecting. The porch is going to be a bigger project than we thought!

There are (were) three columns on the porch, all covered in tile. Two were round and one was square. We hoped that, for some weird reason, they boxed up the third round column and that underneath the tile and inside the square column we'd find a third round one. We were wrong. Inside the square column was... nothing!







So, we knocked that down and put support up in its place, discovering some damaged wood.







We also discovered that the roof of the porch is slanted and that the round column closest to the house wasn't bearing any weight, so we're going to fix the slant, even everything out, and have there only be two round columns.



And here we are!

Kitchen Updates

Here are the kitchen updates!  

First, we removed all of the knobs from the cabinets

With the cabinets above the stove we had a slight problem because they extended to the wall t0 the left creating a little fridge sized space.  Unfortunately , it doesn't really fit a normal sized fridge so it had to go:

Then we sanded/filled holes (no pictures of that, unfortunately) and applied primer!  We need to primer and paint the walls behind the cabinets before we paint the cabinets, but here's what it looks like so far!

Rags says Have a Happy Monday!

Bathroom Updates

I apologize (once again) for my lack of blog posts and I'd like to personally apologize to Kendall as she has be waiting semi-patiently for updates for quite a bit of time now :)

We've been slowly tearing apart the bathroom and working on the kitchen cabinets simultaneously and here's the progress!

First, the bathroom...

I went out for dinner with my girlfriends and I came back to find that James tore down all of the tile in the shower and made some interesting discoveries, as you can see below:

(lovely, isn't it?)

And keeping the shower functional is the plastic sheeting and our makeshift shower curtain fashioned out of copper piping and a $9.99 Target college collection shower curtain/ring set. Hey, it works!

Here is the other big change in the bathroom - we tore down the closet from the second bedroom that butted into the bathroom (creating the weird skinny hallway when you first open the bathroom door)!

Before:

After!

Tucker in the attic

I've been really slacking with the posts lately, but that's mostly because we haven't been doing too much.  It's been really, really hot so we've basically been sitting around in front of the fan and then laying out in the hammock once it's cooler in the evenings.

James was sweeping up some of the old insulation in the attic and a very curious Tucker and Kitten made their way up the ladder after him!  Although James didn't take any pictures in the attic, I made sure to take some of Tucker once he made his way back down.

This is what he looked like after his first trip up into the attic:

(all of his paws are normally completely white)

And this is what he looked like after he went up a second time:

Obviously, it's pretty dirty up there!  He didn't even seem to realize that he had cobwebs and dirt hanging from his face until I stopped taking pictures and helped him out.  He's quite the adventurer!

We pushed through the crowds at Ikea today and brought home a new bed frame which I'm currently in the process of putting together.  When we moved here we left behind our (very old) mattress, box spring, and frame and purchased a new mattress but no frame.  We finally got around to picking out a new bed frame today and I'm very excited!  After almost five months of having the mattress on the floor I think we'll sleep very well tonight.

Here it is, almost completely assembled:

Hope everyone is enjoying the three day weekend!