Kitchen is finally DONE!

Yeah!! The kitchen is finally completely finished!!! Rob just wasn't getting to the tile like he wanted to. As luck would have it a nice young man asked if he could throw some stuff away in our dumpster when it was here. While he was talking to Rob he mentioned he did tile work and asked if we had any that needed to be done. Heck yah! So Rob hired him. His name is Erik and he did a fantastic job. We had the baseboard tiles to put up still and the backsplash in the kitchen and bathroom upstairs. I'm so so glad we hired him. Very friendly, and did such a great job. There is no way Rob and I could have done this as nice. If anyone around here needs tile work please call us and we will give you his number.

Tomorrow I will try and get before and after photos up.

Our Kitchen

They actually showed up today to install the kitchen!! Yeah!! I cannot wait until it is completely finished. The cupboards were even nicer then I thought, which is always a bonus :) Tomorrow the installers (Steve and Steve, father and son, makes me laugh) will be done with their part of it. We were fortunate enough to stumble upon West Valley Ceramic for our tile. I believe we were working with Dana. She was GREAT! First person in our search for tile to sit there and take the time to help us find the right colors to go with our cabinets. We just kept a door off one of them and brought the whole thing in. She was able to help us find a nice tile for the floor, laminate for the counter and a back splash to help set off the counter. So, two more weeks and all that will be done! We will go talk to someone about carpet tomorrow. Painters come tomorrow also. Only a couple more weeks and it will mostly be over with. Not sure what is up with the siding guy. He showed up yesterday, stayed for a few hours then took off and we haven't seen him since. And of course we are experiencing a little hiccough with our water heater. The water comes out nice and hot for 30 seconds then turns lukewarm. We've turned the knob as high as we dare and still no hot water for longer then 30 secs. After talking with Tom today it seems a part upstairs may have been put in backwards or a switch of some sort left the wrong way and it's diverting the hot or cold water (not sure I get it) the wrong way. The plumber will be here nice and early, 6:30 am tomorrow, to fix it.

Little by Little

So, here are some photos with the sheetrock up and textered. Little by little it's starting to come together! Our painter is coming tonight with the primer so next week everything will be painted :) It's so exciting!

View from the downstairs living room.

That will be the kitchen.

Upstairs family room.

Looking down the hall to the back, the house is not crooked I just can't hold my camera straight :)

Elizabeth and Rob investigating a giant puddle of mud in the new family room.

This morning we went on a three mile hike with what Webelos were in town. Elizabeth and Jonathan got to join us. Seth was in a backpack on Rob's back. The other three boys are Luke, Steven, and Sterling. We had a great time though everyone was pretty tired when it was over. We went up to the Hoyt Arboretum at Washington Park. Thank goodness it was shaded it was pretty hot out there! We have a great group of Webelos, I enjoy working with them.

Catching up

So, thought I'd catch up on things since I've fallen behind. I don't get as much time on my laptop since I don't have wireless at the Gardiner's and if we are here Seth is usually asleep in the room with the laptop. When he's not asleep we are usually at the house working on it or waiting for an inspector.

Life is crazy right now. We do have insulation up at the house. Today they delivered the sheetrock and guys are actually coming tomorrow to start hanging it! We were a bit surprised at that since it is a holiday weekend. Sounds like they will be working the whole weekend. We were told, too, that if things continue along we may be done at the end of the month! Woohoo!!! I can go for that.

Here are pics to give an idea of what the downstairs will look like. Have to imagine the walls are done.

View of our new kitchen space.

Stairs and entry to garage. LOVE IT!!

View from upstairs, they cut the wall down to a 1/2 wall. We want the appearance of open space.

Went to the zoo last week with Grandpa and Uncle Shane. It was a nice day, not too hot, not too cold.

The sea lions are my favorite stop.

They have a dinosaur walk right now at the zoo. The kids loved it!

Yes, it's called the spitter and it really spits water on you. At least, I hope it's water!

The kids always love to stop and feed the lorikeets. Most of the time they can get them to land on them.

These two were just being cute.

The zoo was too much for Seth, he finally conked out near the end.

The kids are taking swim lessons right now. All three are loving it!

And finally today, Jonathan found a frog outside and had to catch it. It was sitting on the waterslide they have out back.

Kitchen Has Been Removed

Today Rob went over to the house and, with the help of my dad, took out the kitchen. He actually started earlier, like 4 am. Seth had woken up this morning around 2:30 am and would not stop screaming. No idea what was wrong but Rob finally took him to the house with the hope that Seth would fall back to sleep in his own crib. Guess he continued to scream until 4:30 so Rob figured he was up he would get started on the kitchen. Actually didn't take the two of them too long to get it done. I don't have access to my before pics, they are on the hard drive at home, but here are some during and after shots.

Here is just a cute photo of Seth. He fell asleep there last night after we had run upstairs really quick to talk to Scott. Poor kid was pretty tired.

Changes Inside Today

Before, corner where the piano was located. The piano is now in the boys' room.

After.

Before, this is where the TV was.


After, Jonathan is standing where the TV used to be. Sorry it is so dark, took three photos and my camera just would not cooperate.

The closets after they took them out. You can use the post there to the right for a landmark. I took a before photo but blogger won't let me load it.

And just so people know, we have officially given in and realized there is no way we can live here while this is going on. As I type this Seth is constantly getting into everything that is out of it's place. So, we discussed things with the Gardiner's (Scott and Sarah-friends from church) and they are willing to let us live in their basement for the next couple of weeks. We are extremely grateful to them for their kindness and generosity. They are too good :) I will have my laptop there so will still receive email and because we have internet phone we can hook our phone up there and actually get our home phone calls, hopefully, we'll see :)

OMSI

Yesterday we went to OMSI to celebrate the official last day of school with Connections. We were really done last week but we hadn't gotten a chance to celebrate it :) They have dinosaurs from China there right now. The kids had a great time looking at all the dinosaurs!

The kids in front of various species. Have no idea what the dinosaurs names are. A lot of them had names related to where they were found in China so I couldn't pronounce them much less remember them :)

Elizabeth and Seth playing with a pteradactil puppet.

Seth touching fossilized dino skin. He loves to touch anything he can get his hands on :)

When we got home 2 1/2 hours later we found the roofers had already gotten about 1/2 the roof shingled! Yeah! It's starting to look like a house again :)

Inside Walls and Trusses

This will someday be the new family room.

This is taken from the family room looking toward the back of the house. The hole on the left will be the stairs the first room on the right is the bathroom and the hall looks strait back into the boys' room. Elizabeth's room is sandwiched between the bathroom and boys' room.

The trusses arrived yesterday. It was fun to watch the crane drop them on top of the house. Unfortunately it was also raining so they called it quits after they got the tarp back on. Today isn't much better, cold and windy but no rain yet. Hopefully they can get them up.

We have Walls!!

The walls went up yesterday! Yeah! Now it looks like something :) They only got 3 walls up, I'm assuming the 4th will go up today. We should have a roof by the end of next week! It's starting to move along pretty fast now. Though Tom told me yesterday that Mark, our foreman, is taking off for about a week and 1/2 so not sure how that will affect things. He's pretty good at driving the others. We like Mark :) I also found out I lose my washer/dryer next week and will not have another hook up for it until the house is pretty much done. I'm not too happy about that one. I can handle most things, I do not handle not having a washer/dryer well. Ask Rob, last time I had to use a public facility with our apartment complex I lost it because other people were so dang rude. I told him I wasn't doing laundry again til he bought me a house. It worked, 2 mos later we were in this place :) End of the month I lose my kitchen too. Ug. Ok it will be worth it, it will be worth it. I HOPE! All I can say is I'm glad it's over the summer. Who wants to cook during the summer anyway?

Week 2

They have all the decking up there now. They have also boxed in the floor joists. I can't get decent pictures because they have to put the tarp up every night and I'm not too hip on going up a ladder while they are up there to get pictures :) I didn't know they had been assembling the wall frames today. They are up there, just waiting to be put up into place. Of course it's going to pour tomorrow so no idea if they are going to be able to put them up. Sigh, it's June and it still feels like late winter around here.

Friday we got to pick out the type of wood and stain color for our cabinets in the kitchen. We decided we will replace all the appliances with stainless steel, will look really nice up against the cabinet color we chose. Plus, we get to keep all the silver hardware we purchased for our kitchen a long time ago! Even better :)

This was the house on Friday.

See how it is all boxed in now?

This is the side of the house. The part sticking out the farthest will at some point be Elizabeth's closet. In order to have a good layout for her room we had to hang the closet out in space :)

Front of the house. The very top pieces of wood up there are the frames of the really long, inside and outside wall.