June 10th

Hello! So a couple of the bloggers that I read regularly came back from vacation last week and apologized for being absent... for a week. I looked at my blog and I haven't posted anything since April 16 and I really hadn't said anything from well before that. So, I think that an apology is due?

Sorry!

I do have excuses. Right now I'm actually dictating this blog post to my computer, because I have a broken collarbone and can’t type. Long story short, Matt and I had a miscommunication about which direction we were going to go our bikes last Saturday and we collided. It was nobody’s fault, but he was definitely wrong.

Long story: Matt and I was out of Bethany Beach last weekend on a wonderful family vacation. Along with his brother and sister we conspired to kidnap his mother and father to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Matt and I snuck out the house before everybody was up on Saturday morning and went on a bike ride. We were less a mile from the rental and decided to take a shortcut. That was when we had the miscommunication and collided. I didn’t know how bad it was until a little bit after accident when I couldn’t lift my arm. The good news is, because Matt was wrong, or should I say Matt was mostly wrong, or should I say that Matt was more wrong than me, he has been at my service since we’ve gotten home.

I know I have a lot of catching up to do with house renovations. We've been busy working around the house and getting a lot of projects done. We've reroofed, painted, sketched additions, made and hung curtains, and more-we've done a lot [all with full-time jobs and a jam-packed social calendar].

We can chat about all that in another blog post. Right now I want to talk about our weekend at the beach.

The trip to the beach was really exciting, because we didn't tell that parent what exactly we were going to do. We told them about two months ago to make sure they took two days off from work, but we didn’t tell them why and never spoke of it again. Then Matt’s sister, Melanie, and brother-in-law, Rich, spent a couple weeks prepping Matt’s parents for the trip (telling them what to bring) and trying to trick them into thinking they were going places that they weren’t really going. We didn’t say anything and I hope that we can give anything away without knowing. I know they were trying to be sneaky and get information out of his other brother, but they weren’t sneaky enough.

After weeks of planning (and plotting), Melanie and Rich kidnapped them and headed out on Thursday. They were guessing the whole way where they were going. They were pretty surprised when they turned south, because they thought that they might be going up to Lake Placid or Canada. Eventually, they thought they were coming to our house, because they have to drive by our exit on the Interstate to get to Bethany Beach, but they kept driving and I think that’s when they knew they were going to the beach.

Along the way, Matt and I spotted them on the road and pulled up next to them gave a big smile and waved. Matt’s mom looked incredibly surprised and then everybody started laughing. At that point, I think they knew we were in on it.

We rented a house about a third of a mile from Bethany boardwalk, it was just perfect and I would be very tempted to rent it again. That night, once we unpacked the cars, we had a nice dinner, chatted for a while, and went down to the ocean to dip our toes in the water and have some delicious frozen custard.



After checking out the water, we went to bed, so that we would have lots of energy for a day at the beach. At this point Matt's brother had not arrived, and I’m not quite sure whether or not his parents knew that he was coming. But he was to arrive the next day (surprise #2).

We spent most of our first full day at Fenwick Island playing in the waves with our niece and nephew (two of the cutest kids you ever did see). We built sand castles, found shells, burnt our toes on the hot sand and enjoyed ourselves.


[Aunt Ellie and Haily]


[Uncle Matt and Hunter]

After an exhausting fun filled morning, we headed back to the rental to shower, nap and get ready for our family picture on the beach. But first, we had another surprise for the anniversary couple, Mike (Matt’s brother) showed up! The whole family was there! We all hung out for a bit and then started getting ready for the picture now that the whole crew was there!

I have always loved family picture where everybody is wearing one color (call me crazy) and I thought it would be the perfect memento from the weekend! I was so happy when everybody said they would bring a white shirt, here are my favorites:


[Family Photo]


[Family photo #2]

After we took a thousand pictures on the very windy beach, we went out to celebrate Matt’s parent’s anniversary at the Cottage Café in Bethany. We had a nice dinner, although for the prices, I wouldn’t recommend it. The service was impeccable though! Dinner was followed by a round of putt putt golf, a beach favorite! We had a wonderful first day.


[Mini golf]

Remember

Hello from Snowy Delaware

[Hello? Spring? Where are you?]

March 25th and snow? I've seen snow past March before in Virginia, but never enough to stick. This is a picture of Our Old Colonial, taken on my way back from the gym this morning at 7:30. This is the most snow we have seen all year [it is still snowing at 3:00 in the afternoon] and it is in March. It has warmed up enough so it isn't sticking anymore, but my goodness, what a sight!

I have no pictures of the bathroom for you. They'll be coming soon. We worked on plumbing the bathtub all weekend. One stinking joint just didn't want to seal, so we had to take it apart 3 times, clean it up and put it back together. Not to mention the numerous times we tried to just heat the thing back up and add more solder.

But, after all that work! We were able to shower upstairs for the first time in over 4 weeks! It was glorious!!!

Oh and the high tomorrow, is around 50 degrees! Bye bye snow!

The Shower That Was Not and Tiling tricks!

Well, remember last Friday when I said that we would be showering upstairs this morning. I should have known the instant I said that, the instructions on the grout drying time would morph from being 48 hours to a week! [of course they were always a week, I just thought they were 48 hours]. So, while we got most of what we wanted to done over the weekend, we are not showing upstairs until next week. Bummer.


[Putting up the subway tile]

The subway tile went up sort of as planned. It did go up on Saturday, however it went up on Saturday afternoon rather than Saturday morning. Saturday morning we spend SHOPPING.... no not fun shopping, Home Depot shopping [fun for some, not for me early on Saturday morning for approximately 2 hours].

Tiling itself, yet another not-so-fun activity. It took 6 hours from start to finish and that was with using a tile saw. I can only imagine how long it would have taken otherwise.


[Subway Tile, before grouting]

While tiling about 400 subway tiles is very tedious, I did learn a trick along the way that made the second 200 go much quicker.

My tile tip: apply the mortar using a spackle knife rather than the smooth side your toothed trowel. When I used the trowel, half of the grout wound up flopping onto the tub [very frustrating]. I had a lot more control with my 4 inch spackle knife, which made everything go much faster and cleaner!

My second tiling tip: This tiling tip is for those of you who are planning on getting your tub refinished. Tile before you get your tub refinished! This way you don't have to worry about getting grout and thinset all over your newly refinished tub and most of the clean up is left to your tub refinishing guy. [This tip came from our tub refinishing guy-who did an amazing job!]

Our tub refinishers came on Monday morning and got our tub looking all shiny and new.

It went from:

[Tub abuse]

To this:

[Can you hear the angels singing?]

I will leave you with one last photo of the bathroom:

[still a little finish work left, but looking so much better!

Oh the bathroom

The bathroom is coming along. Not as quickly as we had hoped. We foolishly thought the whole renovation would take about 2-3 weekends with some work during the week. Well this week we didn't get much done as we had hoped, I don't know about you guys out there, but this whole springing forward thing has really gotten to me.

I'm the type of person that does not like to get up a different times even on the weekend, let alone reschedule my entire week! So, I've been a zombie all week and the thought of working on the bathroom once I get home from work is not my idea of fun. That being said, we still have spent some time working up there throughout the week after working really hard all last weekend, just not as much as we had planned.


[Here I am shoveling tile out of the tub]

We were able to get the toilet and the sink re-installed last weekend after clearing out the rest of the tile, so we moved our bedroom back upstairs. I'm not sure if I mentioned that we had spent the last three weeks sleeping in our guest room on the first floor while the upstairs bath was out of commission. I felt homesick, even though we were just down stairs, I wasn't in my room and I didn't like it! Call me a baby if you must!

The drywall is up and I put on several coats of joint compound. It is ready to be sanded and painted [cross your fingers that gets done tonight]. The concrete board is up around the tub and ready to be tiled [cross your fingers that happens tomorrow morning].


[Toilet where it belongs]

And finally we have the somebody coming to refinish the tub bright and early on Monday morning! So, come Tuesday, we should be showering upstairs again in our shiny new bathroom. *fingers crossed* *knock on wood*

Other projects happening around the house might surprise you [I say this because they surprise me]. What surprises me the most is that there ARE other projects going on at the same time as a bathroom remodel and they aren't small! What happened was that I decided last Saturday that I wanted to knock down a non-structural wall in the unfinished basement and then semi-finish the two rooms into one large TV room. So, we did just that. We took a sledgehammer to the wall [that I never quite understood why existed in the first place] and the wall is no longer. We still have a lot of work to do to make it finished, but it already looks so much bigger! I'm very excited about it!


[The aftermath of the wall demo]

We're hoping to get some work done in the basement over the weekend too and finish this project up over the next few weekends! Hopefully before April, because our month of April is booked solid with events on nearly every weekend!

Hello!

Hi guys! I hope things are going well for everybody out there. 2013 is shaping out to be a bit rough for me, but I'm trying to stay positive. *squints eyes and whispers, "positive thoughts, positive thoughts"*

We continue to work on the house, but not with quite as much gusto as last spring until recently when we started work on the upstairs bath.

In an attempt to relieve some stress, I decided to start a battle with our upstairs bathroom. I declared war by taking a hammer to the dingy tile. Unfortunately, the 1. tile was extra thick, making it not as satisfying as had hoped, 2. there was about 3/4" of concrete between me and the studs and 3. as I would find out within the next 12 hours for certain, I was coming down with a cold and finding it hard to breath with all of the dust. Matt quickly took over and continued down the wall I had started to behind the toilet. Once reaching the toilet, he picked it up and moved it into the tub.


[Partly demolished tile wall]

I stayed away from the bathroom for the remainder of the evening and the following day. Fortunately, we have 2 bathrooms so while this one was out of commission we just moved our business downstairs.

All of this demolition took place on Sunday night. The next day we went to work like any normal day. However, coming home I was welcomed by something out of the norm.

When I walked into the kitchen I found that our Island had water splattered on it. At first I was curious *tilts head* what have those cats been up to? *switches on light* Wow, that is a lot of water.

Then there was the moment when a droplet of water fell from the sky, I looked up to see a bubble of water in the ceiling, and I realized just exactly where the water was coming from. It was coming from our bathroom! Which is located directly above our kitchen. I sprinted up the stairs (cold and all), noticed that the shut off valve had not quite done its job and was actually leaking water drip by drip onto the floor, which over the past 18 hours had been enough to leak onto the kitchen island.

I looked around at the tile covered bathroom and didn't know what to do. So I ran down to the basement to find the next shut off valve, which was conveniently located above above an are vent and very difficult to turn, I did manage to turn it just a bit just enough to create another leak in the basement, this one was much smaller and onto a concrete floor that I didn't care about, so I gave up on that and sprinted back upstairs (still sick mind you!). I decided that in order to stop the leak I would need to reinstall the toilet, which would involve me clearing the tile that was now surrounding the toilet drain, heaving a very heavy toilet from the tub over and over piles of concrete and tile back to where it belonged. I did this, while asking the toilet (not so politely) to cooperate with me and quickly the problem was temporarily solved.


[note the mess on the floor]

Then I went down stairs [in less of a rush, but still quickly] and tended to the ceiling. I grabbed an old towel, jumped up on the island, and held the towel against the bubble at which point it burst and a small flood of water came down. I pleaded with it to stop and it didn't, at least not right away.


[not to bad]

I have since allowed the ceiling to dry and started to spackle over the damage. With a couple coats of spakle and some paint it will look good as new, but my... what a way to start a week.

As my colleague said after I told her the story, "When it rains, it pours!"

More Catching Up

During lunch today, I took a quick look through my old posts. It has been such a long time since I had a chance to look at the blog, I didn't even know what I had forgotten [neglected] to post about. I am just now realizing how many projects you all are in the dark about! We have painted nearly every surface on in the house, including the pink dining room and pink kitchen [hallelujah!]. This post is dedicated to the dining room.


[I know it is hard to tell, but those walls are pink and that trim is blah!]

The dining room is Woodrow Wilson Putty, which is a very gray taupe [does that make sense?]


[Woodrow Wilson Putty]

One day I decided to surprise Matt by painting the walls, when he was off working. Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but it was not as exciting as I had hoped, because he came home earlier than expected. On the bright side, I quickly handed him a roller and he helped me finish up the last of the paint.

I was very nervous when I started painting the walls. I warn you that the paint dries a completely different color than it goes on when wet. The walls went from a dingy brown to the perfect taupe.


[Dining Room Paint]

Note: this picture is very old, the halloween decorations have been taken down for month! I swear!

I was so happy with the final product. I think that the color balances well with the living room [which is on the opposite side of the foyer]. I also love the new white trim and how the gray makes it pop. I love that it is neutral and I can change up the decor with the seasons and it still looks great!

And most of all, it was successful at hosting not one, but two family holidays!


[Pre-Thanksgiving]


[Serious Game Playing at Christmas]

We have also added a new light fixture and I don't have any pictures of it at the moment, but you can see a sneak peak in the "Pre-Thanksgiving" picture above!

Until next time!