Homeowner surprises

When you are a homeowner you never know what is going to happen...
My dad came over this week to help paint the baby's room.  While he was painting I noticed something on the baseboard at the edge of the kitchen.  Thinking it was dirt that the dogs tracked in I was going to just brush it off.  I then realized it was a collection of bugs.  I called my dad in to get rid of them (cause what are dads for if not to kill bugs) but after he wiped them off more showed up...and they were crawling out of small holes in the baseboard!!  After ripping off the baseboard we realized that we were dealing with a SWARM of termites!!!!!!!!!!

(Caution......the following pictures are difficult to look at......)

(I chose not to make this pictures large because the scene is just too disturbing)

I was absolutely freaking out!  Dad sprayed them with Raid and cleaned up the mess and we haven't seen a live one since, but now we have a whole new issue to deal with.  And to think my biggest concern was getting the carpets steam cleaned before the baby comes.

Black paint

We made a bold move this past week in our house.  I wanted to add a little "pop" to our plain-jane cookie cutter house so we bought some black paint.  When I told people what I wanted to do I got mixed reactions.  Some people thought it was be really neat and others were a little more skeptical.

We decided to paint our interior doors black!

We have some friends who did the same thing to their house maybe a year or so ago and it looked very cool.  She told me that it would give our house an advantage for when we some day were looking to sell.  I thought I was just take the plunge and go for it...

Before

 In the process

(which took several days and several coats of paint)

Finished product

InstaFriday

...on a MONDAY

oh well!

a painting project for me...a bench we bought at a friend's yard sale now makes its home in our front foyer

 sneak peek at our new back yard:

retaining wall that Josh, his dad, and a couple of college guys built...lots more to come on our new backyard...we just have to finish it first

 strawberry picking at Cottle Farms

 Pioneer Woman's Dr. Pepper bbq

so incredibly delicious and a little spicey so watch out!

Yard Sale

I had my first yard sale over the weekend and it was a success!  My friend Kari brought over a ton of stuff she wanted to sell as well as my mom and Erica.  We tried to do this about a month ago but we got rained out so everything has been stuffed in my garage since then.  We were out at 6:00am setting up and stayed out until about 12:30.  Whew...it was a long morning!

I made about $220 but the best part...being rid of so much of what I considered junk.  As they say..."one man's trash is another man's treasure."

IKEA

I finally got around to taking a few shots of our new IKEA shelf for you all to see.  It's pretty big, but perfect for our large wall.  I plan on adding some height with a couple of bright colored vases but just haven't gotten around to shopping yet.

 We also have big plans for the wall to the right of the shelf with a picture frame collage...but like I said, the shopping part hasn't happened yet.  Haha

 There's nothing new about the picture...it's just one of my favorites!

Spring Break-Day 5

Josh had the day off today as well so we we had a lazy morning of sleeping in and watching tv.  I had a lunch date at Cafe Strudel with a good friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a while.  She is also the wonderful soul that works on my taxes every year.  Since she was able to get us a really nice tax return, I thought what better way to spend some of that money than to treat her to lunch. 

Late afternoon J and I decided to work on painting the crown molding for around the downstairs.  It was pretty easy work...it just took some space!

This is only half...the other half is still in the garage

Ringo decided he wanted a little paint for himself

Spring Break-Day 2

The house renovations are still underway...who knew that a simple flood could take sooo long to repair.  I guess not all the improvements were actual repairs...some things we are changing just for the heck of it.  Such as the fireplace...

Here is a picture of the fireplace before it was beautified

Excuse the fact that it's a picture from Christmas, but its the best one I had.  The fireplace and hearth were made of black slate and while I was gone on the women's retreat in March, J ripped out all the slate and he and my dad replaced it with tile.  They spent the entire Saturday working on it and it turned out awesome.  In my opinion it looks like a professional did all the work!  

Back to Spring Break...today I gave the new fireplace a fresh coat of white paint.

Doesn't it look GREAT?!

On a side note...here a few of my 1,000 Blessings:

16.  A clean bathroom...it's no fun to clean on SB but well worth it

17.  Last minute lunch with Aimee

18.  The gift card to Chick-fil-a from my secret pal at school...it made our sister lunch possible today

19.  My wonderful husband who has worked so hard on making our house beautiful again

20.  Warm (ok...hot actually) sunny days for my Spring Break

21.  Shoe shopping and lunch with my BFF from high school

Covered in Paint

Whew!

Our house is slowly coming together

  It took us three days

And a lot of hard work

But the living room is finally painted.

We did get some help from our family

 Which was awesome because...

I'm not sure how we would have done it all without them.

While we were hard at work

We were rockin' it out to the GLEE soundtracks.

I think the dogs are a little tired of all the home improvements.

A work in progress

Tomorrow will be three weeks since the great flood.  Its been really annoying trying to live in our house in its current condition.  The floors are torn up and our kitchen furniture is scattered around the house.  We finally received our check from Nationwide this week so the renovation process has begun!

We decided to upgrade our kitchen floors from linoleum to tile.  We figured it would be better for resale value, plus J hated the floor anyway. We picked out tile and the tile guys came today to lay it all.  They have to come back tomorrow and put in the grout, clean it, and seal it so its not complete yet.  But for now I guess we'll continue to go out to eat for our meals!

This is what my living room currently looks like...

That would be the oven and dryer...in the living room.

You can almost reach the fridge from the couch!

While we were tile-ing our kitchen we thought "what heck, let's do the bathroom too!"

Next up...drywall in the laundry room and new carpet!!

The Great Flood

As I lay here in bed I think about how I SHOULD be going to sleep seeing how I have class tomorrow morning...but I just can't seem to fall asleep.  You see, I have a lot on my mind right now...starting with the fact that our kitchen flooded today.

 AHHHHH!!!

Let me start at the beginning...

I was on my way home from class today when J called.  He said Lee (our neighbor and good friend) had just called him because he saw water flowing from our garage door.  Well, Lee knows the code to our garage and let himself in only to find the hose from the washing machine had busted and there was an arch of water streaming out of it.  He quickly turned the water off and began pulling wet things out of our garage. (Did I mention what a good friend he is!?!?)  I got home shortly after to find my entire kitchen flooded with water.  I immediatly grabbed the camera and starting taking pics for insurance sake (and of course for the blog...hehe)

I know this looks bad, but I promise I do vacuum my house.  The nastiness on the floor is what floated out from under the washer and dryer and fridge.

The little hole that started it all!

This may not seem like a lot of water...but when it covers you kitchen floor and is slowing creeping across your carpet to reach your new couches...its a big deal!

 

The water somehow managed to seep through the wall and run outside the house.  Even the back porch was wet.

 After we moved out all the kitchen furniture and various wet things from the house, J and Lee started sweeping the water out.  THANKFULLY the water reached about a foot away from my beautiful new couches so we wanted to get as much of the standing water out before it continued to spread.  The crazy part was water had gotten underneath our linoleum floor and the whole floor started to bubble up.

 Soon after our dads arrived on the scene and pulled out the wet/dry vac things.  Whatever those things are, they're amazing.  It pulled in all the standing water on the hard floor and even some of the water from the carpet.  We had most every thing cleaned up by the time the clean up crew came.  They made my house unrecognizable.

 So now we wait.  All of these fans and heaters have to stick around until Monday and then Nationwide will send someone in to assess the damages.  I'm really hoping we can get some new carpet out of this fiasco.