The Learning Curve

So, I had two hats...one of them quite a bit smaller than the other...perhaps dog size?

Oh yes I did.

Sick Again

I've been feeling a bit under the weather for a while now. It wasn't too bad, though, until Sunday night, when BAM it hit me hard. It's the same thing Scott had last week. He had been asking if I would amputate his face, and now I know what he meant because my whole face is stuffed with nasties. I'm blowing my nose every five minutes. I ran out of tissues at home; hopefully I will have enough here at work to last the day!

The best part? Life is ironic, and has one mischievous sense of humor. The one week I would like to stay home and rest and get better is the one week when HUNDREDS OF SAMPLES come into the lab and my boss has too much to do to cover my shift when there is that much work. I worked 11 hours yesterday!

So the game plan is:
Take Afrin and Nyquil every night before bed
Take Sudafed and Tylenol and Mucinex all day
Drink lots of water

If I can just make it through today and tomorrow, then I can sleep all weekend and be totally fresh and bright and chipper for Monday morning!

Kitchen Plans

So Scott and I recently went to Home Depot and walked around almost the whole store and started making plans for when we renovate our kitchen. We want to start when we have enough cash to pay for half of all the costs up front, put the other half on credit, and still have lots of moneys in the bank.

So we looked at so many different things, it was almost dizzying, but we decided we want to do a darker color for our countertops, probably black or dark gray. I saw some granite that was almost black with little silver flecks in it and I LOVED it.

We want very simplistic cabinets with simple hardware. Less is more. We saw some cabinet handles that match the handles on the appliances we want perfectly. We can't agree on a type/color of wood yet, but we both agree that it should match the laminate wood floors we end up putting in. We're leaning toward a darker wood. I like cherryish woods, with a little bit of a red tone in them, but Scott doesn't like those at all. We have to be careful. We're opening up the whole room, making it look much bigger, but if the wood we choose is too dark it will make everything look smaller. I think we will have to find a good balance between paint colors and wood colors as well.

We want to put an island in where the wall used to be. We will move the pantry (well, build a new one that matches everything) where the door to the backyard is, and instead put a large double door in the back leading out onto a deck. It will be so nice to have a deck. Right now we have a teeny tiny little one with a teeny tiny little barbecue...it's sad, and pretty useless.

The best part?

We're going to do a lot of the work ourselves. Lots of quality AnnaScott time. Saves a zillion dollars on labor costs, too. We got a quote for a simple deck in the backyard, and it was going to be $5000! We figure we can do it ourselves for just the cost of materials, probably under $1000.

We want all new stainless steel appliances. I want one of those stoves where the coils are under glass so it's a completely smooth top-so much easier to keep clean! Also, no knobs. I hate cleaning knobs on the stove! Also a must is a refrigerator with a water filter.

I know I've said some of this more than once, but I'm just so excited!

Destruction!

So we started the home renovation! We have everything laid out and budgeted in stages so that as we have the cash, we can complete another phase.

First phase was starting the demolition. We didn't demo everything yet, since we're not getting to the point yet where we need to rip out the floor or cabinets, but we figured something we could do for cheap in the middle of winter was rip out the wall between the living room and kitchen. It was super amazing to open the room up and see just how much room we actually had. When we finish everything it's all going to look great!

So here are some pictures and videos, in no particular order, about the demo process.

Here's where we had gotten quite far, and only had a little bit of the framework left:

Here's more toward the beginning, where we were ripping up all the stuff on the outside, like drywall and trim and the weird subfloor that was installed on top of the wall...we couldn't figure out why they would put subfloor somewhere that people weren't going to walk.

The ceremonial picture of the first slice in the drywall. We needed to move the thermostat from the wall we were hacking down, so we needed to open up some holes so we could thread cables through. This hole has since been patched.

Here are some videos. Most of them show me trying to be handy but it doesn't really work. So far, I have made a very good assistant, and later on I will be the one to pick out paint colors, etc. But Scott is teaching me little things as we go. He does most of the work though, because he's a LOT stronger than I am.

Buster's New Tricks

So Buster's latest two tricks are High Five and Hold.

High Five looks like this:



(Pretend my kitchen is pristine. Which it will be once we finish our renovations. In like a year.)


Hold means he holds still and we put something ridiculous on his head and take a picture of it:

Like Scott's dinner.

Our dog is so smart!