New Floor

For a over a year Anna and I have been looking at redoing the flooring on our main floor with hardwood. We picked out the flooring we wanted that went well with the new cabinets in the kitchen. It is laminate that is finished in a Brazilain Cherry.

I went to Home Depot and was browsing for a thing for my keys when I saw that the flooring we wanted was on clearance I called Anna and told her and she told me to get it. When I was paying for it, I told the flooring lady that I was going to pay with my Home Depot card and she said "Thanks for telling me that 'Lowes has that for cheaper' "(wink wink) and gave me an additional  5% off. Home Depot has a customer for life.

They loaded a full pallet plus 4 boxes into my truck and away I went. When I got home I looked at how much my truck was sagging from the weight and apologized to my back ahead of time. I started to unload the flooring into the house so it could acclimatize to the house. Then I started to rip out the old carpet, padding and tile. I started to rip up the tile in front of the door ... and big surprise I was able to pull out all the tile by hand ... no tools needed. I then started to rip out the carpet. Once I got to the sub floor I started to clean it up and prep for the new flooring when I saw that they had used finish nails (smooth shafted, very small head) to attach the subfloor to the floor joists.... that is why it squeaked all the time. I changed them all to screws. Almost all the squeaks went away.

I had Jorgen come over and help with the install of the flooring. We put down a few rows and then stopped for the night.

Then next day we really went to work, getting about 2/3 of it finished.

The last day we finished and cleaned up. Here are some before and after pictures.

Buster is still getting used to walking on the floor ... he has face planted a few times.

New Roof

I am sure everyone knows about "Windpocalypse" that happened at the begining of December. Well, when that happened I was at work taking care of the servers and stuff... I didn't think that somthing might be happening to my house. When I got home there were roof shingles all over the yard, but when I looked on the roof I was just missing tabs of shingles all over, but I didn't have any missing sections.

My brother's house was missing sections of shingles so I went over there to help him cover it and protect it from any weather that might be coming. Then I turned to my house. I went up on the roof and looked around and it didn't look that bad ... I thought it could wait for me to re-roof in in the spring... which was the plan... but I decided to call the insurance and see what they thought. So a few days later the inspector came out and told Anna it looked like there was not even $1000 in damage thus the insurance wouldn't need to pay for it but after he reported to USAA and they looked at the pictures and stuff they then called me and said they were going to approve the replacement of the roof ... I was shocked ... but was really happy.

WE LOVE USAA.

Anyway, the roofers showed up and asked if I wanted to upgrade my shingles for a little bit more; the insurance would only replace what was there... but I could upgrade if I wanted so I did. They then ripped off all the shingles...

From Roof

From Roof

From Roof

...and then tar papered all before noon ... on Christmas Eve, too!

From Roof

A few days later they came over with about 25% of the shingles and did some of it.

From Roof

From Roof

The next day they finished the rest of the roof ... Buster was not happy the whole time; didn't like people banging on the roof.

From Roof

Halloween 2011

Scott has spliced together a video with some of our Halloween stuff this year:



Here's the sad bit: we borrowed a night vision security camera from Scott's company and had it set up so we could record kids' reactions...but somehow it didn't record the whole night and missed the very best parts, such as the part where Scott jumped out from the fog and scared the crap out of some kids, one of whom screamed and ran away down the street. Yes. So this video is some of the other pictures and videos we took.

Kids are so cute on Halloween. One kid (five years old or so) saw the full-size candy bars and said "Where have you been all my life?!" Another kid (two year old girl) said "Bye, scary!" as she walked away like it was her friend.

At one point during the night we saw some people walk up to Frederick and have people take pictures of them with him. AWESOME.

So new things we added since last year:

Frederick
Ghost in the front window (black lights and white tulle)
Creepy cloth on the front door and up the walkway
Orange lights across the front of the garage
Moss on the tombstones
Flashing lights with thunder sound effects

Next year we're thinking about building a creepy tunnel the kids have to go through to get to the door. We'll see what we come up with!

Quick rant: when I was a kid and we went trick-or-treating, we went to each house and got one small piece of candy. We hit lots of houses so we could end up with a large stash. ONE PIECE. So we handed out full-size candy bars, right? Several kids had the stones to ask, "How many can I have?" or "Can I take two?"

Greedy little kids...

New Flower Bed

This past weekend the giant project (that took eight hours!) was filling in the flower bed in the front yard. We had hated it before because although there were some very pretty flowers for about two weeks in the spring, the rest of the year it was just greenery that either just...sat there...or wilted. Either way, it wasn't pretty. Also, it was covered in wood chips (fugly), and weeds would grow like crazy. It was a lot of maintenance for very little aesthetic value, so it had to go!

First up, Scott pulled out all the weeds, plants, and wood chips. Then, he needed to dig up all the bulbs and pull out any big rocks, so he dug up and sifted all the dirt about eight inches deep. Scott built this nifty little sifter tool thingy for the task.

I was sick this past weekend, so on Saturday I was feeling well enough to go outside, as long as I was just sitting. So I sat on the front porch and got a little sun and fresh air while they worked, and I kept them sunscreened and hydrated. So at least I contributed. But in the middle I got really tired, so I went inside to take a nap. When I woke up, they were all done sifting and were smoothing the dirt down.

Next up he put a weed blocker (a fabric/plastic sheet) over the leveled dirt. Over it we wanted to put a bed of nice, medium-sized rocks, which, it turns out, look infinitely better than crappy wood chips!

We went to Home Depot and got to use the truck to haul the rocks! We bought about a ton of them (and I do mean a ton, as in 2000 pounds). It took two trips in the truck to bring them all home, and the people at Home Depot had to load them for us with a forklift! That was lots of fun, actually.

In the end, this was the result:

I know it looks like there's a lot of dirt in there, but as it rains it will wash out and leave just the stones.

The plan now is to find some really lovely ceramic pots and place a few potted plants (probably flowers or something with colorful leaves) over the rocks. It'll be neater, cleaner, and a lot easier to take care of. Scott is pretty sure that weeds won't grow at all.

And the best part is, nobody got a sunburn!

New Truck!

 Last month we did something that was a little sad, but good for lots of different reasons.

We sold the Mustang.

Yeah, I know, it was very sad, since it was a MAN CAR and Scott is a MAN, and it was definitely eye candy, but we hadn't had time or money to work on it in a long, long time (we'd been focusing on the house)(still on hiatus...). It also didn't have air conditioning, and Scott was dreading riding around in it this summer.

So we went from beautiful, shiny Mustang to this:

And then we had to go car shopping...yuck. We wanted to either get me a newer car and give the Focus to Scott (since I'm the one that commutes) or else get a truck for Scott so we could haul things (mainly from Home Depot!). Scott had looked online at a few small dealers in our town, and we set out, hoping to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible.

We went to one dealer first and found a Focus we liked (yes, we kinda did want another Focus, since we love this one so much) and also a truck we liked, both in the price range we decided on beforehand. The Focus, on closer inspection, reeked of cigarette smoke, so that was immediately out of the question (Scott and I are both allergic to cigarette smoke, and Scott can get BAD asthma attacks from it), and we decided to keep the truck in mind while we kept looking. We went to a few more dealers, and we were kinda sick of it, but I wanted to just get it over with as soon as possible, so we grabbed some dinner and kept at it. We went to another small dealer and looked around for quite a bit with the help of a really nice and helpful salesman who wasn't pushy at all (SCORE) and was happy to stay inside our budget.

We were about to give up when we found it:

It's a 1999 Dodge Dakota. Yes, I know, it's twelve years old, BUT, it only has 40,000 miles on it, because it was owned by the Government and was barely used, and you look at the CarFax and you can see it was regularly maintained and the oil was changed on time and everything. The interior was in immaculate condition and didn't smell like smoke (YAY), and it was $1,500 less than we had originally planned on spending. It was like when we bought the Focus, which was 5 years old when we bought it but only had 17,000 miles on it because it was owned by an old lady who basically only drove to the grocery store once in a while. We got an amazing deal on that one, too. I guess we're just lucky.

The best part? It only took one afternoon to find the perfect car.

And we've already been able to haul stuff with it!

Scott and I are a perfect match. One of the wonderful things we share is the love of organization!

This past Saturday Scott needed to go in to work to reorganize the servers and such. It needed to be done when the office was closed so he could disconnect all the networks and phones. I didn't want him to be lonely, so after I went and had my hair done I picked up lunch and came to keep him company. I ended up being a big help, too, because he was having to do all the work and keep track of what everything was at the same time, and once I got there I could keep records of what was connected to what, and then read it all back to him when it was all taken apart.

So here's one of the server stacks before:

Nasty, huh?

Anyway, here it is after Scott stripped all the cables. That took HOURS because they were so tangled. Every few minutes I heard a "Why did they do it like this?!", but mostly it went smoothly (it just took time). There were a few cables he couldn't undo, such as the firewall cables, so we had to work around those.

The next few hours were spent rewiring everything. WHAT A JOB. We got everything run very neatly, in nice bundles, with NO TANGLES.

Once everything was all organized we just had to put the shields over the cables and can you even believe how neat this looks?!

Here's another server stack that is now organized (trust me, I know it looks like a spaghetti factory, but everything's bundled and color coded and OH BOY you should have seen it before Scott got his hands on it!):

Having things nice and neat just feels so...right.

Buster's New Haircut

Buster has had his annual haircut:

I love that his tail wags so quickly that it's a blur.

He feels like velvet.