Showing posts with label house remodel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house remodel. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2009

A busy weekend!


Hi, birdie. Here is a new female woodpecker. She is so cute :) Look the face that she is giving me.


Arianna and her blanket. Yeah, like I had posted before, this is a new thing. Thank God, she likes many blankets. She uses it to lay down on it, to put on her hair (like in this picture), to put her stuff animals to sleep, for me to take a nap, etc... So many functions...


Mike was feeding her some yogurt, but I found this old sunglasses (She hated them before), but this time she played with them for awhile.

Hey, blue don't eat my Sugar Lime Cookies!! I'll try to post the recipe later since I had someone asking about it. They are really good and fresh. If we can only get some sunny days consistently.

So here is a semi-before of our first floor - living room/ play area. We are always trying to figure out the best possible space and organization for Arianna to use all her toys/books, etc... So, in this picture we had brought down an old entertainment center that we used to use before we moved to this house and since we needed a corner entertainment it sat for two years in one of our bedrooms. But now, it will hold some of Arianna's things.


Here is Arianna's Corner! We arranged her books in the top 2 shelves. She has a lot of books, and she "reads" almost half of them daily. It is really cute when she is reading and making up stories, now if we can only understand all the things that she is saying.


In the bottom shelf, we have three boxes with mostly stuffed animals, tea set, letters, and numbers. Top shelf, lots of blocks and cups. She also has her table with puzzles, her clock, and her notebooks to draw (I hide the crayons, otherwise we would have lots of art work in our walls. Although, she is nice most of the time, and does not do it, why tempt faith, right? I think she approves of the new space :)

We had been working in a kind of big project -Our basement. I finally packed all of our stuff and moved to the laundry area (we are doing half of the basement into a family room). Here is a picture of the carpet that Tony ripped from our floors. Who knows how long it sat, but it was pretty disgusting in some areas. I was so surprised at how quickly he was able to do it, so much that he ended up helping me paint- well, he painted while I help with the taping! Thanks Tony.

Here is a picture of the walls with tape waiting to get a makeover.


Our floors, they used to have some type of tile. They were few pieces left under the gray carpet, so what you see is the glue. We were debating whether to try to take the glue or not, but the floors were in very good shape, and they had put carpet over it without doing it, so we did and looks great. After all, the reason we ended attacking our basement is because we had a small leak into it when one of the bathroom's sewer backed up.

Overall picture of our basement when you come down from the stairs. It is an old house, but we like it. We used to have a huge house in a new subdivision, now we have the opposite ;)

Here you see the walls are painted! It is called fuzzy peach. How tropical (the name).

Here is Jack! Everyone that follows Facebook nows that a kitty showed up to our patio doors, lived on or under our deck for about a week, and finally we could not let him outside. It was raining horribly and the poor thing was trying to stay dry by standing next to out patio door. I guess there is about 4-5 in. of coverage where the rain does not hit. It was awful seeing him there, so I figured that if I brought my carrier (that I used for the other kitties we have) and he went in, I will put him on the basement. And he did. So, we took him to vet next day. He had a microchip, they called the people, left messages and after 2 weeks, no repply. Tried to see if anyone wanted a kitty, no one could. So, he is the other reason we are working on the family room so we can go there. We are going to try an introduction with Betsy and Misty, but I figured the basement is better than outside.

Beautiful saucer eyes!


Me working on the carpet. We got up, ate something quick and contine working until we were done!


Mike working on the carpet with Jack inspecting our progress. Such an efficient boss!


You get the idea, the wall color with the new brown carpet. Very warm and cozy. Now, we need a nice couch for the TV, games, and movies. I will take more pictures once we cleaned all the empty boxes and we organize where the bookcases will go, etc...


Mike and Arianna happy that we had finished the carpet. Now, we just need some dinner! (Oh yeah, Ari was very helpful and played around with the empty boxes, the good thing was that we were able to keep working while she was downstair with us.)

A brake. Blanket and some Noggin videos. She loves Laurie Berkman's songs from Jack's Music Show.


In the crafty side, I finished a baby blanket for a friend. I liked it except that this time one side was a bit more big - still made with love. So, I think it works, and I would keep working on getting better.


We had bought this doll at the thrift store while looking for some artsy stuff, but she did not have any clothing. I decided to crochet this dress for her with the leftover yarn from the blanket. Ari loved it. She kept saying "mommy, doll has dress. Good dress". :)

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Drawing and Gardening and a new fan...

Mike told me awhile ago that he had a dream that Arianna (she was a newborn) was drawing on the walls. Well, it is getting closed enough. She decided to be artistic on the ceramic tile from the kitchen. It is a good thing that it was easy to clean. I took away the crayons, and told her that she needed to draw on her notebooks (has 3 of them). She was not happy as you can see below.

She needed reassuring that we loved her and she wanted to be hug. We were not angry, but we need to decrease the possibility of scribbles on walls and such. After a few minutes, everything was fine. (She will get her crayons back).

See, she is with daddy now. All is well. I still think one day (not too far) we will find some art work...

Then, we went to Burger King so Mike can have all four Star Trek glasses. She looks adorable :)

We had been in our house a bit more than two years and finally I decided to do something in the strip between the driveway and the fence. It is a space of about 35 feet long by 5 feet wide. As always I forgot to take a before picture, but basically it was grass (with some bare spots). The picture below is some of the grass that I rip. That was the hardest part.

While working I saw this beautiful purple finch. Maybe he is looking for some new spots to hide!

Here are two pictures of the strip. It is not finished, I still need to plant 7 of the 26 plants that I bought. Need to put some soil, flattened, and add mulch, so it is still half way. What do you think?

I am adding three rose bushes (one is a vine) and a beautiful Blushing Bride Hydrangea. Love flowers!


Thanks to Dave and Tiffany (and Glenn) for coming so fast to our rescue and helped Mike to install a new ceiling fan!!! Love it. Thank you, thank you!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

New growth and bird and future fix...

Here are my seedlings for future tomatoes! I don't know if they actually will work ( I started a bit too late) but I am giving it a try. Even if 5 work, that will be plenty. So, let's hope so.

Here is a new bird that I have not seen before- it looks like the one called Indigo Bunting, but I am not sure. I love my yard!



And with old and sometimes new houses, here is the next thing that we are going to check - the gutters! Hopefully, it is just leaves or something easy to fix. And this is the reason that instead of paying someone to do the yard (the strip that I keep talking)...I started yesterday by ripping the grass!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Have a happy Fat Tuesday! + All done

Happy Fat Tuesday or Paczki Day! Yummy, those strawberries paczkies are delicious... also the cheese, prune, chocolate, pineapple, etc...



Finally done with the doors and windows, now we only need....


to work in the basement! Yeah, the problem with the bathroom was fixed, but we needed to rip some of the carpet, and the floor under was not good so that is the next project in our list and lots of painting and maybe some curtains... I guess there is always to be done :) Have a happy day!

Monday, February 23, 2009

More pictures...

Here is the outside of the window, still working on it... So, that will be kind of "before" picture, I'll post another one when they are done.

Hard at work... Outside pictures of the patio doors...

There are almost done with the storm door, they are working in the inside now...

New window and door...

I forgot to take a picture when they were taken down the old window :( but the first two pictures are how it looks right now... they took the patio doors, and they are working on it...



Here are some shots of the new window...I am having some lightning issues, but I hope you can get the idea. I'll try later when all the people are gone and they are done working on the patio doors, and the storm door as well. The house is having a major lift!