Living Room Project

I just added the "before" pics of our living room to our photo album, if anyone is interested!

If you are wondering why we have already arranged the furniture differently before we started to paint is because my husband is a geek. We have a home theater system and he needed to make sure the new furniture arrangement was going to work with speaker placement!d

Grabert Demolition

Tonight starts a process that will probably take a month or two to complete, updating 2 of the "worst rooms" in our house. To give you a little bit of a back story on our house:

Our house has 2 bedrooms, two full baths, a living room, an entry way and a kitchen with dining room attached. Every room has a problem with the paint, the two biggest offenders being the guest bedroom and the living room. Every wall in the house is covered in texture, texture that was not applied right and needs to be completely redone. This is some what of an involved process, we need to sand everything off of the walls down to the drywall. After getting the walls smooth, we'll prime the walls and depending on what the walls look like after sanding, possibly texture the walls and then (FINALLY!) paint.

The guest bedroom project started last summer. Forest and our friend Bryce tried to blend the uneven texture, but it was pretty much impossible to do. They also didn't realize that the previous owners painted right over the wallpaper! That absolutely needs to be removed. After that is done, we'll clean up the giant mess it will make, then move all of the furniture from the living room into the guest bedroom. Then we'll do the same thing in the living room. The texture isn't as thick, but the room is about 25X15 and has 12 foot ceilings! We are also going to replace every door frame and the baseboards. Home Depot has these nifty miter-less door frame kits that actually aren't any more expensive then doing it the old fashion way, and they fit right into my decor! Between the entry way and living room, we have 9 doorways. 6 of them are in the entry way! After we get the living room painted, we're going to move all of the furniture back into the living room. We'll then paint the guest bedroom and then install laminate flooring in the entry way and guest bedroom.

I know, it sounds like an insane amount of work. It kind of is, but thankfully we have a good idea of what we are doing now. Forest's major concern in this project? Where we were going to put the speakers for our Home Theater when we arrange the furniture. Since we are installing new baseboards and door frames, it will finally be easy to hide the wires somewhere other than under our rug. The TV is blocking the fireplace at the moment and when this is all done, I'll actually be able to show it off! I won't EVER use it (I live in Texas, after all!) but for some reason everyone loves having them down here.

The only problem I am worried about at the moment is color. Colors for the guest bedroom have been picked out for almost a year now (I know, sad right?) but Forest and I are debating for the living room. I want to do a beige color with country red trim, something very prim. He, for some reason, thinks the trim should be white, which is of course, very boring. So, I'm asking for ideas!

I am super excited about this project. It'll be a HUGE under taking but I am willing to deal with a few weeks of madness to finally update that living room. I'll post pictures as we get the project started!

Insomnia

During certain times...of my life...I suffer from severe insomnia. It's not in any pattern and comes sporadically. Thankfully it's usually before my days off or on a day where I can get some extra sleep if I ever do fall asleep. I was tired all day today, so you would think I would have crashed hours ago. It's nearly 5 now. Getting pretty tired of this, no pun intended (or maybe it is...I can't think straight).

I am taking this time to work on my new photo album. I suggest looking over to the left of your screen and checking it out. 2009 was a good picture year. We had some pretty fun adventures and I even helped delivery my friend's baby. How many times will I get to do that in my life? I'm going to finish this up and then HOPEFULLY get to bed!

New Year's Resolutions

Wow, I can't believe I haven't updated this in 6 months! It's been a struggle even reading my friend's blogs because almost everyone with a blog is also on Facebook. It's taken over as the method for pumping information out to the world. For the sake of my family, I should update so you don't have to hear about things from just my Mom! I suppose it should be a resolution, even...

Things have been going well for us in the last few months. Forest was laid off in October for one day before they came to their senses and realized things would crash and burn without Forest's keen knowledge of the Library's network (at least that's how I see it!). Unfortunately he is doing the job of three people all by himself now. He is down in a room all by himself and it was kind of taking it's toll for a little bit. Thankfully now he has someone helping him a few days a week and they get along really well.

Gracie is doing really well! She seems to love her new class at Lakeview and is still a joy to take care of. In November I found out I was chosen as "Attendant of the Year" from Disability Services of the Southwest (or DSSW, the firm that takes care of Grace's respite care account) The following is the section of the DSSW newsletter that I was featured in! I love the letter the Dendys wrote, it made me feel really appreciated. Working with Grace is the best job I've ever had!

And since the scanned picture didn't come out so great, here is the original!

I've been really busy with my calling at Church the last few months (I'm the Activities Chairperson), we had two dinners in three months! Our Chili Cookoff went very well (and since we live in Texas, Mormons actually know how to make Chili!) in October but what I was really gearing up for was the Ward Christmas Party. We had "Tex-Mex" food with some really fun country Christmas decorations. The food was so fantastic but we had so much left over that I am still even sick of mexican food.

We had a very quiet Christmas! It was just the two of us and our dog. Your dog, you ask? Yes, we actually got a dog! I'm sure everyone already knows about this because he was featured in our Christmas card, but to give you some of the details...a friend of ours, Laney, put a post on FB asking if anyone would like a 2 year old Bichon Frise that her neighbor needed to find a home because her son was having severe asthma. I told her I would love to give him a good home and it all fell into place. We got him on December 14th so he was the perfect Christmas present! His name is Pippin and we just adore this little dog. I've taken him over to Jennie's to play with their puppy and both of the dogs just love having someone to romp around with. Here are a few pictures with our cute little doggie!

One of our Christmas card pictures:

Playing in the snow:



After we got him groomed for the first time:

You may have noticed all of that snow - we finally had a White Christmas! While the rain was pouring in Michigan, we had a good 5 inches of snow fall on Christmas Eve. It was snowing hard enough that it soaked my camera and I only took a few pictures when it was actually still snowing. The first picture is from when it was snowing and the second two are when it started melting. Pippin enjoyed running around in the snow and we bundled up to go play with him in it. The weather has been one big yo-yo, going from the 30's to the 70's, down to the 20's and it's supposed to be in the high 50's early next week. Right now it's in the 20's and we're not liking that too much!

Things are good for us and we hope everyone around the country is having a wonderful New Year so far!