Visitors--of the four legged kind

Living out in the Woods...has been fun. Our home is surrounded by trees, we have a few years overgrowth in our yard...which includes, pokey blackberry bushes sprawling everywhere, tall weeds, dandelions sprinkle the lawn with color, pinecones of all sizes sit on the ground and there are stumps of past trees that could tell a million stories about their life here if they could talk.

The first visitor we had was this little guy. Mike found him out by a junk pile left by Brian, the previous owner...mattresses, futon and frame, golf clubs, motorcycle parts, wheels, rugs, laptop bag, engine parts that I couldn't begin to tell you what they came off of...

We named him Sammy the Salamandar...someone told me that they bring luck...so, thanks for visiting...

We let him go in the more "cleaned" part of the yard.Since then, we've had pesky woodpeckers pecking holes in our house walls, It makes you jump out of bed and run off to scare them off. We've bought a little plastic owl that "hoo's" at pretty much anything that passes it's radar. Cars will set it off, visitors coming to the door sets it off and hopefully it scares away the woodpeckers. Decker added new words to his vocabulary when we got the owl--"Owl" and "Who Who"?!

There is a pond in a neighboring yard and you get the full effect of living in the country when you hear the frogs singing at night. We see these little guys and they're bright green. Decker likes to jump like a frog.

On Saturday, Mike spent half the day mowing the lawn, and trimming the edges. I think this woke up little creatures everywhere and stirred their habitat a bit, since it probably hasn't been mowed in 4 + years. We first saw a rat and disposed of him and then he found these cute little critters:

They were adorable and were very easy to catch, since they are just babies.We really kind of wanted to keep them for pets, they were so lovable, but ended up putting them back near their stump where we think they live.
Decker just loved the little guys and wanted to keep holding them like little stuffed animals. After reading about baby bunnies online, we found out that the little white stripe on their forehead was a sign that they were still nursed by their mother. We thought it best to let them go home....Hopefully we'll see them hopping around the yard as they grow. What a treat! :)

Finally Moved in March 18th, 2010

So I know it's been awhile since I've posted. So I'm going to try to do a lot of posting...some may be random and jumbled, but here goes the first.

In getting our house ready to move, we thought it would take 2 weeks. Well it ended up taking 6 weeks, after the HardWood Floor guy postponed our install...which ended up being better, because we got more of our painting completed.

We slept our first night in our new home on March 18th. We had company the next night, my brother Luke, his wife Lora and their son Dallin. So we had all the rooms ready, minus door knobs on the door and closet doors still missing.

They were a huge help in helping us get more of the closet doors primed and painted, cleaned our sliding glass doors and getting the light fixtures back in place.

We also cleaned up some of our yard of the debris left by Brian, the previous owner and some of our debris that we replaced in the house and had our first bonfire out in our own backyard.

The weather was perfect so we also spent some time at the park. Ferrel McWhittier Park.

This is a great park with a little barnyard of farm animals.--more pictures to come at a later date....

Here's some pics of Dallin--14 months and Decker-- 20 months.

If you noticed the band-aid on Decker's forehead...he fell on the hardwoods and "bumped" his head. It grew into a huge knot, and I think that the pressure was so built up that it started to bleed. He wore it for a couple of days and it healed very quickly.

Job #4 Putting the Wood in...

Randy, our Wood guy delivered the oak wood flooring a couple of weeks before installation, so it could get used to it's new surroundings. :)

Mike pulled up the pergo flooring in the kitchen--which we will probably use down on our laundry room's cement floor--and discovered the orignial linoleum to the kitchen floor. This all had to come up to get to the sub floor for the wood to be placed on. Mike borrowed Randy's toekick saw and if you notice in the next picture one of the kitchen cabinet doors is missing....Ooops! Thank goodness it wasn't an arm or a leg though... Randy's laying it all out...

down the hallway...

Then we get to choose the stain... left to right
1. Golden Brown
2. Golden Brown, Blood Red equal mix.
3. Blood red
4. Golden Brown with 1/2 Blood Red.
They look a little different, since one picture used the flash and the other didn't.

Which did we pick?

Getting the stain down. matches nicely with our cabinets.
moving the island back...

Now it's all done and Decker had to try it out. I know Randy was just cringing as Decker rode across the floor.... ;) (This is a video you have to go to the blog to watch.)



Then a week later, fridge and stove put back in and all clean and organized!

Oh, and by the way, we chose #4! We love it and are so excited!

Job # 3 Getting all the carpet up

In a way to save money, we told our Carpet supplier that we would pull up our own carpet before they installed the fresh new clean smelling carpet. Mike did most of this work. We had ordered a No. 8 carpet pad and after taking off the old carpet, noticed that the pad underneath seemed to be in really good condition and a No. 8 pad. So in an effort to save even more money, we decided to keep the pad and just install the new carpet on top.

Here's the bonus room's cement floor. We had to put some KILZ on several "Dog" spots.We got a cool surprise when the carpet was installed. The existing pad ended up being a No. 10, better than what we were going to put in. We still had to replace the pad downstairs though, so that had a No 8, but we were pretty excited about that.

Then after all the carpet was laid, Mike started replacing the brown 1 1/2 inch baseboard with this white 3+ inch baseboard.

Next come the hardwoods....

Job #2 Paint, Paint and More Paint

We are painting the whole house and since we retextured the ceilings, means we're painting them too. That's a lot of paint. There was a sale at Home Depot a few weeks ago, so we bought 28 gallons of paint and primer and hopefully it will cover all the walls and ceilings...We thought we were going to have the painting all done before the carpets went in...hahahahahaha!

White Ceilings and Eggshell colored Walls

Taking a break....

Love the paint in the hair and on the face...

I didn't realize how time consuming and tiring painting is...I'm tired of painting and we still have the downstairs to do....did I say I'm tired of painting???

Anyways, while many times we worked late into the night with Decker there, we had to figure out a way to keep him off of wet walls, fingers out of paint, and put him to bed when he got tired.

We made a little bed for him in the hall closet with some extra blankets. He didn't seem to mind-- and was tired enough that he would lay down and go to sleep.

When he was awake and wanting to run around, we would put him in his saucer with lots of treats to keep him occupied. (Decker's room)

(Living room)(Master Bedroom)In all this painting, we even had a visitor....We caught Decker with the ceiling paint lid in his hands brought up to his tongue. We called 9-1-1 to be on the safe side, they got there in less than 2 minutes from our phone call and they called Poison Control and they said that it was a water based paint and he should be fine. Maybe we were a little over protective, but you never know....Decker loved hearing the sirens and seeing the big truck.. What fun!

And did I say? I'm tired of painting....

Job #1 Dry wall and Ceiling

So, first things first, Mike was determined to scrape all of the popcorn, (not infested with asbestos) off of the ceiling. I thought we could live with it and not incur an unnecessary expense that was so cosmetic, but it has really made a huge difference. We scraped the popcorn ourselves to save on a portion of the expense. We thought it was going to be a hard job, but it turned out to be a lot easier than we thought. The company http://woodinvilledrywall.com/ we chose was a huge blessing. Kim was great to work with and he let us borrow many of his tools to get our part of the job done so he could get his part done.

I was amazed at how dark and dirty the popcorn was and how fresh and clean a newly textured ceiling was.

These two pictures show where there used to be a wall separating the kitchen from the rest of the living space. We decided to get rid of the remnants and make it all one smooth transition.Here is the lovely laundry room without a ceiling and a sliding door that has a hole in it on the other side.Now it has a ceiling! Yeah! Good bye spiders and other creatures with more than 2 legs!Here Mike and Heath are framing a new door to our laundry room...and filling in a door space that made no sense going into the laundry room. It opened right smack into the water heater with barely enough room to get by.Some of the additional repairs, holes in the walls etc...this space is under the stairs. The previous owners dog spent some time in here..chewing and clawing..it's all gonna go. ;)

It's pretty exciting to see the changes and updates...can't wait till it's all ready to move in!