Oh Happy Day!

It has been a fun filled week at the homestead and Todd has been sanding and Verathaning like a mad man. Isn't the living room floor just lovely?


He's working on the rest of the house and we are playing beat the clock to get it done before August 1st...the day Lei moves back in. EEK!!! I'll be doing a marathon paint job this weekend finishing up. The punch list is so long, I'm getting freaked!
The boys were home all weekend, they went to a double feature on Sunday when I went to my Bridal Luncheon, which I am happy to say, I survived. Yummmmm, wine is goooood. I HATE being the center of attention and Jessica did a fabulous job keeping me out of it.
We went to see Steve Poltz this weekend also, which was a fabulous show, but I am getting old and can't stay out late like Todd's mother, who has a better social life than the rest of us put together. Here's a great picture of my new scary dye job my friend Mary took at the show:

Ok, so that's actually my natural color with no sun highlights. Nice dirty laundry water color, right? And this is a lovely picture of Steve singing his heart out. Mary describes his show as watching an accident, you just can't look away (thanks for letting me "borrow" your picture, ok, next time I'll ask first. :)

After spending 3.25 hours laying in the Lazy River at Cascade Bay earlier that day, my eyes hurt so bad I felt like they were coated in sand. I did find out that is my limit. My eyes were killing me, I was a complete prune, my hair was clear, and I gave into nature calling. It was so nice though. I needed to relax a bit, and it's way cheaper than therapy.

The wedding is coming up fast and so after three different tries of how to match the wedding flowers, we decided to go with this:

http://www.weddingsandflowers.com/Wedding_in_a_Box_Dream.html

they match everything! The plans are coming along and one of these days I will get ahold of the music director at church and have her pick the music. That way, it's one less thing I need to worry about. I already started having wedding nightmares...imagine a dark and stormy night, a bright red dress, the photographer missing, and us driving around in a mini Mystery Machine. All we needed was the ghouls and the cheesy chases.

On the weekly gathering we have been starting, we had 2 guests this week. People think a little thunderstorm and a tornado watch is going to put a stop to us having a BBQ. PUHLEEZE! We just used an umbrella over the grill. I ate too much and we made awesome suncatchers. Nana nana boo boo to all of you who thought we'd cancel due to rain!

More to come...

Smooches to all,

Amy

Another Busy Weekend

Todd and I volunteered at the 89.3 booth at the Minnesota Orchestra, Marshall Fields Day of Music on Friday night and we had a great time! It's kind of hard not to when you have people telling you for three hours how much they love you and the station. Ok, the real reason I signed us up was so I could get my 89.3 t-shirt, shallow, but well, it's the truth. The night's line up included some old hippy doing an interpretive dance to every song, which was highly entertaining...it was almost like the First Avenue Nightclub girls, only older, uglier, and hairier. Well, maybe not uglier, those girls aren't exactly supermodels, but definately hairier.
We took the Fat Boy down there, and the motorcycle (I never get sick of that joke!!) and the ride home was absolutely perfect, but down there was like riding through an oven on broil. I felt like a fresh pork rind when we got there...Oh, we went for Dago's at Dustys first, nothing like a sausage sandwich with carmelized onions and peppers to make me feel like a heifer in heat. Mmmm, sausage...
Saturday, I ran errands and had lunch with Jan. She's my new scrapbooking queen. I keep threatening Todd I'm going to start scrapbooking as a hobby and he swears it's grounds for divorce. I think I'll stick to greeting cards. I made my first one last night and it looks weird, I need practice. They look so pretty in the books and what I make looks more like 1st grade meets the computer.
We spent the bulk of yesterday at the duplex painting, sanding, painting and did I say painting? It looks great though, and we are almost done with all the base coats. Colorwashing will probably be next weekend. Here's what it looks like:


Our pretty sander


The kitchen cabinets...almost done!!

The nifty edge sander

The bare floor with a lot of patching.

The pretty bathroom, retro is IN!

We are having our first Monday Night Neighborhhod BBQ tonight, so let's hope no one beats up anyone else with the croquet mallets. I love summer!!

Amy

A Day of Rest

It was a REALLY long week for me last week and I was pushed to the limits of my sanity (ok, that doesn't take much) and I really wanted to just spend Saturday laying on my butt doing nothing. So I packed up the kids, borrowed my friend's kids, and Mary (my new gal-pal) and set off for Cascade Bay. We spent several hours lounging in the Lazy River and being catty girls and making fun of those with worse taste than us. We ate leftover stromboli, pb&j's, salami and bologna sandwiches, had grape fights, ate chips and got baked by the sun. Fun was had by all! Mary says she's going back during the week of her vacation. I think it's better than therapy and you get to tan to boot!
On the home front, Todd is fighting with the paint at Herb's. The nicotine stains are NOT wanting to be covered. He's resorting to spraying Kilz everywhere. I'd give you pictures, but there's nothing to see but a sea of white at the moment.
So here's a pretty picture of Jack:

Proud medal winner for Sparring. The only time I have ever seen his "angry face" and it wasn't followed by a grounding.

So, we spent a lot of time remodeling our own home (actually, it was finishing it) and the basement was a BIG surprise, since it was full of MOLD!!! OH BOY!
Okay, it was nasty and gross so Todd ripped out all the old sheet rock and replaced it with new stuff. He then decided we needed a whole THEATER in our basement. This was the final result:

Note the textured bat cave ceiling and the crown moulding. I know, the exercise ball and the lamp shade in progress add so much.

My lovely colorwashing job. I rock. 

Ok, out of order, but that's our new sofa. 

Amy and Drake
We had lots of fun on the Third of July. I'd post more, but I look like a skank in the pictures so you don't get to see them.

All Work and No Play...

Ok, so we spent hours and hours at Herb's this weekend and I feel like we didn't get anything done. We did get all of the wallpaper taken down, and as you can see in the following pictures, what's underneath looks horrid. We are going to spray all the walls and then colorwash over them so the wallpaper glue texture looks like it's supposed to be there. It would take YEARS to get all the glue off. Todd looked at me over the gigantic pile of old wallpaper and said, "Don't you EVER think of wallpapering anything, ever." I totally agree, there's so much you can do with paint, I can't imagine why anyone would wallpaper anything.
Speaking of paint, painting the kitchen cabinets is a crappy, icky, and overall yucky job and it's going to take at least 3 coats to cover the weird wall tile and the cabinets. We do love the tiny paint rollers (our new best friend) they are small enough to reach most everywhere and you end up with NO brushstrokes. Very nice. Todd is spraying the doors and drawer fronts...it took several trys since the paint wouldn't stop dripping, so he had to sand everything, start over and have everything laying flat on the floor downstairs. Now, they look great! The bathroom is almost done, and it looks fabulous. We decided to caulk and seal the window shut in the shower since the new FAN can keep the moisture out. I am just amazed at the things Todd can do. Crawling up in the attic made the kitchen stuff look like great fun. He put in a new gfci outlet, a new medicine cabinet, the fabulous fan, fixed the floor tile that was coming up (ok, so it's pink, but we are calling it retro) and he put in a new light fixture, so now you can actually SEE in there! Very busy weekend, but Todd needed help and even just having me get the paper off was huge. He needs to go and fix the over-the-fridge cabinet today (it's too low for the new fridge) so Whitney doesn't have to have it in her dining room. Oh, HER kitchen looks just awesome, they did a great job matching her new cabinets to the old ones and I have total kitchen envy.
We did take a few hours off to enjoy ourselves at Summer Fete...we parked at the top of the 8500 ramp again and camped out to watch the fireworks. Great times were had by all...including the doggies.
Amy

Mmmm, Todd's plumbing...

Wow, there's a dishwasher!

And to think we gave up this wallpaper! What WAS I thinking???

And some people question why this is a shotgun duplex.

Remember these phone jacks? And that wallpaper, sooo pretty. What could have I been thinking taking it down?

How Fun Is This?

After trying to figure out how to create a web page and do this on my own, I was ready to throw in the towel and then Mike showed me the way of Blogger. You rock Mike!
So, we can now keep our friends and family up to date on what we are doing without having to actually TALK to any of them, how cool is the 21st century?? No, really, we love all of you.
Stay tuned for the latest updates, I PROMISE I am taking pictures of everything we've been doing to BOTH houses this weekend. Since Todd has me trapped painting all weekend, picture taking will be a wonderful break in the monotony of watching paint dry.
Amy
Testing Photo uploading, Jack (6 years)





Here is Ginger Pye (9 weeks) and Ross (13 years)