House Updates: Shed's workbench

WOOHOOO! We finally have our shed! Only 6 weeks after we ordered it when we were told three, but whatever we have it now. So before we started loading up everything we have that needs to go into it, we wanted to build a workbench to put in it so we could better organized the multitude of tools that we have gotten from my Grandma and Grandpa after he passed. So Scott drew up the idea he had, did the math on what all we needed and off to Home Depot we went! We had them cut the plywood in half and the 4x4 posts as well. The 2x4s we cut ourselves.  We then put it all together.

This is the underside of the top. We used brackets to attach the 2x4s to the legs. 

Finished bench!

We still have to cut and put up the pegboard for behind the workbench, but we're trying to decide if the pegboard is going to need more support in the middle of the board since we'll be loading it up with tools. 

But yay we have a shed! Now we just need all the frustrating things to stop happening with our basement work so we can work on getting that completely finished and we'll be able to move on even more! Hopefully we'll be able to catch some good sales over Black Friday for flooring. I'll try to do an update on the basement later on in the week.  

Recipe: Portobello Mushroom Cap Pizzas

When Scott and I went to Wegmans to do our grocery shopping, we ended up eating before we did the shopping (this helps keep us from going crazy). I had already picked out my food, but I noticed some mushroom cap pizzas that looked DELICIOUS. So we got the fixings so that I could make my own version!  They were SO GOOD, but next time I would change some things- but I'll get to that at the end.

Ingredients:

Portobello Mushroom Caps
Mozzarella Cheese
Pizza Sauce
Toppings of choice- I used tomatoes and sweet peppers

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2) Use tin foil to make circles for your mushroom caps to sit on to help keep the bottoms from getting soggy. Brush a small amount of olive oil onto the caps, season if desired.

3) Spread pizza sauce on the bottom of the mushroom cap, sprinkle with cheese and add the toppings and any additional seasons that you would like.

4) Bake for 20 minutes or until cheese starts to brown.

ENJOY!

Things I would change:

1) I would skip the pizza sauce. I found that the mushroom caps themselves produce enough juice that the sauce ended up making everything soggy.

2) I would cut off the stems. This time I left them on and found that it made the pizzas harder to eat or cut.

3) I would add more seasoning to the mushroom caps. This time I used only a tiny bit of salt, next time I think I'll try to add some cornmeal or garlic or a mixture of the two of them to try coating the mushroom caps.

So there is my Mushroom Cap Pizza Recipe! Enjoy!

Puppy updates!

We have now had Freya for a little more than a week, and we are even more in love with her than we were when we got her. Because we know that a lot of people are interested in how she is doing I'll keep doing these updates until she is 100% healthy, and then I'll just do fun updates whenever I remember and get up the motivation to write a blog post- and to help keep my brain focused I'm going to separate this update into groups.

FREYA 
Knee:
On Monday Freya had the stitches removed from her leg, she immediately started walking with less of a limp. She still limps a tiny bit, but not a whole lot. The vet has cleared her to start obedience class on the 23rd, pending the news that she is officially ours on Saturday. The vet also has said that we can start slowly exercising her more in order to build the strength back up in her knee. I was told that they believe she has Petellar Luxation, which is essentially a trick knee. So yay! No ACL issue! However, Scott and I are waiting to find out if she needs to have more x-rays done just to be sure. She is certainly putting weight on leg, which is something my parent's dog, Simba, didn't really when he blew out his ACLs. So we are hopeful that she

does not need any more surgeries.

Skin:
Freya is eating well, and will only eat her food if there is coconut oil on it. Since this is helping her skin we are perfectly fine with this (thank goodness for Costco since we can get a big thing of Coconut oil there for only $18). Her dandruff is doing away, and after the stitches were removed we were told she could have a bath, so she did. She is smarter than Nico since she realized that she only had to bump the shower door to open it. Washing her one handed was an adventure but her fur is already much softer.

Behavior:
Freya has been very energetic, so trying to make her rest has been a bit of a challenge. We've been alternating her between her crate and laying on the floor beside us while leashed. Freya doesn't seem to understand she is still healing and really wants to play. We are now very sure that we need to work with her on play biting since she does that A LOT and her little teeth are freaking sharp. However, we know she is not trying to hurt us, only play with us. She and Nico are getting along. We are still watching them carefully, but we think we know one of the reasons that Nico was so cranky. Which brings us to a ........

NICO update.

This is the face of a pout-pout pup.

Nico has been unusually cranky for the last week or so and this weekend it was finally clear why. Saturday he started shaking his head a lot and scratching at his right ear. By Sunday he kept his head tilted to the right the majority of the time. So we took him to the vet and, yup, he has an ear infection. He has ear drops for the next week (which he just LOVES) but he is already messing with his ear less. Nico is also now on reduced food because he has gained weight. However, we know what caused this and are working on getting him back to a fit looking size. Once Freya can go on walks it will help, and then once we get the fence it will be even better!
As far as Freya goes, Nico has accepted her it seems and when she stole a benebone from him (it was a drive by theft on the way to her crate) he didn't even react. He is slightly confused by her barking and play noises while she is in her crate.

Either way, both pups are doing well and adjusting to having a new sibling and we're looking forward to watching that bond grow.

Welcome Home Freya!

This weekend Scott and I welcomed Freya to our home. She is our foster-to-adopt from Bully Paws and we are so excited.

After everything we went through with Snickers we had every intention of waiting at least a month before we adopted again, but then Freya's picture got shared through facebook the next day and we fell in love. Now there is a little more to the story. 

We had been talking about what kind of dog we wanted to adopt when it was time to adopt again, and we had settled on adopting another Bully breed because of how chill and sweet Nico is. One of our friends is fostering a puppy for Bully Paws named Skittles and Scott had mentioned the idea of adopting her if she hadn't been adopted yet when we were ready. But I just didn't get that feeling with her that I got from Nico and I wanted that feeling again. That and for reasons that might only make sense to my brain, I did not want another dog named after a candy. This was a discussion we had on the day we put Snickers to sleep. The next day Freya's picture got shared on facebook, and I told Scott I had that feeling that I got when we first saw Nico's picture. His response was "there are no coincidences" and that is a phrase (or at least an idea- I'm not 100% anymore) that I am pretty sure is repeated in a book I had recently read that is a modern take on Norse Mythology (I can't be 100% sure because I've read A LOT of books recently). Add on the knowledge that Freya is a Norse Goddess who, among other things, presides over death, and we were saying "Ok universe, we get it". The next weekend we met her, without Nico, went home and sent in the adoption application. 

                                                                                Now, this has not been an easy process. Poor Freya has some health issues that need to be taken care of before she can officially be adopted. She was spayed and had a benign mass removed from her leg. Those incisions are still healing. Then last week something happened to her leg, and now that has to heal with a possible ACL surgery in her future. However, it is much better for her to heal in a loving home than in a shelter, so until she is cleared for adoption, we are fostering her! We are absolutely in love.

Now for her and Nico, we can honestly say it has not been love at first sight. Nico has been the only dog for three weeks, and before that Snickers was a loner so he has to learn to share his people. This is a slow process since Freya is on crate rest for at least another week and a half. There have been tense moments with both Freya and Nico growling at each other. We're hoping once Nico learns that she isn't going anywhere he will adjust. He NEVER growled at Snickers, but she was here first so that might have something to do with this too. We largely suspect the few growlies are because of jealousy but we have complete faith that Nico will adjust. While there have been some growlies, there have also been licks through the crate and Freya barking and wagging her tail at Nico clearly wanting to play even though she can't put weight on one of her legs. So while the first couple days have had their tense moments,  it has only been a couple days and it might take two or more weeks for them to truly adjust. 

So we have a new family member and we will continue to post updates about her and Nico as we have them :-) 

Welcome Home Freya!

Good-Bye

Why.... hello there

Today Scott and I did the hardest thing we've done so far, we took Snickers to the vet for the last time and held her as she passed away, and it was medically induced. There were a lot of factors leading to this decision, but the main one was this: our beloved Basset Hound was aggressive. This confuses a lot of people because, I mean, she was a Basset Hound and they are supposed to be the most laid back of all the dogs, but this one wasn't. We don't really know Snickers' background, we got her from friends who were not able to keep her, and we're pretty sure she was from a backyard breeder, and we're also pretty sure she was a runt. Snickers weighed 35 pounds and that was a little heavy for her. Most of the bassets we have met are twice that size.

We had Snickers (or Snickerdoodle as we liked to call her, Snick Snick to others) around 3 and a half years, and we spent three of those years trying to train her to stop the aggression. It didn't work. When we bought our house her anxiety went up and the vet put her on Prozac. In the less then two years we've been in
the house her dose had up twice to the point that she was on the maximum amount possible. It didn't really make a difference. For the last three months Snickers' aggression had steadily been increasing to the point that for the last month she spent most of her time awake growling, snapping and snarling at us and voluntarily spending at least one night a week in her crate. Something was clearly wrong.

Snickers loved laying in the grass after chasing geese

When we talked to the vet about it a week ago she told us to give her a few days to see if she could find out any other information about what could be causing her aggression, but she did warn us that there was a good chance that putting Snickers' to sleep was going to be the best option. Wednesday she called us to let us know that she was recommending that we put Snickers' to sleep. She talked to all the rescue groups in the area she could think of, none would take her because of the aggression. There were no more medicines we could try, something was truly wrong with her brain. We could have opted to run a lot of tests to try to figure out what exactly that was, but the chances of it being treatable were slim. So we decided we were going to follow the vet's advice so today around 8:45am Snickers' passed away while Scott was holding her. It was fast (less than 30 seconds) and was just like she was going to sleep. It sucked, it was awful, but it was the right thing to do. Snickers was not happy, she was not mentally stable, and she was rapidly becoming dangerous.

One of my favorite pictures of Snickers from a couple months
ago. She had just finished eating a goldfish cracker without even
lifting her head up. Silly Puppy.

Luckily, Nico seems to be adjusting ok- it probably helps that he is completely distracted by the fact he is on the floor in front of us chewing on his bone- which is something he could NEVER do before because of Snickers' aggression. We do plan on getting another dog, but we're going to try to wait a month or two so that everything with Snickers feels settled. We know some people will not understand or approve of what we did, and we're sorry they will feel that way, but they did not deal with the constant struggle of having an aggressive dog and they clearly don't know how hard we worked with Snickers to try to prevent this exact thing from happening. For those of our friends and family who have supported us throughout the ordeal of trying to find ways to fix Snickers' aggression - thank you so much.


We love you Snickers and we are so sorry we had to do this, we will love you forever and hope that you enjoy snuggling up to Grandma, Gagoo and Dad Dad. Try not to steal too much of the pie that I'm sure Gagoo is feeding you... and don't destroy his trains.

We have a deck!!

We are very happy about the fact that we finally have a deck! This is something that we weren't 100% sure we were going to do this year, but decided that in order to move forward on the rest of the home improvements that we want to do, the deck really had to come before everything else. So we saved up our Christmas Club money, our tax return money and the money that we got from selling the red truck after we inherited the white truck from my grandfather and settled on the contractor we were going to hire to do our deck. 

The hubby and I still would like to do the majority of the home improvements ourselves in order to save money, but building the deck by ourselves was not something that we really wanted to do. The deck ended up being between five and a half and six feet up off the ground, and it would have to hold our weight so we decided that was something we just didn't want to mess with. So we went with a contractor that is located right outside our neighborhood so it local, and we really want to support local businesses as much as we can and they were just the best choice. 

Getting the deck installed ended up being a bit of a frustrating process, which was not at all the fault of the contractor and all the fault of mother nature. The week we had scheduled the deck to get put in.. we had rain, A LOT of rain. Enough rain that the main road leading to our neighborhood ended up flooding. Luckily, I have an AMAZING boss who is super understanding and had no trouble giving me additional time off in order to be home when they put the deck in. I did end up having to go into work that morning, but luckily Nico was fascinated by the contractors and didn't destroy anything beyond a box of tissues. 

As promised, it took them one day to install the deck, with the final inspection on the next day, so we were able to start using it immediately. We did decide to wait to really put anything heavy on the deck until after we sealed it, but that process will be a different post because it just deserves its own story, because sealing the deck has certainly been and adventure... and we're not done yet! But the most important part is... WE HAVE A DECK! 

Storytime Love

For a little while, I feel like I've been struggling to get the older of the preschool aged children who come to Storytimes (or Grow a Reader with your Library Classses) at CRRL to actually participate. I usually do action rhymes that encourage child participation, but don't require it. Today at Preschool Time, the Grow a Reader class aimed to 3-5 year olds at CRRL, I tried something new (to me).

I recently requested that the staff get a copy of the book Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham  so that we could look at new ideas for some of our programs and I am so very glad I did! I won't share the rhymes I used today, but I will tell you about them, and I highly recommend that if you work with kids, even as a teacher, you get this book! It has awesome ways to integrate science and math into storytimes also!

Anyway so I read four books, two of which I KNEW I loved to read, the others were new to storytime titles for me.


I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont
I absolutely love this book, and in some ways I think it's because it reminds me of Dr. Seuss. In this story, the young girl says how much she loves herself, no matter how many odd looks she gets, and says how what is important is on the inside. She goes on to say that she would like herself with purple polka-dotted lips, spikes, and porcupine hair, ending with saying I like myself because I'm me. 




I Ain't Gonna Paint No More by Karen Beaumont and David Catrow
This is another one that the entire Youth Services staff likes so much we have it in our special storytime collection so that we always have a copy checked in. It is a re-imagining of the classic silly song "It ain't gonna rain no more" and the kids LOVE it. Usually I just read/sing it, but today each time I got to the part that rhymed with the body part I paused and asked the kids what body part rhymed with that word. They did wonderful on this! The only one was what rhymed with "black"- the parents only had to help occasionally.

Again! by Emily Gravett
This was a new storytime addition for me, and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but I read through it and loved it so I figured I would give it a shot. Again! is all about a young dragon who is being read a bedtime story about a dragon who never, ever goes to bed. When his Mom finishes he yells "again" until eventually she falls asleep... and you'll just have to check out this book if you want to know what happens (but it's cute).


Open Very Carefully: A Book with Bite  by Nick Bromley and Nicola O'Bryne
This was my last book and was also new to storytime for me. I found it when looking for another book and knew I just HAD to use it- partially because it reminded me of the book There's a Monster at the end of this book. In it the ugly duckling is trying to tell it's story when he notices that there is someone in the book who doesn't belong and the rest of the story focuses on the Ugly Duckling's visitor and trying to get him out of the book. This is another one that was a lot of fun and the kids really seemed to enjoy.


Usually when I read stories in storytime I'm sitting down but today I tried it standing up and I felt like the kids had an easier time getting involved in the stories, so for Preschool Time and Alphabet Soup I might start doing that every time.

While I was pretty darn excited with how the books were received I was more excited about the songs and activities I did. Usually my storytimes consist of action rhymes that encourage movement but don't encourage participation and when I try to get the kids to participate they just don't. I decided for my storytime today that just wasn't going to work. All but one of my songs required the kids to give me words in order to continue the song. The songs I did focused on actions- so I asked the kids to provide me with some actions that they were able to do- and they did (with a little encouragement from their parents and caregivers). The next song/rhyme was about feelings and what feelings we have and what they look like. So we said the rhyme and I asked for some feelings and asked the kids to act them out. Some of the kids loved this, some were less interested, but I got better interaction than normal. The final song/rhyme that we did was about a dog and how the dog needed things to be happy. I gave the kids one example (a bone) and asked them to supply the other 5 items. It was really fun seeing what the kids came up with that would make a dog happy- all of them were very common, food, water, a nap, but my favorite was a mud bath. All dogs, LOVE mud baths. :-)

For the final activity, I usually put on music, give streamer wands or blow bubbles and encourage the kids to dance. However, I have noticed that most of the kids just don't want to dance so I used and idea from Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham . I got some easy animal riddles from the book, requested puppets that matched the answers from another branch, and encouraged the kids to figure out the answers. I thought that they would struggle with this and I was SO VERY WRONG. Most of the kids were able to figure out the animals before we even finished reading the riddle. I think having the puppets representing the animals helped. Next time I think I will include some other animals that might match the riddle to throw a bit more of a challenge in there.

After storytime was done the kids were obviously very excited and had high energy. One of the answers to the riddles was Crocodile so some kids were chasing each other around snapping their hands together saying they were an alligator. This was a very fun program for me to do and I think it was very successful and I can't wait to begin working on changing up all my other ones (except Mother Goose- ages 0-2- that one the babies almost always laugh so I think it's fine).

My Grandfather's Trunk

For as long as I've had my own place I've wanted a trunk that could be used as a coffee table, but I haven't wanted to spend the money on one. Well, in the course of cleaning out my grandparent's basement so that my Grandma can move into a smaller place we discovered not one, but TWO trunks. We haven't brought the second one home yet, but we have the first one.

However, it wasn't really in coffee table shape since it had been sitting in their basement for who-knows-how-long. The lining on the inside was so fragile it was cracking and peeling. The hardware that keeps the lid from falling backwards has also broken, so we have to open the lid very carefully.

The outside of the trunk was also extremely beat up. The coloring on some of the leather is gone, the bottom is completely scratched up, and because he was using it as storage, my Grandfather scribbled out some of the previous labels, and also wrote on it (it is also possible that the military wrote on the trunk, it is hard to tell). I tried for a couple days to get the permanent marker off with no success. Luckily, I have a very smart husband who has some really good ideas. He suggested that we use bumper stickers and postcards to cover up some of the damage and marker scribbles. So that is what I did.
I cleaned the outside with some baby wipes. Then I got some out some of the postcards we had from my husband's Grandmother, and got more postcards and some bumper stickers from my Dad. We also went a head and got a few stickers and postcards from the National Museum of the Marine Corps to include since my Grandfather was very involved in the museum. I started out attaching the postcards with a spray adhesive, but apparently I was not paying much attention the day I bought it because it was not a permanent adhesive. So I decided to just go back to my roots, and I used good old Elmer's Glue to attach the postcards and the older of the bumper stickers. I let them dry for a couple days then Shellac-ed the living daylights out of the trunk to help protect it from the dogs. I also pulled off some of the more damaged of the liner and covered it with contact paper. Eventually I might fully rip out the lining and do something nicer, but I like the contact paper solution for now. So now it looks like this!

Most of the postcards came from my hubby's grandma. The majority of the bumper stickers came from my Dad, and most of them are older than I am.

I'm looking forward to doing the next trunk, but I have definitely learned some things from this project.

1. Next time, I will glue the postcards on, cover them with wax paper and put heavy books on top to make sure the postcards and bumper stickers dry flat. No bubbles or curling edges.

2. Whenever using shellac, use the cheap foam brushes that you can just dispose of when you are done because Shellac is REALLY hard to get out of paint brushes. I ended up just tossing the brushes because I got frustrated trying to clean them .

I will post about the next trunk as well!

Corner Cabinet Woes

Every now and then I focus on one project and I HAVE to do it, right away. This past weekend it was the corner cabinet in our kitchen. It is one that has a lazy susan and two shelves. Well it had two shelves and was a lazy susan. It isn't that way anymore.

<---This is what we had. Since we moved in I've been moving things around trying to figure out what I could store in this cabinet to make the best possible use of space. We started out storing our Tuperware here. It worked, but wasn't great. We found that we would just throw it in the cabinet instead of keeping it organized so the cabinet would get jammed with the Tuperware instead of turning easily. So next we tried our small appliances. That didn't work well either, most of them were still too big to really fit without scraping against the side of the cabinet. So we put the Tuperware back. We couldn't really switch the style of storage because the cabinet itself is rounded and I'm in no way comfortable with the idea of cutting that rounding out since I have no idea what the rest of the cabinet looks like behind it. Maybe we'll look into it eventually but not this time.


Well last weekend we decided that we were going to take advantage of the bar-stools that my Uncle and Grandmother offered us, but that meant we needed a new home for the trash can and the recycling. We've been having to move them into the bathroom every time we leave so Nico "Destructo Dog" doesn't get recycling and trash all over the house and make himself sick. I started thinking, "Wouldn't it be awesome if we could put them in the corner cabinet." So I started looking into it. First, I checked to see if the top shelf could come out without losing the support for the door. It couldn't. Then, I looked to see if we could take out that top shelf and rig some sort of support that would work for now. That was a no go. Finally, I decided to check to see would it work AT ALL if I just took out the lazy Susan and the shelves and attached the door like a normal cabinet. Well, it works. It isn't perfect, and we will need to replace the doors with something that actually works well whenever we decide what we're going to do with the cabinets (raise them?, add shelves?, paint them? etc). For now, this works and the Destructo Dog hasn't figured out how to get in there, or has lost interest because he can't smell it as easily, who knows. But so far, so good. This is what it ended up looking like :

This is how it looks open. I plan on making the "recycle" and "trash" labels a bit more fun later on, but that is a different topic. You can see that the door is still at an angle when you open it. That's because it is glued that way and at this point I don't feel like messing with that. I got some basic utility hinges and attached them to the frame, and then the door. It took 2 tries to find a good spot for them on the door, but since I don't see us keeping these actual doors later on, I wasn't worried about it, and the mistake holes were on the inside :-) I also got the wrong type of hinges at first. So I ended up running back out to Home Depot to get the right ones.

 Note: In this case, simple was better- I tried the fancy hinges first.

With the door shut this is how the corner cabinet looks. Now, you can probably see that it is sitting at an angle. My guess is that this has to do with the weight of the door and the fact that the door is a 90 degree angle so it just doesn't lay right. You might also notice that it doesn't sit all the way in the cabinet at the moment. It can close all the way, it is just harder to open, so a temporary handle is probably in the future. I thought about rigging one, but then I'm pretty sure Destructo Dog could open it. Once I attach a handle, I might look at one of those magnet latches to see if that evens out the door for the time being.



So there you have it. The project I thought of over the weekend and just HAD to do, and I love it- it is so handy and I don't spend all day worrying about the trash and my Tuperware stays nice and organized in its new home!

Basement Landing- Rip up that Carpet!!

One of the things that we swore we would not do when we bought a house was have half finished projects that sit around forever. However, we have realized that this is going to happen no matter what because of the cost of updates, and the fact we have animals. To be more specific in this case, we have a Snickers... 

...and Snickers has separation anxiety that shows itself through accidents. On top of that, she has favorite spots to have her accidents, and while we could have her crated throughout the day to prevent said accidents, Nico cannot be crated because there isn't a crate he can't escape. This is a problem because he might freak out that she is crated and he isn't and go all Hulk on us. But I digress. 

Snickers has her favorite accident spots. She LOVES to have accidents down on the basement landing, probably because that is the furthest she can get from where she spends most of her time. However, not only was this causing some serious stains due to her neon yellow pee, it stunk. No matter how much cleaner I used, I was feeling like you could smell it anywhere in the house. So we decided it was time to rip it up....

Look at all those LOVELY yellow stains! I promise, we did clean them with a cleaner after they happened, Snickers just has super staining pee. Go figure. 

So I ripped up the carpet and the pad. Some things we found were not a surprise. Like the dirt. That was not a surprise. However, we were surprised that the concrete had been sealed by the builders before the carpet got put down. YAY! However, we were still going to seal it ourselves with the smell blocking stuff after using the enzyme cleaner. But first, we had to rip up the carpet tack. I was expecting that to be really hard to do since it was in concrete, but it wasn't. The downside is that there are now dents in the concrete from it coming up with the tacking strips. 

So the tacking got pulled up and we scrubbed the floor down with the enzyme cleaner and got to sealing. We put two coats of the sealer down and called it good. We then found that just because it was sealer doesn't mean it doesn't stain. So we cleaned again, painted over the stains and then used a polyurethane coat on top of the sealer. Although the sealer says it is "clear drying" the sealed floor now has a yellow tint. However, this is a temporary solution and the polyurethane coat means that we should have quick and easy clean up for any more of Snickers' accidents downstairs. Once we have the deck we'll look into tiling the landing into the laundry room so that it has a nice finished look. But for now, we'll take the not as nice look, but no longer smelly sealed concrete look. 

Adventures of Destructo Dog

Many of you know about our many adventures with the pittie mix we adopted back in August, well the adventures keep on going. Last week Nico figured out how to get out of his latest crate, which is a plastic airline style crate. That's three crates he's gotten out of. We've decided to give up on the crates, however, that means we are going through a whole new learning process on what is truly puppy proof in regards to Nico, aka Destructo Dog. We already knew we had to lock up the recycling bin, and while he's never gotten into the trash, we lock that up for good measure. Around Christmas, and crate number 2, we found we couldn't leave anything on the peninsula counter or the table, he could knock them down. We also learned then that we couldn't leave anything close to the edge of ANY of the counters or he would get it.

Well, this week we learned that we can't have ANY dirty dishes out. How did we find this out? Well, one of the mornings I was running behind and I got MOST of the dishes washed, except a pie plate. So I put that on top of the microwave thinking it would be safe there, but I was wrong. When the hubby got home, only a little before me, not only was the pie plate lying broken on the floor.... so was the microwave. So we no longer have a microwave. We're seeing how long we can go before getting a new one, partially because we are debating what to do. Should we just get another that sits on the counter? We both aren't fond of that idea because we like the counter space being open! Do we want to get shelves to mount above the peninsula and have the microwave either sitting on those or mounted below them? Not a huge fan of that idea- I feel like that will close off the kitchen a bit and one of the things I love about the kitchen is how open it is. The other option is to raise up the cabinets and to put the microwave above the oven/range. This is something we do eventually want to do- but since it will involve repainting, buying some additional shelving or small cabinets to put underneath the current ones once we range them we were planning on waiting on doing this until AFTER the basement was finished. This option also involves electrical work because of the fan that is above the stove now. Thank you Nico for yet again possibly  re-arranging our time line of home improvement plans.

This morning I spent some time re-arranging the shelves in the living room because yesterday Nico decided the DVDs and video games looked appetizing. That luckily was really easy and led to a better arrangement of storage down by the front door.

I guess today we will see what destruction Nico can cause in the 2 hours I'll be at work today- plus probably another 3 for errands/travel time. We'll see! One thing is for sure, once we have kids, the hubby and I will have to do very little baby proofing because our house will be puppy proof.

Goodbye bushes!

Before- with bushes

Since we moved in to our house, I have been saying that the bushes were not going to stay. I hate them. I don't even know WHY I hate them, but I do. I think part of it is the fact it's two and three, not three and three, not two and two. The sides don't match, and that bugs me. They also don't grow evenly, so there is no hope of shaping them into similar looking bushes. So last week I got some money from my awesome family for my birthday, and they kept saying "use it for something you REALLY want!" and after thinking about it, I'm going to use it to get some flowers for the flower beds! But before I can really even start planning those flowers, the bushes had to go. So today, they did! The front of our house is now bush-free!

I'll be the first to admit that after so much time with the bushes, the house looks REALLY WEIRD without them. Despite that, I am happy they are gone! Now the next step is to finish evening out the dirt on the right side and figure out how much topsoil we need to get to fill up the boxes. Then it's time to officially decide what will be planted. We are thinking we want some juniper right up against the house if it is something that can grow in partial sun. I would also like some creeping phlox towards the front of the flower beds- partially because those tend to drape and I think they would look SO pretty, and my parents have some in their yard and I love them. But neither of those are 100% what will be done. But hey! the 2nd step of the front flower beds is done! Flower beds built: check. Bushes gone: check. Next up: DIRT!