Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Little White Stuff

Got our first snowfall of the season today. This is Madison's 3rd winter, but at this age, it's always a new experience for her!







Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Enjoying decorating for Christmas in our new house, including 2 trees and little festive Martha Stewart touches everywhere. Fun stuff!











Monday, November 30, 2009

First Ponytail-sprout

Well it's not the most attractive hairdo but here's proof she has the hair to do it! ;-)


Friday, November 27, 2009

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Monday, November 16, 2009

Little Laughter

I so rarely hear Avery laugh (though she smiles a lot), so I was glad to capture a few seconds of her laughter on video. You wouldn't think she'd be laughing with Madison tormenting her so, but Avery seemed to find it amusing.

Early November Pics

I'm overdue to post some current pictures......




Few from Lily & Katrina's birthday party... I need to photoshop myself into this pic and we'd have 4 generations. ;-)




Lily was 6 --



Kitty was 1 -- Seriously, can you get eyes any bigger than that??


Peekaboo, Bugaboo!
Madison playing with Daddy's hat & arranging the pinecone 'food' around the table --
Madison's outfit for church on Sunday - 'Tis the season!
I love this - I told Madison, "Go stand next to Avery"







Thursday, November 5, 2009

The House Tour: Part 4

At the top of the stairs there is a pretty wide open hallway. Directly ahead is Madison's room. Straight ahead and to the left is our bedroom. Directly to the left is the bathroom.
Pardon the boxes -- the upstairs is still a work in progress!

Looking into Madison's room. She's still in a crib for now but we have a twin bed ready for her on the front porch just waiting for some 'extra time' to get it set up.



The view looking back out of Madison's room (and a sleepy Madison who refused to get out of the picture ;-)



A shot of our bedroom. Don't you just *love* the wallpaper??? ;-) Another thing on the 'gotta go' list.
Unfortunately we don't have a lot of closet space. You can see the one closet we do have in the bedroom there on the right. Our plan is to knock out that wall since the closet extends all the way back to the wall, but it's impossible to get to the back of it. One of our not-right-away-but-hopefully-soon projects.
Walking back into the hallway... We have a nice landing area straight ahead. The boxes will go, and I plan to put a couple good-sized bookshelves there.
The 2nd door to the right is Avery's room. The 1st door directly on the right...
...is the bathroom.
We painted the bathroom. And the color is slate gray, not black. ;-) We'll have white accents and silver fixtures - and hopefully white chair rail/Wayne's coating (sp?) around the bottom half of the walls.
The bathroom is the one room of the house with the biggest plans for renovation. The tub/shower is good but everything else needs to be done. Floor (who puts a carpet in a bathroom?!), double sink, lighting, vanity, etc. But as big a project as I expected it to be, it's snowballing into about 5 times bigger than my original project estimation, soooo...
Finally, we have Avery's room, another one we painted. Avery's room will be storage/nursery for some time to come. When baby #3 comes along (waaay down the road ;-), Avery will move into Madison's room.
The other side of Avery's room.
That's all folks! Thanks for joining me on this photo tour! I hope it satisfied those of you who have been eagerly waiting to see pictures for months now. We hope you will be able to stop by and see it for yourself someday soon! ~

The House Tour: Part 3

The back door looks out to the garage... The garage is considered 1 1/2 car -- not exactly sure why. The door is a one-car door but the garage is deep enough to park both our vehicles. The other side is seperated by a wall & used to be a workshop of sorts.

Our house used to be owned by the 'cat lady' who fed all the stray cats in town. She used to leave the garage door open for the cats to live inside -- there's still straw all in the back area of the garage which needs to be cleaned out. The whole thing needs to be disinfected. It's a fantastic space with a lot of potential but will take some time, money & work to get it up to 'useable' status. Well - useable for anything other than parking our cars inside.



The yard extends to the neighbors' fences and down to the back end of the garage. There is a giant black walnut tree in the back yard which, this fall has been a curse, but I can't help but think in the spring & summer (when it's not dropping its horrible messy walnuts all over our yard) it will be a blessing with potential itself. (Forts? Swings?)




Going back into the house...

...and through the kitchen to the side porch. This will be a great room in the warmer months.
The weather was still mild when we first moved in, and this was the play room where we confined the kids as we worked on the house - they loved it. Eventually (we might not wait for our ship to come in for this one ;-) we would like to winterize this to use year round.


Here's a view from outside looking at the side porch.

The tour continues upstairs...

The House Tour: Part 2

Here we are in the dining room.

One of the big upgrades we plan to do is replace all the windows early this spring with new vinyls. The large window behind the computer I have special plans for. Right now is one of the old kind that fan/crank out to open. I'd like to put in a nice bay window and possibly a window seat.



The view from the living/dining room doorway toward the kitchen doorway...

Because the kitchen was roomy enough to hold our table & chairs, we decided to use the dining room as an additional living space -- holding our computer, hutch, toybox, kids' bookshelf, etc.



Looking into the kitchen from the dining/kitchen doorway...

We have lots of cabinet space which is fabulous. On the left side is the sink, and there are 3 cabinet sections underneath. We plan to take out one of those sections (the farthest to the left that you can see) and put in a dishwasher (which we have - just haven't had time to put it in).

See the square to the right of the window? Let's just call that a giant paint chip -- one of the colors we were considering for the kitchen. It looked a lot different/brighter in a friend's house that used that color! It's darker than what we're going to want, but red/cranberry is the color we're planning on. It will end up being an accent color as the cabinets and ivory wall tiles cover much of the wall space.

To the left of the window is a doorway...



...a view from that doorway back into the other side of the kitchen. Yes, our dryer is in the kitchen. Might change someday but for now it's not in the way. The door on the right side goes out to the side porch.



The doorway from the kitchen leading to the back entry. It's nice to have a 'mud room' space!
Through the door and on your left...



...is a half bath/laundry room/pantry. Having two bathrooms is the gift that keeps on giving, lemme tell ya. Aren't the pantry shelves great? Eventually (when our ship comes in...) we'd love to get a stackable washer/dryer which would allow the space to put a sink in here & make it a full bathroom. But if we never get to do that, it won't be the end of the world. Still toying with ideas for color in this room. I have a few ideas but none I've discussed with Matt yet so I'm not going to publish them just yet!

The House Tour: Part 1

The Official House Tour

Hi! Welcome to our new home!! It's hard to believe after all the trauma I can finally call it our house. I feel like I finally have the freedom to be excited and happy about it! It's been so long living here, not in 'fear' of the seller, but just with the sober knowledge that 'it's not ours yet'. So we didn't totally have the freedom to do what we wanted. But after finally closing last week, it's ours! This is definitely the biggest thing I've ever purchased -- both in physical size & cost! But I like it -- for all the work & expense, it's a fun adventure to journey through (the homeownership part - not the homebuying part).


I'll do this tour in several parts. Let's start in the front...




The front porch door is new - one of the first things we did after moving in. The old porch door was terrible and the handle pinched your hand when you closed the door -- not good with having little kids (not good for me either!).

So once you come inside the porch...


...entry door into the living room. Like the "putting green carpet", as Matt says? That's on our "it's gotta go" list. But it's a good-sized porch. We're using it for some storage right now -- a few boxes that aren't unpacked yet and some misc. things since we don't have an attic (& the garage isn't storage-ready yet).

The view from the entry door looking into the living room & through the next doorway into the dining room...




...then the view from the dining room doorway looking back into the living room toward the entry. The living room and dining rooms are 2 of the 4 rooms we painted prior to moving in. (Many more to go!)