It's BBQ time!!!

Is it wrong to buy someone a birthday present that also somehow benefits you?

Personally, I think those are the best kind of presents. I look at them as investments. Eventually I too will reap the spoils of my efforts! Meet our new BBQ.





It was an early birthday present for MacGyver. They were having a great sale that I couldn't pass up. And yeah, it's chained to the house. That's right. Just try and steal it. I dare you.

No really, don't. I will cry.

An Open Letter to Termites

Dear Termites,

Please go away.

Wikipedia informs me that you are a social creatures that work closely together to sustain your colonies. You are considered eusocial (according to the ever-knowing Wikipedia), indicating that you have a system of dividing up labor responsibilities amongst yourselves, you have overlapping generations, and cooperative care of your young. I see we have some things in common, humans and termites. Yes, Termites, I have done my homework.

I could embrace our similarities and forge an unprecedented relationship with your insect family. Offer squatting rights, if you will. But I am not going to do that. Why, you ask? Namely, because I don't want to. I find your slimy, albino, leggy bodies vile and disgusting, and your behavior absolutely inexcusable. You're eating our house. And I need you to stop. Today.

Your occupancy has created a bit of an issue with the integrity of the posterior of our house. The door doesn't close properly anymore, and body-slamming the doors in my house is not a recommended contact sport. It is not even recognized by the IOC.

Eventually, the entire floor had to be ripped out and replaced. You remember that day, I'm sure. That was the day we poked at you with sticks and dug up everything you had worked so hard to build. I am generally a nonviolent person, and am willing to forgive mistakes. I understand a first time offense. Perhaps the initial Insect/Varmint/Pest removal completed before we moved in (compliments of Dan the Bug Man - thank you kind Sir), and two and a half years of residency have not been sufficient enough to indicate we live here now. When we discovered your existence, we asked you to leave, and made what we thought was a fair settlement with your Termite lawyers. Apparently you did not take that seriously.

Now we are declaring war. We are prepared to unleash the worst from every level of Mr. Alighieri's Inferno to eradicate your presence from our property. There are no squatter's rights in Tillamook. I've checked. And we pay taxes. Therefore, consider this to be your eviction notice, effective immediately. We will launch the nukes at dawn.



DISCLAIMER TO THE INTERNET: I understand I may have put a few words in this letter that have most likely flagged me on every government Anti-Terrorist Task Force list. I would like to plainly state my disclaimer that I have no intention of causing harm to anything living or dead on this Earth, apart from the odius insects holding court under my back porch. I do not possess WMDs or have access to unrefined uranium. Please do not tell the termites about this.

Testing photo uploading capabilities

I'm providing a gratuitous photo of Linus and Mojo for testing purposes. For those of you who are not acquainted with the schnauzers that share in our remodeling endeavors, Linus is the one on the left. I know he looks ugly. Don't make fun of him, he's sensitive. And it's rude. Mojo is on the right. You can make fun of him. He deserves it.

Joker's wild

It was just brought to my attention from my friend (thank you, Zack) that the Congress Brand playing card we found in the walls is apparently an old manufacturer of playing cards that used very unique pictures on their faces. I did some Internet sleuthing and found out that a deck in nice condition is worth a little bit of money online. Go figure! I think we'll keep our humble little joker wall-card.

New Bathroom!!!

This is by far the most exciting (and necessary) project we've completed on our house to date. I did a fairly good job of chronicling the processes this time so the pictures are all here. I suppose that's what happens when you don't slack off on the blogging...

Let's start by taking a stroll down memory lane to visit our old bathroom. Here it is folks. All 17 1/2 sq. inches of it. The shower stall was the size of a phone booth (Superman most certainly would have had a time of it trying to do his little changeroo in that confined space!!). The floor was squishy in several places and the toilet rocked back and forth a few inches to each side. Everything was rotting out and needed to be replaced. And we were more than happy to make that happen!!

First step, rip out that old shower stall! Yes, folks, that's where we showered for 2 long years.

The next step always seems to involve an enormous mess.

The plumbing was a bit tricky, but God Bless those nice people at the local hardware store. They set us all up with the right tools to do what we needed!!

MacGyver framed in the wall for the new bathtub area.

Then the new subfloor was installed!

First of the sheet rock goes up!

The bathtub does not belong on the bed...

It goes in the bathroom!!

Break time...

Tiling begins!!

Now for the upper part of the bathtub enclosure.

Last piece!!

Cue the violins and chorus...........

All done with the bathtub!!

and here is the spout...

Before this, our only bathroom fan was when the wind blew. Now we have a real one!! Our new ceiling fan!!

Texturing, texturing, texturing...

Finally some paint!

Painted walls by the tile.

Our new can light fixtures!

Now for a new toilet the only requires one flush and doesn't double as a theme park ride!!

Out with the old...

(gross...)

Installing the new subfloor. We pulled out the old linoleum and found such severe atrocities I chose not to document them. Suffice to say things were much worse than we had anticipated and all of the bad things are now long gone!!

In with the new!!!

Tiling of the floor begins!! It is the same slate as the bathtub surround.

Just a few more...

Ready for grout!

Sooooo pretty!!!

A few pictures of the finished product!

I created a panoramic view of the bathtub/shower area using Windows Live.

I like that the bathtub enclosure goes above our heads like a bat cave! :) I love our new bathroom. 

New Look!

Those of you who have visited this site before may notice some changes.  No, you don't need to get your eyes checked.  I changed the layout and color scheme.  I felt the need for a change.  For those metathesiophobes out there, take a deep breath and embrace the chartreuse.  I think you'll find it grows on you.  :)  There are a few other changes as well with which I am experimenting.  We'll see how they work out!!  

In other news...

The bathroom remodel post is on its way!!  I know you're waiting on baited breath....

Ahoy!

Good grief it's been awhile! Yes, I am aware of my slacker ways. I have made excuses for myself on here in the past, but this time I won't even pretend to try. I am a blog slacker. When I sat down today to write this I had planned to stagger the time stamps of the various posts to give a better time line and break up the progress into smaller bloglets; however, I then realized it has been four months since I last posted and I have no idea when we did certain projects. So for those of you gasping in horror that I would cheat on a bloglet entry, fear not. I will lay it all out on this one large colossal blog entry. We've been busy bees upstairs (and by we, I really mean MacGyver - I mostly supervised)! Hold onto your socks folks! Here goes!

When we last left you the large window in the middle of the two rooms had been removed and closed up, and the new wall dividing the two rooms had been erected (the wall I would like to remind everyone, I totally helped build!!). It's difficult to photograph, but the doorways were built next.

This is a picture of the doorway to the room on the left. If you look to the right of the picture you can see the edge of the second doorway.

Here is another view from inside the larger room looking toward the future site of the closet in the small room.




Here is a rough sketch of the upstairs layout. I'm talking about the ones on the right.



MacGyver did some ingenious framing to create just a little more space in the smaller room. Installing sheet rock in there will be a blast! Oh wait...

Anyway I digress. Below are some pictures of the new window installation on the back of the house. Each room has a window that faces the backyard now.

Here is a video of MacGyver opening up the hole for the window. It was very stressful to watch a hole being cut into the side of our house! But now that it's all done I am very glad we did. It looks great! And looking at the back of the house now, one would never know it didn't start out like that!!



(MacGyver with his magic level!)



First window in!



Installing window #2...



All done!!



This was done over a few-week period of time, but you get the idea. :)

MacGyver decided that he didn't like the way the shingles looked from the first patch job, so he replaced them with new ones and painted them to match the rest of the house. (OCD much?) Here is what it looks like now!

So pretty!! Hard to even tell there used to be one window instead of two!

And now, onward and upward, scouts!  We move back inside to watch the transformation of our little rooms!

You've seen all the magnificent framing MacGyver did.  Now it's time for some drywall!!  I've come to both loathe and love this step.  It's the step in remodeling when things finally begin to look like you've done something productive, and less like savage beasts have been inhabiting the space and tearing it to shreds.  And yet, it is a very messy, upper-respiratory system taxing, patience trying, hurry up and wait process.  I'm not a big fan.

I can't seem to locate the early pictures of the drywall installation.  Things got a bit chaotic at that time. It's probably just as well. Any pictures taken at that time might not have portrayed MacGyver and I in the best light.  You see, I learned a lot of important lessons during this stage of remodel. The most important of those being that I am not capable of single handedly holding a peice of 4'X8' drywall up on the ceiling.  I am very wimpy.  That little experiment cost us a sheet of drywall and a few ibuprofen to reduce the swelling of the bump on my head where it fell.  Apparently it's time to hit the gym.  Or find stronger people to help. (I vote for the second one).

Here are some of the mid-way through pictures of the drywall installation and texturing process.

(We *heart* mudding!!!)

This is the nifty texture hopper we bought.  Makes quick work of the texturing process!!

Look how pretty that closet area looks! :)

Here is a nice video of MacGyver texturing.  He makes it look so easy!!

After that came the painting.  I wasn't allowed access to the rooms during that process.  Here are some pictures of MacGyver emerging from the rooms after spraying them.

Hee hee...

So after the paint dried MacGyver did installed the carpet, and created the molding around the windows and floors.  I can't seem to find the pictures of the carpet installation right now which upsets me.  I'm sure I'll run across them at some point.  I hope.  But anyway here is the final product. 

 Drumroll please............!!!

Oh wait, just kidding I forgot the new doors!!  They're beautiful and absolutely worthy of an honorable mention.  Here is a picture of the doors looking from the top of the stairs.  

This was taken pre-carpet and molding (obviously).  

Okay now for the drum-roll for real this time....

Here is our new spare room!!!

We moved the treadmill in there for now.  Pretty fancy, eh?

This is the closet door in the spare room.  I *heart* these doors!!!  Eventually I would like all the doors upstairs to match.  

And now on to the craft room.  A quick disclaimer: 1) Creativity thrives in chaos.  2) This room became the staging area for the bathroom remodel and has not quite yet recovered.  This room may look like total pandemonium to the untrained eye.  In reality, it's organized chaos.  Creativity lives here.  And creativity is happy in the mess.  (And yes, Dad, the door can still close.)

My shelves :)

My closet :)

My sewing table :)

 I will have to work to get a better picture of the window frames.  They are absolutely exquisite.  MacGyver has really outdone himself with them.  This window is my favorite!  It's beautiful!  This picture does not do it justice.  I will try to have Creativity move out of the way so I can get a better picture.  

Alas!  The neverending project finally ended!  And it ended beautifully!  We're so pleased! Yes, yes, blah blah blah...I know what you're thinking.  Well you want to know what I have to say abou that?  It's my blog darnit and Iwill brag and gloat and drip praises for myself and MacGyver all I want.  So there.  But admit it, it looks good, doesn't it? :)