She looks really bored here, but she is so friendly! She was a stray that had been coming around Erika’s house, so I transplanted her to mine. I named her Sundae. She is totally white on the bottom, spots on top… like vanilla ice cream with toppings. Corny, I know. I put a box and towel out for her underneath the fireplace overhang on our back patio. After 2 days at her new location she is still coming back for food and affection, so we’ll see how long she lasts! 
Hubby surprised me with a new patio and back steps when I came home from CA! It is so nice to be able to walk out the back door now. We ate outside a few times, when the weather was still mild, and it is so nice to sit and listen to the birds, look at the tree and the sunsets. ~sigh. We have much to be thankful for. Our latest project involves making a planter around the patio and up the side of the house. I have plants sitting around in pots waiting to be planted, but the project seems to get bigger and more involved as the days go by. At this rate, nothing is getting done very fast. What started as digging a few holes and sticking plants in them, has now come to include borrowing a rotatiller (and borrowing a truck to pick up the rotatiller), buying a wheel-barrow, purchasing stones to outline the planters, buying a level to level said stones.. etc etc. My poor car has hauled a lot of interesting things, and she was struggling to get 25 bricks 3 miles. We put some on the floor in the back seat to distribute the weight a little but it didn’t help much. We actually stood on the scale with one to see how much they weighed… 20lbs each. And I realize now that I have no pictures of the actual stones. Oops. I will post one soon.
I admit I completely forgot I was supposed to edit some pictures I took of the boys while I was in CA. Here are a few, I will upload them to Snapfish soon. Mom, I can make the bottom ones landscape if you want too, I think.
I love my new curtains!! Mom came out to visit, and spent most of her time helping me unpack, clean, put stuff away, and she made curtains too! Fantastic job, btw. They look just like I imagined when I found the pattern and fabric. Sometimes, you just need your Mom around. I am so glad she was able to make it out here!
Ok, so it doesn’t look like much, but I am so tickled pink at the deal I got on that carpet! It’s brand new commercial grade carpet, that I got for $40 at a flooring showroom. It was a scrap that they couldn’t do anything with, and they were nice enough to cut it in two pieces and load it into my car!! That just made my day. Now I don’t have to freeze my feet, or put shoes on every time I go down for laundry! So yes, I am quite proud of my little laundry ‘area’. This is the disaster the rest of the basement is in… 
Not exactly the ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ I was hoping for. We turned our gas fireplace on for the first time yesterday. Within 20 minutes or so there was a REALLY strong smell of wood burning. Not a good feeling in a new house. It’s gas, and it has fake logs, so logically one would think that something else was burning besides that. We sniffed the outlets, felt around the walls for hot spots, sniffed in the basement, upstairs, etc to no avail. Finally we decided to give up and call the fire department. That’s what they are there for right? And I was hoping they had one of those nifty thermal imaging cameras like we had in Palm Springs to see heat in the walls. They did! Except they call it “Fire Spy” here. Oooo. I was mortified to have a full response toned out, but better safe than sorry.
{For those of you in CA, when the fire department gets a call here, they have these air-raid sounding sirens that go off at the station that can be heard for miles. I am not kidding. They are staffed with lots of volunteers so that siren is in addition to their pagers. I feel like we are in the Blitzkrieg sometimes it goes off so often!}
Anyway, you can gauge their response time by counting from when you hear that siren go off to when they show up at your door! So after dutifully telling the dispatcher we would wait outside the house, I was bad, and ran around putting down painters tarps and cardboard on our wood floors and very light colored carpet. Can you guess why?
So after finding nothing in the walls, and saying that it smelled more like paint than smoke (not helpful) they concluded that it was just the fireplace getting ‘broken in’, and burning of dust and particles inside. Ok…. So we left the fireplace running and opened all the windows and doors (it was fairly cold out), and of course after they leave the smoke detector started going off every five minutes and we had to keep fanning it. Hubby came up with the brilliant plan of placing a box fan on two chairs pointing up at the alarm, and that quieted the nerve-shattering noise. I am sure all the neighbors are wondering what is wrong with those ‘new people’. They all seem to be quite friendly. Walking around the neighborhood in the evening is very popular here, and everyone likes to stop and say hi and introduce themselves if they see us in the yard or garage. On the plus side, our grass is coming in! Hubby says yesterday… “ I hope it rains tomorrow – it’s free water.” I started laughing hysterically and asked if he ever imaged that sentence would come out of his mouth.
The dining room looks really cool! But that awesome bluish-grey color is only the primer. It does look almost good enough to leave that way! I love the way the kitchen looks too! That color warms everything up!
We had to take the front door off the hinges to get the refrigerator inside.
