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.
It is so exciting to see all the beautiful wood floors. Wood floors were rare in CA, or maybe I just wasn’t very observant. So it is really an exciting step for me! (Picture me wiggling in my chair)
And… they finally installed the stones around the fireplace. Makes it look very cozy. :) We are a little leery of how yellow it looks, but they are in, and the carpet is ordered… not much we can do about it – so, why stress over it? I will find some curtains to tie it all together. I am excited about paint too! We can’t make any alterations to the house until after closing, but we intend to paint before we move in. Just a basic beige (do you know how many shades of beige there are!?), but this morning room area is going to be a fantastic cranberry color.
I’m not sure what goes between the sidewalk pieces, in front of the driveway, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon. Apparently they only put one layer of blacktop on the driveway for now. Then 6 months from now when it has settled and what not, they give it another coat.
We went to check on the progress of our house on Friday afternoon. It is going splendidly, thank the Lord. The have
the cabinets up in the kitchen, base boards throughout the house, railings, bathroom tile, primer on the walls, and some of the appliances are in. One teensy weensy problem we noticed right when we walked in… they installed the island in the kitchen sideways. Its 90 degrees off- the cabinets
were supposed to open towards the stove… now they open towards the sink and dishwa
sales rep panicked and called the contractor to come over and look at it, then he started making calls. Apparently, in some homes they install them long ways like that, and whoever installed it made sure it was the proper distance away from the other counters. So, after some deliberation, Hubby and I decided that we actually liked it better facing that way. Since it was technically up to code, they let us keep it that way. I think it actually opens the kitchen up a bit. I was very excited to see that in all my lower cabinets there is a shelf that slides out! And I am going to have to invest in a cute step ladder because there is no way I will be able to reach those top shelves! I can’t wait to see what it is going to look like when the counter tops come in!! They have almost finished grading the lot! This was taken at the back of the house towards the side yard.
Part of the basement
Our slider, opening the right way fina
lly!
My kitchen, and pantry. Doesn’t look like much, but I’m excited!!
Dining room / Living room
Pumping insulation into the attic
Or as they say out here, “sheet-rock”. I still can’t get used to that term. The image that always pops into my head is giant slabs of granite. Why would I want those on my walls? The brickwork is finished! And from what we could see, they have drywall up in the garage. Hooray. 
This was as of yesterday, then I went by today and saw they have bricks up in the front! Yea! There is a little brickwork on either side of the garage, then up the one side of the front to the peak. They estimate the completion date to be May 20th.
and it is a little bit of a worry that it’s raining on the floor.
We are eating off paper plates, and the washer/dryer have been retired.
As some of you may know, we have sold our condo (at the end of the month), and we are having a home built by a developer. We are really excited! It has been a long process, but the Lord has rewarded our patience. We are moving in with some very generous friends at the end of the month, and the house is supposed to be completed by the end of May. Hopefully everything goes smoothly!
