Where have I been?

Not sure if any of you have noticed that my posts have significantly dropped in the last few months. Well, I do have a very good reason for that....and that reason is that I am pregnant! Yes! We found out at the end of August.We wanted to get everything major done on our house and after we did we decided to start trying and it happened right away! So the home improvement projects have come to a stop. We have had a few things done here and there but hired a contractor to do them all. So now that we are expecting. I am not sure where this blog is going to turn. I think it will be more of a family blog and photos of our munchkin etc. I am sure we will still continue to have home improvement projects...we will just not be pounding them out every week non-stop like before!

Everyone is always asking how I am feeling. In the beginning I was nauseous in the mornings when I got up and on my way into work. Thankfully my wonderful husband would cook me breakfast and have a glass of OJ ready for me to head into work in the mornings. Surprisingly the OJ helped take away a lot of the nausea for me. That instant sugar rush was just what I needed I guess. Unlike a lot of pregnant people I was not hungry for much. Nothing really sounded good to me and I really struggled with meat. I didn't want anything to do with it. It really had to be cooked in with something and in very small pieces to get me to eat much of it. Something might taste really good to me one night for dinner and the next day the sound of leftovers would make me ill. Thankfully, Terry is really awesome about eating my leftovers and is not picky at all. Gotta love that man! The closer and closer I got to the end of my first trimester the less nauseous I was. Thankfully!!! I did however and still do have to pee what seems like every 5 minutes! Seems like our walks with Cooper have to be cut short a lot because of this...but what can ya do?

Now that I have reached my half way point- 20 weeks as of Monday-I am not as picky about eating food and have not got nauseous at all. Fingers crossed it stays that way. I still have had no real cravings. Kind of wish I had something crazy I craved to tell people but nothing yet! Or a funny story about me having Terry run to the grocery store at 2am to get some pickles and peanut butter...but nothing yet.

We did find out early in November that we are having a little girl! We are very excited for her upcoming arrival on or around April, 29th.  We have also decided on her name and it will be Addison Grace. Thankfully we only argued it out for a week and came to a decision. :)

I have also started taking photos of my progress. Here I am at 18 weeks along.

 

I am going to continue to try to remember to take photos of my monthly progress. I also hope to add some upcoming projects before Addison arrives. Like I want to redo out bathroom floors, build a head board for our bed and of course redoing the guest bedroom and making it a nursery for Addison. Stay tuned.

Our deck is finally fixed!

Our lovely dog Cooper...he is still in his puppy stage. He just turned one year old this month...but he still loves to chew and destroy things. He thinks that everything is his to chew on! We are trying to break this habit because it is now costing us a lot of money. Before we had a carpeted deck. We liked it and it was nice to be able to go out there and vacuum it off. Yes, it was old school and a little grampa-ish but we had no plans of changing it in the near future. See below:

Well last month Terry was packing up for a work trip and he put Cooper out on the deck. Well Cooper saw him packing up and normally we bring Cooper with us where ever we go. Well Terry left for his work trip around noon that day. I come home from work around 4pm and Cooper has decided to tear all of the indoor out door carpet off the deck in front of the screen door all the way back to the furniture....

As you can see Cooper completely destroyed the carpet and even though he looks sad and remorseful in this photo he sure was HAPPY to have me come home and find this mess...I on the other hand was NOT happy. In fact I was furious! But since we didn't catch him doing it their was not much we could do about scolding him for it- since it would do no good.

 

We did lots of research on what we should do to fix it. We could of spend around $50 and got more indoor/outdoor carpet just to have him destroy it again. We also thought about getting a paint on sealant product but thought that the deck would not be able to breath underneath and it also takes days to dry in warm weather...which we don't get in Seattle in November. So after a weekly trip to Costco we came across these 12x12 deck tiles that just lock into each other. They were certainly not cheap ($400) but we thought they were the easiest to install and would allow the deck to breath and we figured that Cooper would not be able to destroy them since they are made out of this synthetic hard plastic material.

 

So Terry ripped off the old indoor/outdoor carpet and then pulled up all the old (somewhat moldy) plywood off the deck and we were glad that we found a pretty decent wood deck below. We were able to put the tiles right over the wood deck. We are really happy with the new more modern look of our new deck. Its unfortunate that we had to spend so much to get it fixed but in the end it does look a lot better.

 

 



A little fixin'

We have not been at all fond of our big black microwave above our stove. One because its black and doesn't match the rest of the white appliances we have in our kitchen and two because the cabinets were not installed with a built in microwave in mind. I think it was originally set up to have just an oven vent there. So it drove us nutz-o trying to cook but not really being able to see the stove controls in the back. Plus the microwave was totally old and crusty and didn't even suck up the exhaust when we were cooking! Shown below is our old microwave and cabinet.

So in August we decided to do something about this! We purchased a new white microwave and after talking with our trusted handy man friend- Randy! He told us to buy a new shorter cabinet for above the stove and he would help us install it all. So we did! It took a few months for our schedules to align but when they did Terry and Randy were able to pound this out in one Saturday afternoon! I was SOOOOO happy to finally have this done and to FINALLY be able to see the controls on the stove and to be able to cook and have it feel like normal with out a big hunky microwave hanging down in your face. You couldn't even tell that we had taken out the old cabinet and installed a new one in there. It is perfecto! Plus the kitchen looks bigger to me know that you don't have this HUGE black box sticking out of the cabinets! Here is how it looks now!

 

Another amazing thing about this microwave it it has a HUGE amount of suction. It even has a turbo speed for the fan!!! Sucks all the heat and steam right up! Also the other thing I am completely shocked about is when you turn the microwave on to reheat something you cant even hear it running!!!! It is so quiet! I had to ask Terry if it was working right. I just love my new microwave and the space we gained above the stove. I am one happy chica!

Our Anna's Hummingbirds

Ever since we bought our house last October we have noticed a family of hummingbirds living around our yard and greenbelt. After doing some research we found out they are called Anna's Hummingbirds. They do not fly south in the winter months and actually stay and live here all year long. We have spent countless days and evenings watching these little guys. I am not sure exactly how many we have living in our greenbelt but I am pretty sure its about 4-8. All day long the make their little screeching grinding sounds and dive bomb each other....and sometimes myself.

Recently we recently purchased an automatic wireless remote shutter release for my SLR camera and set it up on my tripod to get some good shots of the humming birds. I absolutely love this automatic shutter release. It will trigger the shutter up to 100 feet away. So its great for shots like this and say family portraits. Much easier than hitting the auto timer button on your camera then running back to make the shot in time.

Here are the shots we got on Saturday evening of a few of our hummingbirds. From the looks of them I believe that most of these are females. The males are really bright and colorful their entire head is colored.

DIY Stepping Stones

A while back I saw a cool idea on Pinterest on making your own step stones. I quickly read through it (aka-looked at the photos) and sent it onto the hubby and told him I wanted to do this at some point. So while we were rebuilding our fence a few weeks back Terry remembered that I wanted to do this and purchased an extra Sonotube to use as our mold.



 In case you have no clue what a Sonotube is, they use them for putting concrete into for fence posts and such. Anyways, he cut out some rings from it with a saw to make them perfect for little stepping stones.

We laid out some tarp because I really didn't want to slop any concrete on the grass or patio. Then put a layer of garbage bags over the rings.

 I had to add some stones to make them all pretty and special. Then we added the concrete...

....but since I didn't read the directions from pinterest and was just wingin' it....they didn't turn out right. The weight of the concrete sucked the stones into the mold.

Good thing we only did one tester because I forgot the part where you don't put the stones on the bottom first. You first pour the concrete into the mold... then wait about 20-30 minutes (depending on how runny your concrete is) then place the stones on TOP! At that point you can do fun little hand prints...or dog prints like we did.

Here they are dried and placed in our walk way. It takes about 24 hours for them to cure out so you can step on them. They are a bit smaller than I wanted but they get the job done! I just need to make about 6 more and they will go all the way to the gate.