Picture Gallery

Office Gallery

We had this set of framed, favorite vacation pictures hanging in the basement when we first moved here.  When the basement got re-done over the winter of 2008-2009, they came off the wall and sat in a pile for, um, 3+ years.  It's been maybe 6 weeks now since I decided one day to put them on the wall in the office.  I also added pictures to the newest frame in the set, the one on the right.  Noah helped, he held the level for me.  Since we are currently using the bathroom right there all the time, we get to walk past these many times a day.  They bring a smile to my face!
Clockwise from the top we have threesomes: Superior Hiking Trail pictures from some of the big vistas.  Black Hills, SD - red canyon walls, blue skies, and vibrant greenery.  "West Dakota" bike tours on the old mountain tandem, I think this was all Mickelson Trail riding in SD, but might also include a picture from the Maah Daah Hey trail in ND.  Winter on the North Shore, Lake Superior in ice and snow.  The middle picture is from Arches National Park in Utah, we visited Colorado and Utah with that old mountain tandem, too.  Oh man, we used to take great vacations!  When will Noah be old enough to take with on adventures like theses?  It might be these pictures that have caused the discussion to start, but lately, there has been a lot of talk about getting another mountain tandem.  We're basically done paying for a new bathroom, so maybe the next big thing will be a new bike?!
Anyone else out there leaving prepared frames on a pile for years before putting them on the walls?  Any other tandem riders?  Adventure vacationers?

Counter/sinks are in!

Whoa, it's looking downright finished up there!  There are a lot of steps to go, but she's looking good!

Vanity

Sinks and Faucets

Shiny Granite, love that swooping faucet!

I almost feel like I don't need to say anything here!  A few pictures tell the story pretty well.  Makes me really want to get the mirrors figured out NOW and clean up all those details quick as possible so that we can move in and start enjoying it!  The vanity plumbing should be operational by the end of the weekend and the shower floor sealed, so we could shower or use the sinks as much as needed.  Brian doesn't want to install the toilet until the final coat of paint has been applied so that he doesn't have the toilet in the way for any of the clean-up/finish work on the walls and trim in there.  Progress is happening!  We might have this thing done before the permit expires! :)

Let there be light!

 The electrician made it back to put the final electrical together.  The light fixtures are nothing fancy, but we can get the work-man's halogen light out of the room now and use a real switch to turn things on!

Love the glow in that shower.  Why didn't we get the floor sealed during the past two weeks??  I want to move in now!!  The light and fan are working, the shower plumbing and door are up and functional.  All the tile is complete.  We could be bathing in there if we hadn't slacked off about sealing the stones and grout...  The heated floor is also running post electrician visit.  Ooh, does that feel nice on my feet!

Pirate Bubble-beard

We put a bubble beard on Noah and had to quick grab something so that he could see his bubble face.  With our bathroom upheaval, a hand mirror was not going to be found before the bubbles fell off.  The camera, on the other hand was fairly handy!  He thought it was pretty cool to play with the bubbles - on his body, in the water, on the bath toys.

All trimmed out

The trim got put in this weekend!  It had a few issues along the way - height compared to the toilet supply and the cabinet edges, but Brian got 'er done.  

Trim still needs some nail hole fill and  paint - touch up on the baseboards and the works on the door trim.  I think, now that the trim is in, we could place the toilet whenever we get around to it.

We held up the mirrors and wondered if they are big enough.  Coming from the whole wall mirror concept in all previous bathrooms, 2 clean cut rectangles (1 over each of the sinks) seems kinda small.  We also decided that with the cabinet in place, we could hold up the light fixtures in place and see where they might go - that means a call to the electrician to finish the job!  When we held those up, we discovered that we got what we paid for...  They were very cheap fixtures and they were bent such that the glass looked all crooked. We're going to try to get back over to big Orange this afternoon to trade them out for a non-crooked lights.

I'm fighting the mid-winter yuck right now - my throat hurts so bad I cry whenever I swallow.  The worst part is trying to sleep at night.  Happy Valentine's day to me...  Speaking of which, Noah had a grand old time making little cards for his Valentines.  I should have gotten a picture, but we were too caught up in the moment.  There is a party with his friends at daycare.  I have to get better by the weekend!  We're going to Frostbike to talk about starting high school bike teams in MN.  It's going to be awesome and I'll need my voice!  What do you take for a sore throat?  I gargled salt water a few times last night to try to ease the pain for sleeping (along with ibuprofen to reduce swelling).  I think I got 4 hours total...  I drink lots of tea also, hot liquids seem to be helpful.

Stripping!

I tried my hand at paint stripper.  We're trying to take the 37 coats of paint off the bathroom door prior to adding a nice clean coat of Swiss Coffee (our trim white).  It's not going too well...  

What a mess

After 2 passes with the paint stripper

I'm not even close to the original wood.  Part of me wonders how much better the stuff would work in the 65-85 degrees recommended range, rather than the 35 degrees in our garage that I was working in, part of me wonders if really old paint is just that resistant to removal?!  The sticky, goopy Behr paint came off resonably quickly, but it was taking a LOT of the paint stripper to get very far.  Brian says if it doesn't work, we'll just buy a new door, but I'm all about making it work!  Right now, it looks like the kind of thing you might find on display in an antique or craft shop with some berry wreath hanging over it!  Maybe we should embrace the antique look?!

On a different note, we've shown our house to a couple of realtors and an interested party.  Everyone agrees that our living room doesn't feel very large.  Could it be that we have "suburban gigantic" furniture in there, since it was purchase to fit in our previous house (and never made it to the top of the to-do list).  So we're working on a solution to try to open the place up.  We've pulled 2 of the 3 tables and have our throw blanket in there pretending to be a rug right now.  It definitely feels more open.  Seems like this week we're going shopping for an area rug and a tiny accent table.  Haven't decided yet how much of the old stuff is going on Craigslist, but most likely the end tables, possibly the whole room.  Know anyone who might be interested?

Here's the rug of interest so far... Target rug

Fitting together

Two special orders arrived this week!  The first was the cabinet.  We were able to pick it up - it fit just perfectly in the back of the car. Yeah outback.  Fit #1 was a success.  

Fit #2 was to get the holes in the right places for the plumbing to go into the cabinet.  Cutting holes into our fancy new cabinet was a bit nerve-wracking!  Measure twice, cut once!

Fit #3 was to actually get the 60 inch cabinet into the room with a 60.5 inch clearance!  And it had toilet plumbing to maneuver around.  Success!  We got it in without scraping off any wall surface or dinging up the cabinet.  It's in and fits and looks good!

There's a sample of the counter we're settling on up on the corner.  It's not absolute black, which we were originally looking at.  It has a bit more variation and interest (which would hopefully hide some water spots better).  The cabinet has to come back out in order to trim the back/side walls, ugh.  We're making progress...

The other special order that came in was the shower glass!

Woot!

The tile guys came back and finished a couple last details that they had to finish including putting up the shower shelves.  Everything is starting to look great!  Brian is going to work on trimming the room next and after the trim (once the cabinet is finally placed), we can install the toilet.

As far as the crazy number of crazies going on at our house...  We've settled on the mantra of "just say NO", at least for a few weeks and for the "deals" that we've been considering recently.  Now that our house is cleaned and de-cluttered to be "show-ready" we're liking it even more.