Sagebrush and Maple Bars

On Saturday I traveled with my mom to pick up my sister Sara and my niece, Zoe. They recently moved to Seattle, Washington and wanted to come home for a visit. So we agreed to go and pick them up halfway between Salt Lake and Seattle. We ended up meeting them in Baker City, Oregon. Once we picked them up in the parking lot of the Bi Mart we turned around and headed back home. All in one day. We traveled 950 miles in one day. It took us about 16 hours with stops. Pretty crazy, huh? Let me describe the scenery for you... Sagebrush. Roadkill. And that is about it. So while my mom and I were on our expedition Nathen and Annie decided to head down to the BYU basketball game. Annie enjoys going to these mostly for the treats. Her favorite treat is called a Cougar Tail. You can see a picture of it above. Basically it is a gigantic maple bar. Of course her dad helps her with it, but she can eat quite a bit of it herself. Usually when we go to the games she is ready to go home once her treats are devoured. After all is said and done, Nathen and Annie survived their Cougar Tail and Mom and I survived our trip. We are now enjoying having Sara and Zoe with us and I think they are going to have to stay with us for a while, which is good for us, but bad for Kason.

More of the house...

This is the before and after of the kitchen. (minus the new range and sink). We replaced all the appliances, counter tops and flooring. I wasn't too fond of the pinkness. The cabinets are all the same, except I replaced the hardware. When we ripped up the old linoleum we discovered that the dishwasher had been leaking. Upon further investigation we found a moldy, rotted floor. We had to take out all of the cabinets and replace the kitchen floor. I was in a fabulous mood when we discovered all of this as you can imagine. Thank goodness for our amazing dads who came to the rescue!!! We never would have been able to do this without all the help we had from our family. We are very blessed to have the families that we have!

Lots and lots of work

I have been helping my parents paint their house for the last few days. As you can see, Annie was excited about helping as well. She had the important job of painting the wall behind the fridge. Painting is a lot of hard work and helping my parents these last few days really had me thinking back on our huge project last summer: remodeling our house. We bought our first house last June. We bought it knowing it would be a fixer-upper, but we didn't realize just how much fixing we were about to do. We closed on our house on June 8th and spent the next five weeks working on it just so we could move in. We were finally able to move in on July 17th. We are quite proud of our little home and all the work we put into it. There is still a lot to do, mainly in the yard, but we are looking forward to it knowing that we are making our home better and better. Here are a few before and after pictures of our house...
This is the living room before. It had green, dirty, wrinkled carpet and a really funky mirror. As you can see, the railing was lovely as well. It had been sitting out in the yard for quite some time I believe. The previous owner and to put it in the house in order for the loan to go through.

This is the living room after. We repainted and recarpeted and defunked the mirror. We also sanded and refinished the railing. I originally wanted a new railing until I found out how expensive they are!

The picture to the right is the entryway before, and the one below is after.

Probably the most drastic change in the whole house was the bathroom remodel. The bathroom was seriously the scariest room in the house. Nobody dared to use it. We called around and got lots of bids for a bathroom remodel and with every bid I became more and more worried that I was going to have to stick with what we had. I had no idea bathrooms were so expensive. Then one day we had the fortune of hearing about a tile guy who does great work and could completely re-do our tile for just a little bit more than what it would cost to regrout the existing tile. So with a phone call and a couple of weeks of showering at the in-laws we had a new beautiful bathroom!