My First Robot

Since we've been working so much in the yard, we haven't gotten very much done inside the house lately, but here is one of the few updates we did do recently:

From April 17th:

www.instagram.com/charitychain

 

We now have AI in the house. I do not take this lightly.

I was hoping my first household robot would be the kind that vacuums. ;)

But who knows, maybe this one will save us enough money to buy the other one.

 

This is the Nest "smart" thermostat, put out by some of the geeks over at Apple. The coolest AND creepiest thing about this guy is that he *learns our habits* and starts to program himself around our schedules. Also, he has a motion sensor and if he detects you are Away, he lets the temp get lower/higher than usual to conserve energy, then automatically resets himself when he *sees* that we are home. Also, he is connected to wifi, so I can change the settings from my phone no matter where I am, he's able to see weather forecasts, and potentially receive software updates automatically. He shows what the temperature in my home will be in 10 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc., based on the current settings and the weather outside.

 

Big brother is totally watching. No really. This is his eyeball.

 

But I guess it was inevitable, right?

 

P.S. I just creeped myself out by calling it a "he" for this entire post.

 

Anyway... next time we get a robot, I want a Rosey Jetson or at the very least a Roomba. ;)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video here ,if you're interested.

 

 

 

 

Home Improvement: Vinyl Floors

Gonna keep this one short and sweet. For the both of us. :)

Most of the work was actually done about a month ago but we finally added some finishing touches to it, so I feel better sharing.  ;)

This is the kitchen floor BEFORE.

A little scary, yes? The tile was so old and bad, it was literally falling off. You could kick the tiles up. Joel wasn't even sure what they were. Not ceramic.

Unfortunately I don't have a Before of the bathroom. Don't know how I missed that one. But that is still very much a work in progress anyway, so we'll skip it for now. Sufficed to say - the process I'm showing you here was repeated in the bathroom and laundry room as well.

>>>

First, Joel tore up all the layers of flooring until he got to the very bottom. I'm not even sure what you call this layer, but it's basically part of the frame of the house.

Then he laid down underlayment in all three rooms: kitchen, laundry, and bath. It's basically a thin board.

I will spare you all the details of how I went about choosing color and type of flooring. I will say this - we decided on a vinyl tile because (a) Joel could install it himself easily enough and (b) it allowed for flexibility during later renovations. For example, later on when we are tearing out old cabinets in the bathroom, if the new cabinets take up less floor space, we can just add tiles here and there as we need to and not have to re-cut/ re-install a whole sheet of linoleum flooring!

They were self adhesive, and seemed very easy to use. I should talk - I didn't do anything! :) So, you just line them up press them down or roll them on. Of course there is cutting involved once you get to the edges and corners.

Joel found a little helper to hand him tiles as needed.

                         

                                       Before                                                           After

                                                                          Wide shot

Done in the kitchen: installed flooring, fridge, oven, microwave, painted cabinets/new pulls.

Still to do in kitchen: New cabinets, sink and counter tops. And, since we don't have a dishwasher right now, we'll also add one (and the townspeople will rejoice).

And after we're done tearing things off the walls and putting things on the walls, only then can I justify painting the walls. :) Can't wait!

Thanks for visiting.

Home Improvement: The Boy's Room

It's really late and I'm really tired, but I wanted to share a few photos with you before I collapse into bed. I'm just excited because I've been waiting for a few weeks now to be able to finish this project and then share it with you. We've been living here for over a month now and we finally have one room almost done! :)

Here's a photo of my son's room before we moved in. (And my son posing in it. Hehe)

The floors look alright from far away - but they really needed refinishing. And, while were were at it, I wanted them darker, since they were kind of a honey brown. The walls were very dingy and dirty and needed paint. The windows are newer, which is good (probably one of the few things in this house that's less than 10 years old!), but the casings were unfinished.

Anyway - Joel refinished the floors before we moved in and then this is what the bedroom walls looked like for the first few weeks.

About a month ago, we finally found the time to start painting! My son was very invested in the project - he picked the color out himself, and had been looking forward to helping with painting for a long time, so we went ahead and gave him a brush. And then I realized he doesn't have any "work clothes" like mommy and daddy... so we let him paint in his chonies! He only helped for a couple of minutes. ;)

 That's the most adorable house painter I've ever seen...

 ♥

 Taking his work very seriously.

 Oh yeah, and Joel helped a little too. :0)

 

Here's what the old door casing looked like before Joel tore it all out. And there was no baseboard at all. So, after we painted, we waited a few more weeks to acquire the tools needed for Joel to install baseboards and new door casings. And I got to be helpful and paint those myself while Joel was at work (I was pretty proud of me). :P Anyway, here's detail of the new casings and baseboards. 

.

So today we finally unpacked all his toys! When we got to his boxes of books, he ended up spending a few hours looking at all the books he forgot he had and 'reading' to himself.  ^_^

And here, my friends, is our somewhat finished product! Tada!

What I'm not gonna tell you is how big the mountain of his toys is that stands behind me as I take this photo. ;) Funny side note: I told him maybe it was time to sort through his things and see if there was anything he wanted to give away to kids less fortunate. We do that from time to time when he has gotten to a point where he's accumulated a lot. After sorting through a few hundred guys and cars are other little toys with him, there were exactly three items in his giveaway bag: a broken plastic Easter egg, a sticker dispenser with no more stickers and a pair of 'disguise' glasses. It was so pathetic, I just stood there laughing at the sad little bag. Ha. Oh well! Guess he wasn't in a very giving mood. Maybe we'll try again later.

So I say it's 'almost' done because the only thing we have left to do in this room is to install a new light fixture (the one in there now is blah... and broken actually, so he just has a lamp right now) and we'd also like new blinds eventually. Maybe some window treatments... but for a little boy's room sometimes I think that's over the top. We'll probably hang some of my son's art work on the walls. That will really make it homey :) Then I think we'll be finished here!

Anyway... no sooner are we done with it than I am left wondering how we will rearrange it in a few months, when it goes from being a boy's room to a boys' room!! ;) That will be interesting.

Tomorrow we hope to paint our room and maybe I'll blog about our new vinyl flooring.
Thanks for visiting. :)

Humble beginnings

These are the cheery faces I greeted as I went to water my veggies today.

Tomatoes

Bell Pepper

Let's not discuss what number 'attempt' this is for me. Haha. These ones were doing great until we moved and the day after we moved, I found them crusty and mostly dead. I assume I made the mistake of taking the flats outside too early for the little guys, since it was about 1000° that day. Anyway, I picked these up during one of our many recent trips to the home improvement store. They were about 12" when I got them a couple weeks ago and I made sure to enrich they're soil and find a good sun spot for them. They've grown really well (about twice as big as they were) and I am so pleased to see flowers on them. ^_^

"Energy and persistence conquer all things." ~ Ben Franklin

Although  I'm not sure I've conquered anything just yet. I suppose I shouldn't count my tomatoes before they... hatch.

Since I was taking photos of our hap-hazard "garden" - or the beginnings thereof - anyway...

This is Joel's baby. It's a Satsuma Mandarin tree. He has a thing for citrus and we have already talked about wanting to get fruit trees in the future. But this is our first one. If you look closely, there is one fruit on the top! But it's still really young so I don't expect too much this year.

Satsuma Mandarin

The fig tree was here when we moved in (obviously - it's huge!) For some reason it has been trimmed very lopsidedly. That bushy area to the lower right is actually the main trunk with a bunch of new suckers on it and then the huge branches reach way out to the left. Weird! We will let it give fruit this year before we take all those left-side branches down. And at that point we'll decide whether to keep the tree and just cultivate the new growth on the trunk or take the whole thing down as well. It's not a bad tree, but I'm not a huge fig fan. I guess it's fun to give them away though. Anyway - this is the meat bees' favorite place to hang out! I think they like the sweet fruit.

Fig Tree

And here are just some little annuals I planted in front of the house, just to have something cheerful to greet our visitors. The dirt here is VERY hard and has lots of clay in it. I mixed in a little compost blend but I'm not sure how some of the petunias (purple) are fairing. We'll see. I just have to remember to water! Water water water.

Being busy with the move and remodel right now, and expecting the Little One in a few months, I've decided to mostly wait until next spring to start a serious garden (raised beds and irrigation and all). So for now we just have some potted things here and there.

Thanks for visiting!

Home Improvement: The Kitchen Cabinets

Here are some kitchen photos we took a few months ago, when we saw the house for the first time.

 

As you can see it needed a major face lift! I think a lot of it might be original to the house, which means they're about 60 years old. Over the course of the past week, among other things Joel has done, he also painted all the kitchen cabinets inside and out and we replaced the pulls. Then I added contact paper to the inside, just for a nice clean finish. It was the first time I've ever used contact paper, and I'm not totally sure, but I think it might be love. It reminds me of the first time I held a label-maker. Suddenly, I wanted to label all things in my universe. Haha. Well, a similar feeling overcame me while working with contact paper. Hmmm... what else can I cover with this stuff?? :-) Anyway... back to the results.

BEFORE:

Gross.

Gross.

GROSS!

 

AFTER:

Much Better!

This will hold us over until we can get new cabinets (hopefully next year). And at that point, we'll also look into installing a dishwasher (which will be welcomed to my home with trumpets and rose petals), a new countertop and sink. I can't wait! It's gonna look so good when it's done!

The kitchen floors are almost finished, too. Another major improvement! More on that next time. ;)

Home Improvement 4: General Update

Today I'm feeling very pregnant and HOT and so exhausted from two weeks of hard work that I could barely keep my eyelids open all afternoon. Which is probably just as well, since I sprained my back yesterday and should be resting. So, in this forced holiday so to speak, I decided to try to put together some semblance of an update for you.

Lately life has been a blur. All the days meld into one. I have thrown all my usual schedule and routine to the wind in favor of the task at hand. Which is: to remodel the house and then to slowly begin to unpack some boxes. The unpacking has to wait until after the remodelling, you know. For instance, in the kitchen, the cabinets need to be repainted. And by that, I don't mean that I really wish they were a different color, I mean the paint that's there now is peeling and flaking off, and we don't want that in our bowls and cups, so they really need to be repainted. In the meantime, all my pots and pans and recipe books and tupperware and even my entire pantry of dry goods, sit in boxes quite patiently on the living room floor. :) Take that scenario and apply it to every room in the house.

But painting cabinets is not the most pressing need. Which is why we haven't done it yet!

Joel has been amazing. I think there must be something special that God puts in a man that really makes him want to work so hard for his family. I can't imagine what other explanation there could be for the momentum that seems to drive them sometimes. He has done so much around the house already, it's kind of mind-boggling. I hope you'll indulge me, as I give into temptation and just share the huge list with you of some of the things he has done in the last 17 days:

• Pulled up the carpet
• Sanded down the floors
• Stained the floors / polyurethane for protection
• Installed the toilet
• Pulled up the old linoleum and even some of the subflooring in the bathroom
• as well as the kitchen and the laundry room
• Installed new subflooring (underlayment) in those same three rooms
• Installed the flooring (vinyl tiles) in those same three rooms (this part is almost done)
• Researched and order a new fridge and oven /range
• Installed a new back door
• Fixed a leak in the spigot outside
• Trimmed the loquat tree branches that were rubbing against the house
• Started painting in the laundry room
• Hooked up the washer and dryer

... and about 50 other 'littler' things that I am sure I'm forgetting. Not bad, huh? Especially for someone who has a 40 hour/week job and only 'gets to' work on the house in the evenings and on the weekends! I am so proud of him. And I am sure he is even more exhausted than I am.

There are precious few things that I can do in my condition, but of course I waddled around and did what I could too :) Which mainly involves trying to clean the place from top to bottom (no easy feat - I think the guy who lived here before us was an elderly bachelor, so it's obvious to me that he was neither handy with a hammer nor a sponge), and pruning the jungle of flora in the front and back yards.

OH! I have rose bushes! Did I tell you that?

They were a little intimidating to me at first, but like most things in my life that intimidate me, I googled it and educated myself. Haha. I was a champion rose-pruner in no time. It took me about three days just to prune the 6 rose bushes with my little hand pruners, as well as a very large (and overgrown!) Camellia hedge in front of the house. Here are a couple of my favorite ones that have bloomed since:
      

   

I wish this was Smell-a-vision, because really half the charm is in their intoxicating aroma...

Another thing that takes up a LOT of my time is my War on the Box Elder Bugs. We have a huge Box Elder Maple in the backyard, which is very nice and shady. But it has attracted thousands of these creepy little beetles into the backyard

and they have gone unchecked for over a year now (that's how long the house was vacant before we moved in). I read somewhere that, of all the pesticides you could use, soapy water is actually the best thing, because it suffocates them. So, I kinda want to just flood my yard with soapy water, but unfortunately the little buggers fly, and a lot of them would get away. Instead, I spend the better part of an hour a day out there with an ortho-sprayer filled with hot soapy water, killing them one by one and drowning out the little hatchlings. They don't bite or anything, they are just a nuisance and so gross, I get the heebyjeebies just thinking about them. It might just be my imagination, but I think their numbers might be going down. My goal is to kill as many as I can before they mate and lay eggs so there will be less next year and so forth. What really creeps me out is that I just read they can find little crevices in your house to hibernate for the winter and then there is the chance that you will have little beetles flying around your house in the spring when they wake up. YUCK! Our old stucco house has cracks and crevices a-plenty! So my main goal is to keep them OUT. Oh, that reminds me, add this to Joel's list (he did it yesterday).

• caulk the windows and a bunch of crevices around the outside of the house

There are a few other options we might look into for pest management.

All of our new neighbors have been very friendly, taking time to introduce themselves or at the very least wave hello from across the street. I cannot count the number of times they all said to me "Well, you've got your work cut out for you!" How do they do how much work I have cut out for me, I wonder? I think they must have all got together at some point and taken a group tour of the house when it was on the market. :-)

Well... I hope this post didn't sound too much like complaining. I am really so excited to be in our new place and we have such BIG vision for it. But it just seems like so much work sometimes! And we add things to the ToDo list every day. I really don't want to speak evil on it at all, but sometimes it reminds me of the movie The Money Pit... or maybe that old Jimmy Stewart one, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. I am chuckling now just thinking of them. It's just humorous to consistantly find something else in the old house that needs repairing or some new strange quirk with the place. Sometimes I stare at a new Thing I have found and go "Hmmmm... what the heck IS that and what is it supposed to be for?" It's kinda funny.

Seems like I've shared a lot, and still have more to share, but I'll give us both a break for now. I'll post some befores and afters soon. Well, befores and "still working on it but doesn't it look betters" ;)

Thanks for visiting!

Mystery Tree

We have this beautiful and very interesting fruit tree (possibly two of them, actually) on the side of our new house. It offers some nice shade, helps keep the house cool and looks almost tropical. Any guesses as to what it might be? ;)

Home Improvement 3: Stained

Joel had the day off work for the holiday. Well, day off his office job, but he definitely worked all day today. We are pretty tight on time, so thank God we had this bonus day to get things done before we move in. Joel stained the entire house today: two bedrooms, a small hallway, a large living room and a dining room! What an amazing guy... :)

Here are some pics of the floor in its new color. First one taken tonight and second one earlier today in the daylight.

I am pretty pleased with the way they turned out, and really can't wait to enjoy them. Joel still has to do the poly coat tomorrow night (after he gets off work!). And we would still like to paint the walls and put in new vinyl flooring in the bath and kitchen before we have to move in Thursday! Cross your fingers for us. ;)

A word about color choice. What I really wanted was a dark coffee brown, but it was almost impossible to find in stock anywhere. And it was logistically simpler to stick with the Minwax brand, but that also kind of limited my color choices. The first one we tried was Jacobean. We got a sample and Joel tested the colors in a hidden corner of one of the closets.

I found it was too 'black' and not 'brown' enough. So... looking at the samples in Home Depot, I thought maybe Dark Walnut looked browner. Doesn't it look browner? I thought it looked like it might be browner...

From left to right, this is Jacobean after 5 minutes, Dark Walnut after 20 minutes and Jacobean again after 15 minutes. What really confused me was that Dark Walnut @20 and Jacobean @5 look so much alike. I really could not tell them apart at all.

But this is also where I decided I didn't want the black undertones in either of them, so I looked at that sample chart again, and decided to try English Chestnut. I promised Joel this would be the last sample I'd make him buy. ;) Good thing they come in little half-pint sizes. Here is English Chestnut under the first three tests.

It did look a little browner so, even though it wasn't as dark as I would've liked, I said - let's go for it, English Chestnut it is!! And the floors turned out really great. Darker than I thought they'd be, so that was a nice surprise. :)

Now... what color to paint the walls?!

0_o

I'm in Cottonwood, Ca right now for a cousin's wedding. Joel is in Chico working on the house. He texted me this photo tonight of the wood floor after one pass with the floor sander. Says he's encouraged by how well the sander is working and that the discoloration is coming off pretty easily. YAY!

 

He still has a few more passes to do, of course. But, he'll be driving up this afternoon to join us for the ceremony. 

~C