Long time, no updates...

I'm justifying the lack of updates by the sheer and complete insanity that life here has been the last several months, but that is a crummy reason - I could have been here blogging instead of dinking about on Facebook some nights :-)

So - in a nutshell, been working: on house, on business, at Roberts Sales' business, at schooling, at trying to stay on top of things...working away LOL! We've done a fair bit more on pieces of the house, have the shop to a fairly good point, and are tackling outside things when the crazy CO weather this year cooperates - we had 7 weekends in a row of rain that slowed down a lot of projects, and launched us straight from rainy muck to 90+ degrees, which I like even less to work in. But I digress....

I think I am going to just do lots of before and afters to catch up a bit on what we have been up to - quick and to the point! So, I'll snag pictures of some of the fun projects, and not so fun ones and get them up here in the next few days.

For now, I leave you with this little smile - we have our first chicken eggs! We joined the ranks of other urban chicken farmers in May and have 7 bantam girls - the kids, of course, named them all, so pictures and names will be forthcoming. Two are white with gray and lay light blue eggs, the other 5 lay various shades of tan and brown.

If I never re-finish hardwood floors again...

...it really won't make me even a tiny bit sad. Remember the Green Grass carpet that we pulled up? Two bedrooms, hallway, front room and stairs - the front room floor was the best - in good enough shape to just get a light buffing and polyurethane. Everywhere else needed sanding...lots of it. But, hey, they're done, and they turned out pretty well considering how much David and I both really wanted to just be done with them!


Oil based poly REALLY darkens the wood ALOT! We were kinda hoping these would stay lighter, it was a pretty light oak. We learned a bit from this- on the kitchen my brother suggested using water based poly - it does make quite a difference on how much it darkens up.

Happy New Year!

I have so much to catch up on! We have been busy bees working away on the Green Grass House - we did end up taking quite a bit of time away from remodeling work to do "real" work, the Holiday season was not as busy as it has been in the past (darn economy...but that is a whole other post...) but busy enough to keep us hopping a little some weeks and put most everything around the house on hold until the new year.


So first things first - the SHOP IS DONE! Well, has been for quite a while, but since this will be lots of back info, that is the first and foremost. Above pics are the finishing, windows, outside paint, etc, done back in August or so.

Moving in racks, inventory, and most importantly, the embroidery machines... I need to snap pics of the "after" still - might clean it up a bit before I do, though, the shop is a bit of a disaster!

Cardboard Counter Experiment

The kitchen has been the single biggest source of frustration, as they always are, I'm sure. One of the problems we have there is that it is in the middle of the house without much light - we figured out a solution I think - it's a bit unique but hey, everything we do usually ends up a little unique ;-) We are cutting a window into the wall here, but to leave it as an open window would mean that the kitchen would be open all the time to the formal front room (not so nice when we decide to blow off doing the dishes lol!) so we are putting in a vinyl shutter, on its side, to make it "closable". Thanks to Habit for Humanity Denver, this funny little project cost us $12 for the shutter and $10 in sawzall blades (poor sawzall - plaster is hard on blades!)
The other thing we are debating on for the kitchen is an island, a counter, a peninsula, something to add more counter space and give a little bit of a division between "kitchen" and "dining room". Some brilliant person on Houseblogs (I can't remember who!) had made countertops and cupboards from cardboard to test their layout and we copied their idea with our cardboard counter/island. Oddly enough, it double as a fantastic "den" for Sara and Alex, and she took great pains to decorate all of the outside with signs and hieroglyphic symbols about them living there ;-)

Speaking of mud...

I snapped these pics a couple weeks ago...it had rained, the new gutters for the shop work wonderfully, but of course, land right in the unfinished and unlandscaped dirt from the foundation dig. Which of course, makes it irresistible to all children 3 and 5 years old.

Ouchie lawn!

Well, only if you can call tangles of low growing weeds "lawn", I suppose...I forgot to post this, but the guys had to trench to bring wiring out - this trench went right through what was a sorta "flagstone" patio, we had to pull up the flagstone, but we are currently searching for more to add to it and make it into a really nice large outdoor patio. David snagged some today (yay, Craigslist again!) and we will probably end up buying some from Santa Fe Rock and Gravel, too. We are looking at ground cover plants to put in between the stones and loving this site: Stepables

Shop Progression

More apologies - been too busy to blog! So, here's a catchup - the shop is coming along fantastically! Framing, siding, drywall, wiring are all done. Yesterday they textured (MESSY!) and painted, I didn't snap pics yet but will if we make it over there - it is currently raining and the yard is a ginormous muddy mess, so we may not take the kids and dog over LOL!