In Which We Spend All Our Money...plus a bonus house tour!

We've had an expensive (but exciting!) week at our Rock Star castle...

After our last yard sale lawnmover burst into flames (really), Kirk decided to get an electric mower.  I think it looks like a Little Tykes toddler car, but it's SO quiet and nice!

A major appliance purchace- our new washer and dryer!  I LOVE them- they're also very quiet.  I've never had a front loader before and I'm eager to see if they are really as awesome as I've heard.

Plus:  A tour of Jeremy's new house!  I recorded it THREE times- this one finally took after the first two were mysteriously deleted.  Check it:

The Great Siding Project: Phase One

We started our siding project on Saturday. We got pretty far into it, but we're not done yet. Here's Scott (Kirk's coworker who is helping/teaching us) taking off the first board.

Scott was impressed with the stuff underneath our boards. He said it was high quality and whoever had put up our original stuff did it right. We did not have to replace the stuff underneath, which was a relief.

Kirk and Jeremy have the whole bottom off. Scott is watching from the background.

Kirk and Scott pulled off almost all of the top themselves! (We only had two ladders.)

Go Kirk Go!

Everything's off!

Scott helps Kirk saw the new boards.

Kirk and Scott putting on the new boards. (Jeremy and I were pulling off the stuff from the other side, with breaks for Cathy to run take pictures!)

Lunchtime! Papa John's was having a $5 pizza day. Score!

Side One Done! We still need to paint, of course, but the boards are up! Even unpainted it looks a million times better.

Sarah insisted on supervising.

The old siding.

A view of the unpainted but fabulous anyway siding.

Jeremy and Cathy had been pulling off siding over here, but it was slow going due to all the plants (including a rosebush) and...

The gas leak! Our meter smelled STRONGLY of gas, so Cathy called the gas people to have a look. They told us to stop working in that area until they could check it out. Good thing...

We did have a leak. Here's our old IRON meter. They replaced it with a much lighter and less leak prone one. (no picture, sorry!) Our old one looked pretty cruddy, so it's nice to have a new shiny meter to go with our new siding!

We only went partway up- we'll go back and do the rest next weekend. Everything is covered up, so it should be fine.

Sarah got tuckered out from all the supervising.

We're thinking this will be a Three Phase operation. Hopefully everything will be done next weekend so we can start painting!

The Siding Project

Our $900 pile of boards

For those of you who don't know, we're residing our house. After getting some quotes ranging from $16,000 to $31,000, we decided to do it ourselves. We estimate that we'll be saving $13,500-$29,500, One of Kirk's coworkers used to do siding as a side job, and he's coming over to help us get started.

We start tomorrow at the crack 'o dawn, and hope to be done with the hanging the siding part of our project by the end of the weekend. We lucked out- it's only going to be in the '80's this weekend! Yay!

The Resident Mr. Fix-Its

I somehow managed to blow up the wiring in our kitchen with our vacuum cleaner. I also was not able to switch the circuit breaker back to on, which concerned the engineers of the house. Of course, they like nothing more than trouble shooting a problem, so they spent last evening hanging out with this:

Kirk especially loves playing with the multimeter. Sometimes he'll go around and test things with it for fun.

Look at those big smiles! I bet they wish something would break every day, just so they could fix it!

I don't remember what ended up being wrong, but they were able to fix it. It took several hours and a trip to Lowes, but we have power in the kitchen again.

Kirk's next project is to replace the plug on my vacuum. The dramatic explosion (there was a loud pop AND smoke! ) melted something in the plug. He does not think that there will be any problem with the vacuum. I'm kind of hoping that there will be, so I can get a Dyson.

Wichita Weekend

We had a pretty productive weekend this week.

Cathy planted some jalapeños at Kirk's request. His coworker has an awesome recipe that features cream cheese stuffed, bacon wrapped jalapeños cooked on the grill. We'll let you know how that works out!

Our dishwasher is making a funny noise. Kirk, using tools from his favorite brother in law and the wonders of the internet, is trying to figure it out and fix it.

Meanwhile, in the garden, Cathy spots some green tomatoes.

Sarah sits wherever she wants. Nappers beware!

Cathy and Kirk had time to hit up a yard sale, where they got this adorable bunny picture for ten cents.

We stained the deck!

It was a good day to do it, nice and cool in the morning and not so bad in the afternoon. Jeremy helped us as well, which made it go much faster. We miscalculated how much stain we needed and had to run to Lowe's for another gallon.

Before:

That's Kirk's air compresser in the middle of the deck. He cleaned out the cracks with it.

Kirk says hello!

Side view

After:
It really needed to be stained.

Another After Shot
I can't belive how much better it looks!

New Kitchen Color

I found some yellow paint in the basement that the last owner must have left, and thought it would look nice on one wall in the kitchen. I think it does!

Photographic Evidence

Bathroom Remodel

Cathy spent the past month remodeling the bathroom. All it took was some paint, new towel racks, and a lot of time gritting her teeth and scraping off the frog wall paper.

Here's some before shots:

Note the frog themed wall paper. There are even fake frogs glued to the faceplate of the light switch!

You can see the bottom of the cabinet I painted right above the toilet. There is also a wooden toilet seat. And more frogs. They sure loved their frogs.

Here's the after:
Notice how frog free it is! Scraping down that wallpaper took FOREVER. You can also see our new towel rack on the right. We painted the walls a purple color.
Here's our other new towel rack. We also replaced the faceplate of the light switches. We were not able to scrape off the wooden frogs.
We replaced the wooden toilet seat with a white one. You can sort of see our new toilet paper holder here.

This picture had been in our bedroom, but we thought it looked just right in the bathroom.
Here's the sink area. Not much going on here.
A better shot of the paint and picture.
I painted the wooden cabinet they left a pale yellow. The drawers underneath are something I picked up at a thrift store when we lived in Fort Collins. I painted those too, and they're very handy.