You Bought It...You Build It!

Photo Credit: Nora Myers
With a trip to Ikea typically comes the acquisition of a piece of furniture - with the acquisition of a piece of Ikea furniture comes assembly!! In this case, we got a dresser for our bedroom. As Kyle found out today, Ikea dressers require a lot of assembly, which in turn takes a lot of the day. BUT he prevailed and mission accomplished! Now he just needs to move all his stuff into it! While he was dresser building I was continuing to work away on painting the bathroom. I'm happy to report - it too is complete, with two coats of very barely blue on the walls, a white vanity and white door frame! Woohoo!!

Family Fun Day!

We had a fun day today! First we were out fairly early and headed down to Mall and Millenia. We hit up a few stores - including Pottery Barn Kids (one of Nora's favorites) where she had what I'm pretty sure was her first tea party, with her daddy. It was pretty cute. After the mall we stopped at Ikea, did some shopping and had a less than wonderful but ever entertaining lunch - or what was left of it after Kyle dropped mine on the floor. Fail! Then after a late/long nap the weather cleared up just enough that we were able to go to the fireworks "celebration" of Jod's, I mean, Maitland's birthday! Hehe! Happy Birthday Jodums and Happy half birthday to our ever entertaining and always adventurous Nora Nora!! All and all we made today a good one!

Goodbye, See Ya Later, So Long 'Til Next Time!

Today we said goodbye to our little Sportwagen - well, Kyle's little Sportwagen. The lease is up and it was time for it to go back to it's home at the VW dealer. For a car that we never intended to get, it did what we needed it to do and now it's time to move on to bigger and well...bigger things. Haha! Nora wanted to be sure she had a chance to say goodbye to "daddy's car". For the very immediate future - we're down to one car...YAY CARPOOLING TO WORK NEXT WEEK!!

Take it to the Sidewalk!

We have had a busy day!  By 9:30 this morning we were up, I was showered, dressed, had been grocery shopping, come home and put away the food, dropped the car off at the shop and ridden our bike home!  Phew!  This afternoon at long last, Nora got to ride her bike on the sidewalk rather than in the house or back yard.  We don't have a driveway that is conducive to bike riding and lately she's proven she can steer and pedal with some accuracy around the obstacle course that is our house, so I felt like she was ready to give the straight sidewalk a shot!  She did well, only gave me (and one driver) a street related scare once.  She'll be really good once she starts actually paying attention to what is in front of her rather than everything else in the world!

Stripping

There's something about "Q" words. In a hospital, you never say "it's quiet" and I've now learned that in home improvement you never say "quick"! Our bathroom facelift took a slight turn to the complicated when we realized that someone recoated the layers (upon layers) of oil based yellow trim/vanity paint with 1 more layer of yellow latex paint. Thanks person!! Since the latex paint was flaking right off - shocking - we were left with little choice but to strip it. While not overly labor intensive it is a messy messy process! But, now that we're down to bare wood/coat number one we can sand, prime and take those accents from yellow to white and get back on track. Hopefully by the end of THIS weekend we can have the bathroom transformed from work zone back to bathroom! Fingers crossed!

BITES!

Now that I've finally got Nora convinced that biting isn't ok I wish we could do the same for the bugs around here! A half hour at the fence chatting with Kate yesterday evening and she woke up this morning with legs that looked like they'd been a buffet! She's pretty hearty, but there's one thing that she doesn't weather well...bug bites. While she's a champ with the itching, there's no hiding when she's been eaten up!!

More Works in Progress

Kyle was a hardworking champ today. For those of you who have seen the "game room"/entry to our house you'll appreciate the HUGE improvement! Someone got a bee in his bonnet this morning and with me pitching in here and there we were able to get things organized and free up lots of space in the middle of the room. Progress didn't stop there...there's a coat of primer on the ceiling in the bathroom AND the guest room is now emptied out and officially became a "work-zone" as the carpet came out tonight. Progress for sure, but we sure do love to have a few different balls in the air at once!