Knit Night

Our first get-together in the new house was when I hosted my knitting group one Thursday night. It went very well, everyone seemed to have a great time. We had an excellent turnout, even though very little knitting got accomplished! After the awful kitchen setup in our old house, I really appreciate having a good floor plan with room to entertain. We've been having people over fairly often now that there's not carpet in the kitchen!

Here are Brandy, Jackie, and Valerie enjoying drinks and edamame at knit night:

Blooms

We have two gorgeous dogwood trees, one white and one pink, in our front yard. They bloomed in late April and were still in full bloom for Derby, when our guests were here! It was getting dark in the pics, but hopefully you can see how pretty they are. We've had tulips, daffodils, lily of the valley, irises, and really pretty peonies pop up so far. It's kind of neat to be surprised with what's out there...but there's A LOT of yard work to be done this fall once we decide what we're keeping and moving.

Kitchen floor

Our new kitchen floor, aside from being gorgeous, is the same color as Mikey!

Buh-bye carpet

We no longer have any carpet on the main floor of our house, and it used to be everywhere...including a disgusting mess in the kitchen, as seen below:



On the last Friday of Adam's vacation week, I was also off, and we pulled out the crappy, dirty carpet that was infesting my kitchen. The carpet was glued to funky 70s linoleum underneath and we kept sticking to it, but it was such a relief just to get the grossness out of there! Here's Adam ripping up a corner, and carrying out the last remnant of carpet.

Babysitters

Before we moved into the new house, but after closing, we spent a lot of time painting and pulling up carpet and such. But we were able to leave the dogs at the old house for a few hours at a time. It was great, because the houses were only a couple of miles apart. When we had our recent project week, however, we had to figure out what to do with Mikey and Zoe while we painted, installed flooring, etc.

The answer: chew toys.

The bacon-flavored rawhide stick thingies I bought were awesome. Kept them occupied for quite awhile, as seen below.

Enjoying our efforts

We've got lots to update about and quite a few pictures to post, but I just wanted to share my excitement about our first get-together in our new house! It's tonight...I'm hosting the weekly Stitch-n-Sip (our very chic gathering of knitters). Adam's going to throw some tasty tidbits on the grill, I'm serving white chocolate-covered strawberries, and the weather is supposed to be awesome.

We've been working this week on recovering from all the projects we did last week: putting away tools, cleaning up, and moving appliances back to their rightful places. We have a beautiful new kitchen floor that makes me actually want to spend time in the kitchen (!!) and the yard is starting to look greener all the time. Even though it's by no means finished, the house feels like our home and I'm pretty proud to show it off.

Stay tuned for pics from tonight and from recent projects. And coming up...we prepare for our first overnight guests on Derby weekend!

Frogs No More

Another project this week was painting the bathroom. Believe it or not we were tired of the brown walls with blue, hand painted frogs on them. We plan a total bathroom redo in the not too distant future so this was just kind of a quick fix to hold us over. Nonetheless here are the pictures.

Amanda and Zoe prepping the ceiling for paint:



And the frog's final moment:





Final pictures are yet to come as we haven't finished the 2nd coat yet. I had to take the day off today to play golf so we will be finishing it tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Spring=yard work

Adam mowed the grass this week for the first time! It was pretty exciting. We don't have much actual grass yet, but there are lots of various other things growing in the yard, including pretty purple violets. Unfortunately, we decided to reign in the wildflowers and try to grow...grass! A few weeks ago we had the yard aerated and seeded, and we've been waiting to see if anything would come of it. Now we have tiny little grass buds. It's awesome! Adam gave the yard a trim, which took about 3.5 minutes because it's quite small. In fact, the photo was staged because he was finished before I could get a picture. Here he is in all his cuteness:

A Week Off To Work

I took this week off from work to get some things done around the house. First on the list was finishing the quarter round molding. My uncle and I had already put it down in the master bedroom and dining room before we moved in.
I bought 120 feet of quarter round and painted it before my uncle and cousin came over Sunday. The hard part is getting the angles right so two pieces will meet even and flush on corners. The area under the bay window was especially difficult:



It took us about 5 hours but we got the foyer, living room, hallway and office finished. Here is a before picture:



And a couple of afters: