It's looking like a bathroom...

Jacob has been slaving away upstairs and has now put in some insulation and framed in our new bathroom. We took a 3 hour trip to Lowe's and came back with all our bathroom necessities, including a jacuzzi tub (yay!) and picked out the colors for the bathroom (grey, white, and yellows). Jacob's step-dad, Larry, is going to help us with all our plumbing needs.

The tale of two spoiled kitties...

Our two cats, ZZ and Mo, are like two spoiled children. They have a special diet with high priced food and bottled water, due to ZZ's urinary tract problem that keeps sending him to the cat E.R.


They also have toys aplenty, are allowed to snooze where ever they want, and are given loads of pets. They sure had fun this Christmas with the wrapping supplies... and thanks to Jacob's mom, they had a little Christmas treat of their own...new catnip stuffed mice. This is them "getting high" and loving it:)

The Roof needs to go!

This past summer we came to the conclusion that our little red house needed a new roof. What was currently on the top of our house, keeping us dry (although we did cross our fingers every time it rained) was the cedar shingle roof that was installed when the house was built sometime in the early 40's.

Cedar Shingles aplenty...we gave these to anyone who wanted some kindling for the winter, plus we had to take a load to the dump!


Jacob, and a buddy from work, along with his wife and I stripped the roof of the cedar shingles, installed plywood to create the airgap to bring it to code, then put in the new roof. We had gorgeous weather for the project, except for one morning when we awoke to the dreadful sound of rain. Of course this was the day that we had pushed our luck and decided we didn't really need to cover the bare, open roof with tarps. That was a real bonding experience for us as we traipsed up to the roof in the rain and attempted to get an unruly tarp to lay flat.

However, in the end we have a beautiful new roof that does keep out the rain!

Upstairs Remodel Phase 1

Pretty much as soon as we signed our house papers we applied for a home equity line of credit so we could begin remodeling our upstairs. When we moved into our house in 2003 the upstairs of our house was in two sections. The first section contained a room that was haphazardly "finished" with some sort of insulation (more to come on that topic) and semi-walls. We did a little bit more to it, including putting up sheet rock and framing in a closet. This has been our bedroom for the past two years. The other half was completely unfinished and has been used as storage.


Our plans are to completely refinish the upstairs, put a bedroom in the other side of the upstairs, install a new bathroom, a walk-in closet, and still have room on our existing bedroom side for an office/rec room. So, at the beginning of December we packed up our stuff, said a tearful goodbye to our super comfy king size mattress and moved our bedroom downstairs to our guestroom. Jacob started demo immediately (captured in these pictures) and found some quite interesting things.





First, he discovered that the prior tenants had apparently not had the means to properly insulate their bedroom, so they used whatever they had on hand, including sheets, pieces of shag carpet, old curtains, newspaper, etc. Quite disgusting to pull out from the ceiling. However, he also found some pieces of newspaper, dated 1939, which goes to show how old this house is.

















Example of "something" being used as insulation.

The Happiest Place on Earth

From Dec. 17-Dec. 21 Jacob and I took a trip to Disneyland, along with my brother, Mikhail.

The park was all decked out for its 50th anniversary celebration, along with Christmas, so it was pretty neat. We spent our days running from ride to ride, trying to get fast passes to minimize the wait time on some of the more popular rides, eating (I think Mikhail wins an award for the most Churros eaten), watching parade (after parade) and firework shows, or if not watching these events ourselves, then navigating our way through the huge crowds of people while they watched them. We even got to pay a visit to "California" Santa!We also spent one day at Legoland.

We didn't know much about Legoland going there, but it turned out to be quite cool. Everything was made out of legos, which was quite impressive, considering the size of some of the buildings and creations. (Yes, these are all made from legos)

And off we go...

We've started this blog to share what's going on in our "quiet" married life in good old O-town. Some of you may not know that we recently purchased a house, the one we've been renting for the past two years. It's our cute "Little Red House" on Yelm Hwy that sits on almost 3 acres. We are VERY excited to finally have completed this process, which ended up taking almost a year. We're lucky to have had the opportunity to buy this house and property from close family friends of Jacob's! We hope you enjoy keeping up with what's going on in our lives and we'd love to hear from you along the way!





















Our own little apple orchard!






The garage/shop!