Here we go....

Not updating again. Really hasn't been all that eventful since Labor Day. We had a good time with the family, it was a beautiful weekend. Brought home something with us that we didn't want however.....a cold. Jim and I were held up in the house for a week or so with a cold. I still have a mild cough that nags at me a bit. Luckily it wasn't too bad and it didn't last too long. We are finally back to normal again.

This weekend should be interesting. We are having a garage sale. I have personally never held my own garage sale, so I'm not sure what to expect. We priced everything out, which was difficult since I really had no idea what they were worth. We really don't care if we make any money, we just want to get rid of the crap. It's a sub-wide garage sale, so hopefully we will get a lot of foot traffic!

That's about it. Jim put up some more curtains and hung up some more art work around the house. Still tons more to do!

We've been keeping busy!

Time for the well needed house update! We took a couple trips to Ikea and Bed Bath and Beyond over the past two weeks and have finally gotten some things together. The family room still isn't at 100%, but it's looking better and better:

Here is our new curtains. We still need to put up our celing fan.


Here is our new entertainment center. We plan to add two shelves in the middle area above the TV.


The Kitchen is complete. We put up blinds and well, since I never posted it when we painted, here's our new paint job.

The dining room is still a mess, but I wanted to show off our new china cabinets. There is one on each side of the window. This one holds my collection of polish pottery, the other one is our wedding china. We also got new chairs for our table. We have curtains to put up still.


Little by little we are getting things done. Next up on the agenda:

Paint half bath on main floor
Paint small part of master bath (toilet is in a separate area)
Remove wall paper from Guest room and paint
Paint other spare room
Hang art work throughout house


That has been keeping us pretty busy the last two weekends. This weekend we are planning to kick back and relax with the family. Supposed to be a good weekend, I'm looking forward to it!

Busy Month: A Visual Guide

So instead of typing out everything that has gone on since the last time i've updated, I thought just a brief visual tour would do the trick!! So here we go..

For our "dating" anniversary we picked up a new game:
It pretty much just monitors your steps for each day. We each have a goal of 6,000 steps which is approximately 3 miles. Over one month later, we have reached our goal every day except for one! It has definitely kept us motivated to stay active. I highly recommend it!
So yes, I have been getting into running more! It is a great workout and fun to get outside and clear your mind during a nice run. I run about 3-5 miles every other day or so (been slacking the last week though).

To help me out on my longer runs, I got this nifty hydration belt. It holds two 10 oz containers of water and has a pouch just big enough to fit my key and cell phone. It straps around my waist and surprisingly isn't bothersome at all. I really have enjoyed having water readily available when I need it and not having to run without my cell phone on me.

July 11th we headed to a graduation party for my church sponsor son.

Down to Hamtramack for some awesome polish food to celebrate my grandma's birthday.

Mmmm.....Dill pickle soup, my favorite!

We headed off to the family cottage the following weekend. The weather was actually quite cold and the bugs were just insane. So we shacked up and watched "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Interesting movie....it was nice to have a little getaway, even though we were doing the same thing we would probably do at home!

Since the cottage was so buggy, we left early on Sunday and decide to go to the zoo! We hadn't been there in years. I will post pictures as soon as I load them onto the computer!

We decide we would try to do a ton of geocaching for a week. We made it out for two evenings and found 20 or so. Not too bad :)

I met my MIL for lunch one afternoon. We had some great sandwiches and then headed over to the local gourmet grocery store and had some wine samples. You can actually drink wine while you shop....I totally want to go back!

We headed over to a cute local bar for a friend's birthday Friday, July 24th. It was busy and loud, but we had a good time.

Another day of geocaching, however, this time we turned into a road trip. We hit Grand Ledge which was a cool place for the geocaches, then proceeded to Grand Rapids for the bet hot dogs EVER!!

Yesterdog. Seriously. Best. Hotdog. Ever.

MIL birthday was that weekend, so we went over to celebrate on Sunday. Had a wonderful dinner and for dessert and amazing torte.....we got to take home the leftovers too. I'm sure it all went straight to my thighs.

Back to the cottage! This time the weather was great. We did some tubing. No that is not a picture of anyone in particular up there, just something I pulled off the web, lol. We all attempted to stand on the tube whilst moving. It was really hard. My legs were killing me for the next two days. We had a lot of fun and ate a LOT of food. A few favorites....

Grilled Chicken

Avacodoes!

Here we are to today! I spent most of the day trying to work on our landscaping. I was doing a lot of shoveling and moving around of dirt. I am basically trying to reconfigure the whole orientation of the existing landscaping in our front yard. I am still dirty and frankly I'm pooped.

August 22nd, Jim and I are running an 8K (5 mile) race. I really need to get back into my running routine. It's hard when we have been working on the house so much. I don't really have time for both it seems!

We finally picked up curtains and other random things for the house. Hopefully we will whip it into shape before the winter hits. I hope to have the front yard landscaping done and have this house decorated more by then. We plan on painting two of the bathrooms and our "activity room" as we like to call it is turning disney themed room since we have so much disney stuff! It'll be a fun, even though I hate painting.....

The Weekend

I decided to keep the exercise posts separated just for the heck of it. So here is everything else from the weekend...

We starting painting our kitchen last week. We are having family over next Saturday for dinner before we head to church for my confirmation. I will be officially Catholic next Saturday night. It's been an interesting journey and a huge learning experience of little religious factoids. It sounds like it is going to be quite an event at the Saturday vigil. I am pretty excited! ANYWAYS....so we have to finish the kitchen by then of course.

So this Saturday was a beautiful day....there was no way we were going to stay indoors and paint!!! Instead, we went out for a day of Geocaching again. We headed to Seven Lakes State Park in Holly. We found every single geocache in the park. It was a beautiful park with great winding, hilly, hiking trails. We spent about 4 or 5 hours there. We then hit up one more geocache on our way home. So we got a total of 9 out of 9! It was defnitely a sucessful trip! So being that we galavanted all day Saturday, Sunday was the day to paint. So we kicked butt and got all the primer done and a full coat of color. I started round 2 of the color but stopped at around 8:30 or so. So today we have a church thing to go to and then we will come back home and paint the rest of it hopefully! I can't wait to have the kitchen back!!! I will post before and after pics when it's offically done.

Holy Crap....we have paint!

We have FINALLY finished painting the family room. It's only taken...let's see...2 months or so??
This is only Phase 2 of the project (Phase 1 being that we had the whole ceiling replaced due to a leak and the fact that it was a horribly textured ceiling).

We still have to get a new ceiling fan and light covers, curtains, entertainment center, and other decor. But for now, we are just happy that we can sit and relax and watch tv and actually LIVE in this room again!! No more watching tv in the bedroom all the time now!! We were so happy to move the furniture back in and watch a movie!! I am looking forward to curtain shopping this weekend and hopefully getting the light fixtures too!


Before:


After:

New Project

We are FINALLY painting our family room. It's been in disarray since before Christmas!! So here is the before picture.....hopefully in a week there will be an awesome after picture!!