Welcome 2011

It's almost 2011, and I'm looking forward to the new year. 2010 was good to me and I have no complaints, but I just have a feeling 2011 will be great.

After much thought and internal debate, I decided to take a new job and will be starting it in the new year on January 4th! I loved my co-workers and clients at my current company, but had been there 5 years and was feeling ready for a promotion and a new challenge. I'll still be working in media... at another advertising agency in Seattle... and it's a small industry so I'm happy that I'll still get to see people I know and old co-workers now and then.  Wish me luck!

I'm also looking forward to 2011 since we already know of 3 good friends of ours that are getting married next year. I love weddings and getting together with friends we don't always see often to celebrate. And one of these weddings will be up in Whistler in July (which I can't wait for)... That will be a beautiful wedding and such a fun getaway.

The house of course is always on our list of things "to-do"... and fingers crossed all the electrical, dry-wall, cabinetry & carpet will be done in the next few months. Then I can finally start picking out fun paint colors and looking for neat furniture/accessories/art/etc. Our goal is to finally have it all done by May (which would put us about 1 year from when we started)!

Finally... Matt and I are also hoping to sneak in a vacation away at some point this year. Going to Egypt last year was amazing and we definitely have the travel bug. Hopefully we can get away for a week to Greece or maybe somewhere in South America this year.

So much to be thankful for, and so much to look forward to. Wishing you all the best for your families in 2011 as well. Cheers!

There's just something about snail mail

Although email is always nice and the easiest way to communicate it seems these days... there is just nothing like the excitement of getting real letters in the mail (not junk mail... but from actual people you know)!  Maybe I'm old fashioned, I don't know. It clutters up our fridge a bit, but I love seeing the photos every day when I walk by. The holidays are the best for this (along with weddings and graduation cards) and I love seeing the new holiday cards each year from friends and putting them up.

Images from Christmas

We spent Christmas Eve this year up at the Whitfield house, with all the typical festivities.... drinking wine, hanging out, dinner, church service, and movies. We even got in a little Xbox Kinect that evening. Matt and I stayed the night and enjoyed the morning with my family, and then headed over to his Mom's for Christmas day and dinner.

I managed to capture a few pictures while up at my parents house (and somehow with all the festivities we didn't get any this year at Matt's mom's house).

 The Whitfield's Christmas tree

 My Mom's Santa collection  =)

Making hot spiced wine

Mom

Matt on his phone

Sarah & Kieran 

 John, with all the fixings for a fun evening.

Electrical

That's right, we are doing the electrical in our basement ourselves. Luckily all the electrical that was already in the basement wasn't too old, so it's mainly just adding new lights and outlets, and moving much of the wiring around so that it works better for our needs.

The first thing we had to do was map the electrical in our whole house. Since this house had been remodeled so many times over the years and new outlets and things added, the notes on the panel were outdated and there was no good way to know which outlets or lights were hooked up to which switches on our electrical panel.

We are reading a book on DIY electrical, and the way they suggested you do this is turning off every breaker on your electrical panel and then turning on one at a time to test which outlets and lights are "on" connecting to it.  After you find out which switch goes to an outlet, you right that number down next to it on the map of the house and then on to the next.

 This handy tool, you stick the metal end into an outlet (or up against a loose wire) and if its "on" the little tool buzzes really loud (kind of like a smoke detector sound).

For some outlets we were having a hard time figuring out... here is another strategy we used. This tool we borrowed from a friend, and you plug the black piece into an outlet which is "on", and then you go to the electrical panel and put this yellow piece next to each switch until it buzzes loudly. This was a much easier way to figure out which outlets went to which switches on the panel. Unfortunately it didn't really help with ceiling lights... so for those we were back to the first strategy.

The whole process only took maybe 4-5 hours, although I'm sure someone skilled could do it more quickly.


On a side note... you know how you tell kids not to stick their fingers in outlets? I also learned you should never touch the sides of them if they are exposed. =)  Those little round metal pieces on the sides of this outlet (hanging from out ceiling) gave me quite the shock when I went to grab it so I could stick the outlet tester in it. One tingling arm later and now I know...

Holiday festiveness

Tried to keep the Holiday decorating simple this year (only because our house is under construction and its a little hard getting decorations out... plus our upstairs is packed with boxes since there is nowhere to store them in the basement while its being remodeled... so now a lot of room to put things up). Anyways, even while trying to keep it simple, I just love the weekend after Thanksgiving when I get to put up all of our festive holiday decor and our cute little tree.

Our little tree. Maybe one day we'll get a bigger one once there is more room in the house with the basement done and we move our big TV & entertainment console downstairs. Love the new Red Balls we have on it this year though and the the "G" ornament I picked up at Pottery Barn. =) 

Holiday Flowers

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone....Time to start the Holiday Decorating! Found these beauties at Home Depot for $3 each.... continuing my obsession of having flowers in our house for the year.

First Snow

We had our first snow of the year this week! Seattle doesn't get snow very often, maybe a dusting of snow each year and then it melts the next day. But this reminded me of the "big snow" of 2008 when we got 2 feet. On Monday we got a couple inches.... but I dont think anyone was even expecting that, so everyone still drove in to work that day and it was a mess getting home. Seriously, worst traffic mess I have ever seen in Seattle.... literally took Matt & I in the car 5 hours to get home from downtown to West Seattle (which would normally take 15 minutes).

I have to say though, even after that horrific 5 hour drive home.... I'm crossing my fingers for lots more snow this year. I just can't help it! Love the snow and how pretty it makes everything look... I'll take that over rain any day.

Here is a picture from our front porch.

Beer Brewing with the family

We celebrated Kieran's birthday 2 weeks ago by going with my family to a place in Edmonds called Gallaghers and brewing beer! It was a great time, and this last weekend we went back to bottle it. Can't wait to give it a taste. I even made some fun labels to try out on some of the bottles to make them look festive and maybe we will give some away to friends this holiday season. =)

 

 Washing the bottles

Bottling the beers... 

 Enjoying some of our beer.

 Labels for the beer... We bottled them in larger 22oz bottles, and I printed these labels ahead of time at home to put on them and make them festive!

And then we were done! 12 boxes (each with 12 bottles) of beer. 

1 batch of Citrus Blonde and 1 batch of IPA. 

Its that time of year...

Time to get the Chimney swept. I can't believe we have lived in our house for 3 years and have never had a fire. Matt was concerned since the chimney was so old, how long it had been since it was cleaned (if too long and there was a lot of build up it could cause a chimney fire which we do not want!)... and we just kept putting off getting it cleaned. Now I wish we had sooner!

I called up a company I found recommended on the West Seattle blog - The Mad Hatter, and scheduled them to do the Chimney cleaning. They were booked out for about a month back in October when I called, so we just had them in this week. They had a $99 special, and did an awesome job. They kept everything really clean and did a total inspection of things letting us know about a few other things we should keep an eye on or fix on the roof in the future. I am always weary about letting contractors or workers in our house, worried it will get super dirty or that if Matt isn't here and they say technical things that are over my head and I'll have no idea what they are talking about and I won't know the right questions to ask. But these 2 guys were both so nice and friendly and helped answer any questions I had.

Can't wait to have our first fire in the fireplace this year!

 

More walls up, more floor down

We tried to be extra productive this last weekend, since we only have 1 more weekend until Thanksgiving and then Holidays are in full swing and we'll be busy every weekend in December.

So, we got more walls put up, and are getting sooo close to having all the subfloor done. The Subfloor is really my project (I guess Matt figured I couldn't screw that up, haha), and while it was kind of fun at first... that quickly grew old. We just have so many odd shaped areas and nooks where you have to cut the panels to fit, such a pain. Oh well, one upside is that I have been forced to become comfortable using the power saw... and after about panel 100... I have to say I feel like a pro. =) Ok, not a pro, but at least I'm not scared to death of sawing off a finger anymore.

The first wall is up

We are finally putting up walls. Matt has a system down, building the walls on the floor and then we hoist them up and attach them to the ceiling beams and the floors. Here is a picture of the first wall we put up. Hoping to get all of them done in the next few weeks before Thanksgiving. It actually seems to be going quite smoothly so far, and I think after this last weekend we have about 1/3 of the exterior walls done. We will see...

Flowers everywhere

We went with my parents to the Marysville Rotary Auction this last weekend. My dad is really involved with Rotary and its a great cause raising money for scholarships for kids. We've gone the last couple years and always have a good time. Hopefully as we get older we will be able to donate more to great foundations like Rotary and give back to the community. Anyways... we didn't walk away with too many auction items this year, but did make it home with these beautiful flowers!

I thought these would be way to huge for our house... and they are very large... but are kinda fun for a week taking over our dining room table. 

Beautiful little centerpiece I picked up! Fits right in with our little pumpkin on the kitchen table. 



Happy Halloween!

Mmmm...

Apparently Trader Joe's has it's own reserve wines (kinda like Charles Shaw), but instead of $3, its about $8 I believe... probably the cheapest Pinot Noir I've ever found, and I have to say it's better than I thought it would be. Perfect for a night at home carving my pumpkin...

end of the season

Harvested this last bounty of tomatoes from our yard this week just as the rains came in. Man we lucked out this year... for how bad the weather was this summer, we sure seemed to do well with our tomatoes and other vegetable/herbs.

I also learned a trick last year... you harvest all the remaining tomatoes at the end of the year (before it gets really cold and rainy) even the green ones. Put the green ones in a couple pieces of newspaper wrapped up... and they end up turning red and ripe also!

Basement Subfloor

Now that all our insulation is in, the crawl space is finished, and the last bits of the furnace are done... its on to the next project, putting in our new subfloor. This layer of floor will go down on top of the concrete, and provide a layer between that and the future carpet we will be putting down.

We are also using a cool product (I actually heard of it while watching various DIY shows on HGTV...and then we checked it out and bought it at Home Depot) called DRIcore. It comes in square panels which we can snap together, and has plastic with ridges on the bottom of it (this is in case any moisture gets in, it wont get up to our floor/carpet, and can drain under our subfloor). We thought this would be a great extra precaution for our basement just in case there are ever moisture problems in the future.

We got started on it this last weekend, and its going pretty quickly. I think it will just take another weekend to get it done. (fingers crossed)