Nuthin’ but an H thang, Baybay…

The bamboo flooring arrived for our Bathtastic! bathroom last night. Another day, another thing to make room for. Our shoot dates were pushed back some, so we won’t film again until March 19th. On the upside, it falls on a Friday this time.

I really wished for one more free day last weekend. The weather was finally sunny and warmish, so I cracked a window and dusted/washed the entire living room, dining room and kitchen.

In other news, we’re putting some of the stimulus money to work for us. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides a 30% rebate on certain energy efficient home improvements as well as a $1,500 tax credit. We’ve wanted new windows in our house ever since Day 1, so this was a nice incentive to do it sooner rather than later. We met with the windows dude on Saturday and are signed up for installation in late-April or early-May.

Also last weekend, I attended 2 baby showers – that was a first for me. I went shopping on Saturday for both (because I’m a procrastinator). Melanie’s shower had the best baby shower game ever. It was hilarious and even the kids had fun. The second shower was for Melissa, who is my cousin Danny’s girlfriend. They served the most delicious lasagna…plus I got to see my aunties and cousins.

Finally, Adam and his BFF’s went to some sort of class where they learned how to make bitters. Sounds like they enjoyed it. I met up with them at Cooper in the SLP for drinks and dinner, where Gwen & Dena joined us. It was a lovely evening…

I know you know that I know you know this – but weekends are too short.

The fixtures for our new Bathtastic! bathroom just keep showing up. The question is: where do you put all this stuff??

When the jetted tub arrived a couple weeks ago, there really wasn’t a good place to stash the bulky box…so the Futon Room got the job because it’s the least used room in the house and it’s closest to the main bath. The Futon Room also now hosts the beautiful vessel sink that came last week as well as the shiny new sink faucet which arrived last night. The boxes for the vanity are stored in there too, so it’s quite crowded. We’re waiting on the shower/tub faucets and countertop to land at our house any day now.

I just got an email today telling me that UPS wanted to deliver the bathroom door. Normally that wouldn’t pose a problem, except this is a kind of specialty door (I don’t want to blow the secret yet so I won’t divulge any details) and along with its hefty crate it weighs 200lbs. Sheesh! No Futon Room for this bad boy…I may end up parking outside for a few weeks while the bathroom door lives happily in my garage spot.

It’s real now – we have plane tickets!

This summer, Adam, Chrissy, Justin and I will be flying to Paris with a quick stop in Iceland. I’m very close to committing to a gorgeous boutique hotel in Paris by Renaissance, which is pretty exciting. This hotel will put us right smack in the middle of everything: la Tour Eiffel, Champs-Élysées, l’Arc de Triomphe, le Louvre, and more than I can list.

Our plan is to stay in Paris for a week and then take the Eurostar train through the Chunnel to London. Chrissy & Justin will be with us in Paris and then they’re taking off to Amsterdam or wherever the wind takes them. I can’t wait to compare adventures with them when we return home.

I’ve narrowed the London hotels down to a few, but I can’t decide which one will be a better location. There are a couple right on the edge of Hyde Park that seem to be a good fit, and then there’s a nicer one just east of Piccadilly Circus. There’s yet another one right by a train station southeast of Piccadilly that has a great view of the Thames river. I need some help from my London-familiar friends! I have a feeling that no matter where we end up staying, it will not suck.

It’s not exactly spring yet, but this is the time of year where my brain starts wigging out at the weather. As a result, I start hyper-organizing and purging stuff in the house (which drives my husband cah-razy). This time, the objects of my pre-spring-manic-purginess were the storage area under the stairs and the “utility room.”

I pulled out everything from under the stairs, including some of the nasty, slumped over insulation that had started to slough off onto Adam’s belongings. Why would one insulate under the stairs? I don’t get it, but then I digress. Once I had the space cleared out and cleaned up, I moved all of our Tubs of Xmas Decoration Goodness in there. One down, one to go…

Moving on to the “utility room.” We have strange names for 2 rooms in our house: the “utility room” and the “futon room.” The utility room houses the electrical box, the sump pump, the freezer, the tool cabinet and the internet junk. Sort of utilityish, right? You can probably guess what the futon room contains. Anyway, I digress again.

Being that I’d already removed the Tubs of Xmas Decoration Goodness from the utility room, I went to work on my painting supplies. I’m not sure how this escaped me…but I had over 20 gallons of paint. Much of it was from when we moved into the house in 2004, making it 5&1/2 years old. Disgusted with myself, I began to weed out the paints that I know will never be used again (mostly because they were too danged old). I removed the lids and stacked them in the garage in preparation for the trash dude. How did this happen? I’m sooo not a pack rat, how did I manage to unknowingly keep all of this paint??

Another part of this entire effort comes with an ulterior motive of mine. I really want to oust our laundry room from the tiny walk-through space that leads to the basement bathroom…and put it in the more spacious utility room. All I need to do is get water to that space (easy), a drain (hard) and a vent (so-so). Am I actually talking about another project whilst in the middle of another one? Yes, yes I am.

Learned a valuable lesson about batteries last weekend.

With Adam’s kind assistance, I was hunting for a backup battery for my Canon 50D at National Camera Exchange. We were presented 2 options: the Canon brand battery was $60 (though it was out of stock) and the Brand X battery was $50 (and was in stock). We decided to look online to see if we could find a better deal, since those prices felt a little steep.

Within maybe 5 minutes of web browsing, Adam found TWO Brand X batteries for $16 on Overstock.com. A little skeptical, I waited until they arrived a couple days later to render judgment. It turns out that both batteries are charged and work perfectly with my camera. Needless to say, I’m glad I saved some cash.

My takeaway from this experience is that if you need batteries, cables, or small electronic components in general, it pays to check online first. Adam saved lots of moolah while putting together the new entertainment wall by patronizing online dealers instead of the brick and mortar retailers. It seems to be a category within retail where much markup takes place.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle…Yo Joe.

I began the weekend feeling pretty proud of us because we had plans to unload a lot of stuff from the house.

But first thing Saturday morning, the CalSpa dude came over to do a checkup on the hot tub and outfit us with more chemicals – a big plastic tub of chemicals that we have to figure out a storage spot for…ugh. After the spa dude’s departure, Adam and I made a trip up to the Unique Thrift Store in New Hope, where we donated several bags of clothing and household items. Our downfall was that we decided to go inside the store. I had a harmless desire to see if they had any snowpants. We left with a big ole bag of stuff…so much for purging.

The rest of the afternoon was spent cleaning up the dust from our bathroom demo and tackling laundry. Thrilling, I know. Our friend Rob came over for the evening and it was a very low key night of movies and popcorn.

Sunday was Valentine’s Day. Adam made us breakfast and we eventually made it over to National Camera, where my love bought me a sweet new camera backpack. Of course, this means I have to purge the other camera bag…rats! But back on the purging bandwagon, we returned a cabinet at Ikea later that day and felt a little like we accomplished something. We met up with my mom afterward, who gave us some homemade Valentine’s cookies – my fave! Adam and I wanted to have some sort of fancy dinner to celebrate the holiday, but I had a stomach ache all day and wasn’t super hungry. We traded our fancy dinner plans for flatbread pizza and a Coppola Cabernet. And you know, it was fantastic.

Adam made the comment that it’s not terribly convenient to get rid of things in the winter. I think he has a point. I sure would love to be able to hold a garage sale right now…

Adam and I have lived at our house for 5+ years now. We knew it was a fixer-upper when we bought it. The previous homeowners did some interesting things, including but not limited to their clownish decorating style, iron burns in the carpet, punch holes in all the interior doors, hand-painted countertops and enormous messy gardens in the yard. It’s taken 5 years to erase all of this and make it our own.

Last year, our big project was to complete the master bath/Adam’s bathroom. It became apparent that this room suffered from mold problems, so it was an easy choice for us to remodel this bath first. The good news is that we’re very happy with the space now…and the bad news is that is took a year to finish. Hoping to have a better turnaround on the next bathroom project, we elected to tackle the main bath/my bathroom. Much like the other bath, this one will largely be a “gut”, but unlike the last project, having the main bath out of commission for a year won’t fly.

Last November, I happened to catch an ad on Craigslist for a TV show called BATHtastic! A home improvement show junkie on the weekends, I’ve seen the show several times. As it turns out, they were looking for homeowners who wanted to remodel a bathroom for their new season. I filled out an application, submitted a couple photos, and lo and behold, they called me the following week. I was a little shocked, expecting that they’d have thousands of submissions to go through. One of their peeps interviewed us, checked out our bathroom, took photos – and by early December, informed us that they wanted to feature our bathroom on the show.

Last Tuesday was our first shooting day. They took more camera interviews with us and we started to demo the bathroom with the help of the show’s host and their contractor. I’m still amused that I worried so much about cleaning every nook and cranny before they arrived, only to have them leave 11 hours later with every surface covered in construction dust. There are two large holes where the linen closet and the bathroom once stood; to be rid of the old, ugly fixtures excites me to no end!

The crew is coming back to shoot Day 2 on March 1st and Day 3 on March 23rd. And then I’ll have an amazing, completed new bathroom. Our BATHtastic! designer, Kelli, has been full of interesting ideas. She’s found such unique materials and fixtures that I can’t wait to see it all pulled together.

I just hope I don’t look like too much of a tool on TV.

A large AWD truck,
A snow removal service,
A better, longer, warmer winter coat,
Moonboots,
Snowpants,
A new winter hat,
New wool socks,
A clean car,
…or I’ll just take a plane ticket to a place with no snow.

Yesterday, I spent the day in my friend Keri’s basement. I helped her paint their family room a lovely yellow color called “Butter.” The two of us kept looking at our work and uttering “Yay!” or “This looks amazing!” I’m even thinking about stealing their color for my own basement painting project. Not only do I think we both felt very accomplished when the job was done, but I also had a sense of readiness for my own upcoming painting project. You could say this job was a primer…Get it? *fizzle*

Our own basement is a hot mess right now. Adam is rewiring the entire Entertainment Wall with the new TV and speakers, which means there are wires, electronics and construction materials everywhere. I die a little inside when he tells me he has more wires arriving in the mail soon. But each time I enter the basement, I chant in my head “It will be awesome when it’s done, it will be awesome when it’s done.” He made a lot of progress while I was out yesterday and it’s starting to look promising. Today, I’ll be priming the Entertainment Wall and trying to arrange some of the mess into organized mess-piles. If I’m not back by the end of the day, send a search party.

Welcome to 2010 (if you haven’t been welcomed quite yet). I’ve neglected blogging again, sorry about that. Lack of motivation on my part. I do owe myself a brief recap of 2009 and will deliver one soon. I’ve convinced myself that when I’m senile, I’ll appreciate being able to read this blog and actually remember some stuff about each year…

Let me at least cover the holidays, because they were very weird this year. I’ve been hosting parties for both sides of our families for a few years now, but this year, I hosted none. My cousin Cori took on the crazy Linstad clan and my Aunt Jan picked up the Kooyer side. It was much less stressful without all the planning, shopping, cleaning, etc. but it was also much harder for me to get into the holiday spirit without all of my little preparations. Then, it snowed. Lots. All of our plans seemed to go out the window as everything seemed it was to be rescheduled.

On Christmas Eve, we braved the roads to my mom’s place and spent the afternoon exchanging gifts, snacking and playing cards. That evening, Adam and I basked in the hot tub while the large fluffy snowflakes crowned our heads. After, we enjoyed some Soba noodles with sesame sauce and watched The Hangover again. What a weird Christmas Eve. The next day, we again braved the roads and spent the afternoon with my Daddio. My cousin Mark and his girlfriend joined us and we had a nice spaghetti dinner. My Daddio and Adam played guitar and sang old country/blues/Elvis songs for me. The snow was still falling and we spent a lot of time shoveling/snowblowing. On Saturday, we drove down to Jan & George’s place in Shakopee. Jan made an outstanding chili and we ate way too much. We got to see Linda and BWEM even drove down from Duluth for the afternoon. Finally, on Sunday, we got to see the rest of the fam at Cori’s gorgeous house. I really enjoyed catching up with everyone, which I don’t get to do as much when I host. I probably hugged Auntie Bon too much! After her accident last summer, I just can’t help myself.

As for the final holiday, New Year’s, we held a small party at our place. You didn’t think I could live without hosting something, did you?

And now, we’re in January…full, frontal winter. My attitude and the weather have been bad, but I’m getting excited for the Medallion Hunt beginning this weekend. That will get me through the end of the month and then it’s February I need to worry about. Though, I think we’re going to have something pretty crazy and fun happening in February this year. I’ll keep it a secret for now until it’s finalized, but just you wait!