Tearing up floors is a B

We are doing a complete overhaul of the first three rooms in our new house. It is a lot, a lot, a lot of work but I know that it will pay off and look gorgeous once we are done. We are tearing up floors, securing the sub-floor (I didn't even know what a sub-floor was before last week), refinishing cabinets, tearing out an old back splash and replacing it with an awesome glass tile mosaic one, repairing the molding in some areas, and we are painting all the walls. We are about half way done with our list of 'move in' projects. We, or should I say Josh, started by tearing out the floors. Lucky for us, there wasn't only one, but four layers of flooring in some parts of the downstairs. He has been such a hard worker and ripped through all of them in just two or three days, after putting in a full day at the office. He is awesome.

I spent a lot of Saturday pulling staples out of the linoleum in our kitchen. We then had to move all the torn out wood and linoleum from these rooms to the backyard patio area where it will wait to be picked up.

This is the floor that we had to tear out. I felt really bad getting rid of it because it was really charming and I think might have been original to the house in one room. It was necessary though. The sub-floor needed some repairing and securing.

Enlarge this picture to take a look at just a fraction of the nails we had to pull out of the sub-floor. They didn't come out with the wood we tore up so we spent SEVEN hours pulling these babies out. I was pretty sure I was going to cry by the end of that day.

This isn't even all of them! We literally pulled out thousands of nails and staples from this crappy sub-floor.

Josh seriously is such a hard worker. I wish I could help him more than I can. I am just not strong enough to do some of these projects. Here he is putting screws in every 4-6 inches throughout the sub-floor to resecure it and make it safer and quiet. It was so squeeky before we started all of this. Now it doesn't dare make a sound, it knows my husband will come after it.

The next step to getting the floor ready for our new beautiful wood is laying tar paper.

On top of this will go ply wood, again nailed in every four to six inches, a moisture and sound barrier and then finally our new floors! I am so excited and can't wait to see the house once these are in. They are going to transform the entire place!

Happy day for Joshua

Last week we closed on our house. We are so excited to be home owners! Renovations have begun and we have a lot of work ahead of us. Josh LOVES working on homes. He loves to build, fix up, take down, make new, recreate...all of it. It is so nice to have a handy husband. Right after we closed we headed straight to Home Depot. Home Depot is Josh's favorite store in all the land. He could spend hours there. We picked up a few things then headed to OUR HOUSE.



That same day one of my clients gave Josh and I awesome tickets to the Jazz game. We were ten rows from the floor and it was so much fun. Josh had a happy day.

Long time no post

We have had a CRAZY couple of weeks, hence me not posting for a while. In the past week and a half we have both gotten sick, made two trips to Urgent Care, celebrated a birthday, worked, bought a house, started marathon training, celebrated our nephews baby blessing, spent countless hours boxing and packing our current place, babysat, and gone to Home Depot 8000 times.

So, our big news is that we have purchased our first home! We are so excited and can't wait to move in. This week we will be spent tearing out the existing wood floors, painting walls and cupboards, redoing the back splash in the kitchen, installing new wood floors, getting carpets and vents cleaned and then moving! We will post before and after pictures of the house and our projects. We can't wait to get started. Since our blog is public we won't be posting pictures of the exterior but we will send an email to our friends and family with a picture of our new place. It is so cute, but will be even better after I get my hands on it.

Poor Josh has been so so so sick this week. Monday he called me while he was at work and told me he wasn't feeling well. By the time he got home that day he was completely miserable. It turns out he had both bronchitis and pneumonia. Poor kid! I have never seen him sick like this and I felt terrible for him. He is a trooper and never complained even though he was very uncomfortable and in pain. Unlike him, I am a major whiner when I get sick. Luckily, he is now starting to feel better and should be able to go back to work tomorrow.

Here is our week in review in pictures:

Here I am, sick, blowing out my pretend candle on my chocolate pecan caramel apple. It is my favorite treat.

I love this picture of Seth and Josh. They will be good friends, I just know it.

Baby Seth on his blessing day. We love him so much and are so grateful he is part of our lives.

Poor sick Josh

What our current house looks like:


We have about half of our things boxed up and still have quite a bit of work to do. I hate this part of moving, I can't stand to have everything all over the place.

Courtney Nicole

It’s a rare occasion that merits me writing a blog post on this World Wide Web you kids are always talking about. In fact, I’ve only written once that I can remember. But today is one of those rare occasions- a special day that deserves special attention. Every March 5^th calls for celebration of the birth of a certain individual, who, although small in stature (almost legally handicapped), has the heart of a woolly mammoth.

Courtney is my beautiful wife, and these are 23 things I love about her:

1. She says old person things all the time, like: ‘shucks’ or ‘quit busting my chops’
   
2. Her laugh is one of the things that made me fall in love with her
   
3. I’ve never met anyone that adores babies as much as she does
   
4. She is an amazing cook, and getting better all the time
   
5. She hums & sighs involuntarily all the time
   
6. She will believe anything I say
   
7. Sometimes, while dancing with friends, she’ll get extra enthusiastic and starts to do a wild dance and her hair flies all over the place
   
8. For some arcane reason, one of her favorite movies is “Three Men and a Baby”
   
9. She doesn’t speak any other languages as of now, but her Spanish gibberish is actually very impressive
   
10. She makes, literally, the best cookies I have ever tasted
    
11. She will be an incredible mother – anyone who knows her will agree
    
12. She will sometimes jump up in the air to do Chinese splits for no reason- trust me, it sounds more graceful than it looks
    
13. She loves her family and loves to be with them
    
14. She is instinctively nurturing
    
15. She is amazingly clumsy most of the time, but can be very graceful when she cares to be
    
16. She automatically begins to scratch my arm or my head whenever near me
    
17. Anytime she is sitting down she will sway from side to side, almost as if she’s rocking a baby to sleep – she has done this since I’ve known her
    
18. She truly wants to be a good person, and always wants to serve people in need
    
19. She is very concerned about eating and living healthy
    
20. She is smokin’ hot in a bathing suit
    
21. She has a perfect level of confidence and self-esteem which really, really helps make life and marriage easier for me
    
22. She totally wanted to make out with me on our first date (she’ll deny it), even though I had just been wearing denim cut-off short shorts roller-skating
    
23. She is the only person in this world I want as my wife, and she said yes to me

The only negative thing I can think about Courtney:

1. She is only 1/3 of this relationship, by mass, but still feels entitled to more than half of our bed

Happy Birthday Court! I love you more than anything and I hope you have the birthday you deserve this year.

Your loving husband,

Josh

Note to readers:

Courtney has expressed to me in the past that she doesn’t really care much for birthday attention, so why don’t you all give her a call or drop her a line to say ‘Hi’ and ‘Happy Birthday.’

Sick as a dog

I hate being sick. I came down with Influenza B on Monday and the past three days have totally sucked. I don't think I have ever truly had the flu. I have had a fever of 102.5, intense body aches and joint pain, sweats, chills, a sore throat, cough, nasal congestion, and a runny nose. Moral of the story...don't come to my house, you might get infected and die (at least you'll want to die).

In the past 72 hours I have consumed:
2 bowls of soup and a bagel (THANK YOU so much Rachel, you saved me today)
about 20 crackers
64 oz. of tangerine juice
4 Advil
2 Tylenol
2 Tamaflu
countless glasses of cold water

I have also watched the following movies:
Dan in Real Life
Wayne's World
Forrest Gump
Sleeping Beauty
The Princess Bride
Parenthood
Notting Hill
Pride and Prejudice
50 First Dates

and lay in bed wishing someone would just put me in a medically induced coma until I'm all better. If you can't tell I don't handle being sick with much grace. I am a major wuss.

Sounds exciting doesn't it? My doc told me that I should expect to feel this crappy for a week. I'm 3 days into it and I am hoping I can cut this thing short and that I only have 2 days left. We have an announcement to make in a few days and I need to be healthy for what we have coming up. Sorry mom, we aren't pregnant. Poor Josh has been sleeping on the couch because he has been busier than ever at Goldman and can't afford to get sick. They really need him right now. So boo for being sick, I hope you all stay healthy. Again, remember not to pay me any visits in the next couple of days.