Our New Kitchen

A local business, Ros's Cabinets, is closing one of their branches and selling their displays for very cheap. My parents just happened to stop by when the branch was open, saw they had 2 kitchens they were selling for very cheap, and told us about it. We knew eventually we were going to upgrade the kitchen, but figured the roof and siding were at the top of the list of projects, and the kitchen was more in the middle. However, this deal was too good to pass up! We are getting a beautiful, custom kitchen for about one-third of the retail price.

 

We are psyched, and now have our new big winter project. Good thing Mark and I both have next week off, because we'll be spending most of it going to get the cabinets (with real granite countertop!) from the store and moving it all to our home. Whew! This is going to be a lot of work.

Happy Christmas!

We've been decorating the house for Christmas, and it all started with getting our Christmas tree. In town, the Men's Club (which I don't really know what that means) was selling Christmas trees. We had driven by a couple of times and saw that they were really nice trees, so we went to go pick one up. We decided we wanted a full tree, and this one was very nice. It was also tall (almost 8 feet), but since our ceilings are 8 foot, we figured once we trim it down a little, it'd be perfect.

 

Once we got the tree in the house, we realized just how big the tree was. We didn't trim it enough, so we can't fit our tree topper on it. Also, because it is such a round tree, there weren't many options for places to put it. So we put it in front of the balcony door, at the foot of the stairs. It is very beautiful, but hopefully next year we'll remember this and get a slightly smaller tree!

More Cooking!

 

In this case, actually baking. Karen (my mother-in-law) made some homemade dog biscuits, which Niles (and Dylan, who came to visit last weekend) have been really enjoying!

Animal Antics

And here are some more photos of the animals being cute, and trying to stay warm.


Neko is hanging out with me while we watch TV.

 

Niles was being lazy and hanging out on his bed in the living room while I did some cleaning, and he let me cover him up with a blanket.

And finally, here is a photo of Boone (my sister's dog) at Thanksgiving. He found this frisbee that apparently belonged to my cousin during the 70s, and promptly destroyed it.

Our Home

 

Thanks to an enormous amount of help cleaning from Jessica, the house is really starting to shape up. Right now the living room is a little more cluttered than in the picture, but you can see the idea of it starting to shape up. It is missing the wood floor we hope to put in sometime during the winter, and the trim has yet to be painted, but the walls look very nice (thanks Mom!).

Here's the first version of our "game room." Since we can't use the basement yet (eventually we'll put a rec room/movie room down there) we are converting the third bedroom into our game room (aka, the party room). There are still lots of boxes around the room to be unpacked, but it is worlds better already. Now people might actually want to go into the room and hang out.


And finally, here is a view of the finished roof. We do have to go around and trim some edges still, and take down the last of the ladder jacks, but theoretically the roof should no longer be a water hazard! Plus, it is a fine looking roof, if I do say so myself!