A weekend of R & T

Look who came to Roch to visit! Two of my dad's awesome sisters! Well, lets be honest, they came for my cousin's volleyball tournament, but the reason doesn't matter... it was so much fun to have them here! Their relationship is rare and an example of sisters being best friends. I think most parents envision their kids being best friends, but often life, marriage, job, fights, etc prevents those relationships from blossoming into what these two have.  It truly is a gift they have in each other, one I think most people (ok me) wishes they had as well. What's better than having your best friend at all your holidays, family functions, as a travel companion, helping you always host and raising your kids? It's almost like a sister wife, but not. :) Love these two! 

Glad you all came!

PASS!!

I don't know that this post needs anything else. I passed my CRNA boards!! The last 30 months of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice has been worth it! This also means I'll be posting more about our adventures and final remodel updates! :-)

I am officially the worst...

Who starts a blog and only blogs once a month, or in my case, once every 6 months?! Yes, I know I am the worst, but it only leaves me LOTS of room for improvement? Eh eh?? Like that positive spin?? :-) well let me show you what we've been up to lately at the Elton Hills residence. 

I should have introduced her months ago... This is Kola, our miniature schnauzer puppy! We had been considering getting another dog for awhile, and we were able to make it happen in August!  We wanted another dog because Nym really needed a friend. 

If you've ever heard of Temple Grandin,then you maybe know dogs are companion animals. Temple has autism and a PhD in animal science. She teaches animal science at Colorado State University and is the most accomplished adult with autism in the world. Living with autism has allowed her to gain insight into how animals think and why they behave the way they do. Google her name, read her book. She's quite an incredible woman. Because of her insight, we assumed Nym would like having another dog around... We didn't realize just how much happier and more well behaved Nym would be with a companion!

Thank you Temple, Nym is MUCH more calm which WE in turn love and they are  the best of friends!

The other reason for a second dog is because of allergy research I've been reading. This current research shows decreased allergies in kids that are raised in homes with two or more dogs. Fingers crossed this will help our future children! 

Here she is, little baby Kola. She is always at my heels and I love it! :-) (except when I accidently step on her)

The long awaited hardwood floors post!

AHH.. Finally! The hardwood floors post! I started refinishing the floors mother's day weekend because I was on-call. Let me tell you, It's. SO. Easy!! It cost me about $150 total to do it with the sander, stain, polyurethane and other supplies. It's easy AND cheap, WIN! We considered just polyurethaning the floors and not adding a stain, however, most of our wood is a light oak and it has a "blonde" look if we only polyurethaned them… a richer, deeper stain it is. My only regret during this process is living in the house while doing this. This, however, was not something we could avoid. I didn't matter how many times I cleaned the floors before staining or polyurethaning, I ALWAYS had at least one red hair on my floors and a few or Nym's… that was annoying, but we made due and we absolutely LOVE them!

Here's a picture from before. You can see the traffic patterns in the floor.

This is my sweet sander from Menards. It was $23 for the first 4 hours and then $2/hr after that!
We paid $35 for 8 hours of sanding!

I sanded the floors with coarse, medium, and fine paper. After sanding off the initial polyurethane,  I had no idea where I had sanded, so thank you youtube for this idea! I penciled the floor, the sander acted as an eraser so as I went over an are, the pencil marks were removed and it allowed me to be efficient as I didn't waste time re-sanding parts of the floor.

It felt like move-in day! We sanded the living room first, then moved all our furniture from the bedrooms to the living room and sanded them. We then stained/finished the bedrooms first and moved our furniture back.

Bedroom with one coat of stain

The difference between one coat and two coats. So. Much. Richer!

Finished bedroom with trim. I hope to eventually paint the windows, but that won't happen until I'm done with school.

Nym's room

Ta da! It took me about 10 days to complete this project. Had I not been working/in school, I could have finished it in about 3 days. We're taking a little hiatus from the remodel as we enjoy our summer, barbecues and our finished basement, but hopefully in the next few weeks we'll start on the kitchen demo. I can't wait to make you jealous of my sweet 1960s oven and tile counters. Til then!!

Staying close to home

Do you ever get caught up cleaning or studying and realize your forgot something? Lets just say this happens to me… often. Nym will ring her bells to let us know she'd like to go outside and sure enough I'll let her out. Sometimes she wants to play, sometimes she needs to potty, sometimes she just wants to enjoy fresh air. So… I'll let her out. I'll get caught up studying or cleaning and sure enough Greg will ask me where the puppy is and so we'll go to "find" her. This is what she's doing. :) She is such a good little puppy!! We don't have a fence, she doesn't wear a collar consistently, and we don't have a large backyard. She just stays close to home, keeping an eye out for squirrels :)

What a day!

First, have you ever had the fire truck show up at your house? I had a little fire going this afternoon in our fire pit, and BAM! the fire department was knocking on my door. Granted they were nice, but one of my neighbors turned me in! Apparently, in the city of Rochester you can only burn firewood, nothing else AND you're suppose to let the fire department know before you do it! Holy cow. Sometimes city living is not for me. Too many rules. Too many people with nothing better to do.

I just got a call from Greg that he was rear ended pretty badly. *sigh* I hate accidents and I especially hate when they happen to my family. So often chronic pain starts with some sort of accident. Thankfully, Greg is strong, active, and quite healthy, so hopefully it's just car damage and not real damage to him! Well, I was going to update about my hardwood floors, but there are more pressing things to do instead. Pray for no whiplash for my husband!

Basement... it is finished!

Our basement is finished. Actually, we're waiting on our glass door for the shower to arrive, but after that, we. are. done. It's awesome. It's so nice to go downstairs and relax in the space we built! We moved all our furniture from upstairs down and this the one place in the house that feels complete. AHHHH, I feels so good! Here are some photos with the furniture in it.

That big blob in the corner is a Lovesac. We LOVE this thing. I huge thanks goes out to our friend Rachael for giving us this awesome piece of furniture, to Pat for hauling it from Colorado to Texas for us, and my parents for driving it up from Texas to MN. It obviously was quite the process to get it to our home, but once you sit on it, you'll understand WHY it was worth it!

Bathroom vanity and mirror - it's a terrible
picture so if you want to really see it,
come visit! ;)

For now, we have a shower curtain up so the shower
 is usable.

My next project is to refinish the hardwood floors upstairs. Remember our hardwood floors under the hideous carpet? When we pulled up the carpet we showed you this picture.

After cleaning them, our floors looked like this:

Notice the traffic patterns??? Hopefully my next day off I'll be renting a sander and making these floors beautiful again! Once they're finished we'll purchase furniture for this space and one more room will be done! I'm debating about staining the floors because they're a "blonde" color and I'd like them to be a little darker. Any thoughts??? 

See Nym in the picture on the left? Greg made a little stand for her to sit on. She sits on that thing for HOURS monitoring the neighborhood. It's really cute. Often we can't get her down from there because she just likes to see what's going on outside! She is very protective of her home :) Well that's it guys! SLowly but surely we are getting there! These HGTV shows make this process look WAAAAAY easier than what it actually is.