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.

Shower update

The bathroom has been my baby. Well, let me correct this... tiling has been my baby during this remodel. I have never tiled...Never laid a single tile, thinset, grout, nothing, nada. I remember my dad tiling a floor when I was young, but we were not apart of the project. SO how did I learn to tile? You guessed it. YouTube. You can learn just about anything on there. I even learned how to mud and tape, but my wise husband wouldn't let me. :) It took Troy (our awesome mud/tape guy)all of 4 days to do our entire basement. It was impressive how easy it was for him. I'm sure it would have taken me weeks! So, for my sanity, I'm grateful Greg said no :)

Back to YouTube. It. Is. Sweet. But, I also think people are putting themselves out of business teaching us DIYers how to do it without their help... tutorials for FREE!! Greg tried to correct my technique a few times, but I told him "I know how to do this, I learned it on YouTube. I got this."

Tiling... I'm not going to lie, it's really not that difficult. I was nervous with the initial tiles I put down, but then got into the flow and here we are with a fully tiled and grouted shower. All that's left is to seal it and put the glass door in! This shower is freaking HUGE! It's 4 ft x 5 ft. It's really a thing of beauty and I cannot wait to use it next weekend!

Here are some progression pics. Grout makes such a huge difference!!

In the mud/tape process. Just tile on the floor.

I used a level to make sure it was perfect! *almost*

Grout makes it look SOOO pretty!

All grouted

Notice the showerhead from the ceiling. It's a true rain shower to my husband's delight.

(Guest post from Greg)

THE END IS NEAR!

We have completed a number of huge milestones in the basement! Carpet has happened. Tile in the bathroom is nearly done. The toilet and vanity are installed!

Apparently even the plumbing is working. That's a plus.

We purchased the drop ceiling and the baseboard trim as well. Allan and I will be installing that this week. It will be such a major improvement in the soundproofing of the basement as well. Right now, when Nym starts to scratch (her leg hits the floor every time), it sounds like someone is pounding on the door to get it. Funny, but not ideal for napping/movie time/video games (the major things that will happen in that space. 

Andrea has seriously done a remarkable job on the tile in the bathroom. I think she may have realized that it is more work than she initially thought, but it's pretty rewarding for her to see what she has accomplished. It's been fun to watch the transformation.  :-)

The stairs to the basement. We got nice padding under the carpet, so it's really soft and 

springy. We are extremely happy with the end result!

Living room with LoveSac and drop ceiling supplies.

Living room with a shot of what trim will look like.

Living room from another angle. We painted all of our ducting white. It looks WAY better.

The vanity! We love it. It will look even better with the mirror up!

Andrea's incredible tile work. 

Installed and functional toilet. Love it. Notice Andrea's tile work in the background and 

the vinyl floor tiles. Both look good due solely to her diligence and care. I'm pretty freaking grateful.

We also hosted my fraternity brothers from undergrad this weekend. We had a blast and really enjoyed having that space in the basement for one of the families that showed up. It gave them a lot of privacy and allowed them to just sleep and join us when they were ready. As a group, I am really grateful to have them in my life. They helped with some of the installs, cleaned up after themselves, and provided food for the whole weekend. Basically they acted like grateful, mature adults. Wonderful.  :-)

More to come soon! We're looking forward to the final inspections that should be happening on Friday!

Taking shape

The past week the basement has really started to take shape. We (actually Allan and Greg, I clean up after them) are finishing rooms and making tons of progress. We've had LATE nights and I am exhausted as I'm sure the boys are, but we're hosting a bunch of Greg's frat brothers next weekend and I would LOVE to have this space completed. So, we're pushing hard to hopefully meet this goal in 10 days!

That yellow thing in the first picture is a drywall ceiling lift. Little did I know, you find these things at rental stores. I showed up at Home Depot one night this week about 30 minutes before they closed thinking/asking to rent one. The man at the counter looked at me confused and I'm sure I returned the look because obviously, you go to Home Depot for EVERYTHING. Why would I need to go to a rental store??  Well, lucky me, there was a contractor at the counter who had one in his truck! (I think he felt sorry for me, but hey, I'll take it!)  He offered to rent me his for 1/2 the price of a normal rental and off I went. Score!!! This little contraption saved us (Al and Greg cause lets be honest, I didn't do the drywall) so much time.

This is the wall between the two rooms as the walls are going up

Check out our shower! This thing is HUGE!!! It's 4'x5' and it is going to awesome.

The boys putting up the ceiling in the bathroom. 

One bedroom complete!

Living room progress

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Check out our rain showerhead. I cannot wait to have this thing done!