2008

What happend the beginning of 2008!

Christmas 2007!

We had a great Christmas, it was the first one time that we have had Josh Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. Josh and I made cookies and wrote a letter to Santa on Christmas Eve. Before bed Josh left some cookies, a glass of milk, a carrot, and the letter to Santa were Santa would easliy find them.

After Christmas Janis pointed out that there was a birds nest in the Christmas tree.

Christmas came and went and January followed right along.

January 2008

Tyler and I had a birthday party for Josh at a bowling alley. There were lots of kids, and even a few cousins there.

During the beginning of Januray Rose had her first encounter with peanut butter.

Bailey & Rose decided after the peanut butter was gone it was such hard work they needed a rest.

March 2008

Easter soon followed. We went with Ariel, Brian, and Emma to Ann Morison Park for an easter egg hunt, and Josh got to meet the Easter Pickle. Yes the Easter Bunny was there too.

Then Easter morning, the Easter Bunny had left little plastic eggs with clues & treats in them for Josh to follow. At the end of the trail was his Easter basket.

March/April 2008

As tax season came to an end Tyler had to get our camper up and running for the camping season. He attempted to burn his arm off, but only managed to singe a few hairs. Tyler went to start the propane oven for the first time this season and a flame came shooting out. I ran out and turned all gas off at the main line.

Tyler disasembled the oven and found the culprit. He repaired the line and put the oven back in the camper.

We also repaired the leaky exaust manifold in the pick-up truck this same week.

Towards the end of April we took Josh to his first Drag races.

During April we also worked on Janis's motor home. The front end was rotting off, so Tyler had to replace it with new wood.

Summer, Fall, and Winter 2008!

Wow you should all be amazed! We are updating the blog again within a 2 month period!

Well as most of you know we have been very busy. Tyler received woodworking machines/tools, so now is the proud owner of routers, a planner, table saws, clamps, etc. He was very excited to try them out, so played with random chunks of wood. He even made some pretty designs in an old wood broom handle.

We began our camping season the weekend of April 20th. This was our 1 year anniversary and my first tax season in an accountant’s office. Tyler went on the renewal, the yearly guys only camping/fishing trip, and it is the first "official" trip of the season. I think we managed one or two more times of camping before summer came along.

With gas prices so high over the summer we decided to work on the downstairs bathroom. This project was started when we first purchased the house, got put on hold so we could fix the downstairs bedroom and living area and has been on hold since. Then Anna found a great deal on Craigslist for granite tile. We went to look at the tiles found some we liked for the bathroom and they had such good prices Tyler said we should buy some for the counters in the kitchen.

All of the granite we purchased are 12x12 tiles. The granite that was purchased for the shower surround in the bathroom we got for $2 sqft. This usually sells for $10 sqft. The granite we bought for the counters in the kitchen was only $1 sqft, regularly $5-6 sqft. So a great deal. Since we purchased the granite we were all amped up to work on the bathroom so bought all the necessary remaining tiles for floors, accents, etc. This is when the bathroom again was put on hold...

This is what the house looked like when we bought it.

Remember earlier I mentioned Tyler got woodworking tools. Well he decided it would be neat to try and update a kitchen cabinet door. He took one down and went to work on it with his new toys. Tyler failed to think that it would drive me nuts to have one cabinet door off/different then the rest, and so our bathroom project turned into our kitchen project.

This is what started the project!

So what started as the bathroom downstairs, turned into just updating the style of the cabinet doors and painting them, to gutting the kitchen, to gutting 1/2 the upstairs.


The poor job the previous owners had done with the kitchen bothered Tyler to the point of pulling cabinets off of the walls. Since the upper and lower cabinets were out we decided to tear the old vinyl flooring up. When we pulled the layers of flooring up, the bottom reveled hardwood. We decided that refinishing the hardwood would be cheaper then buying tile, so decided to salvage the wood. This then led to tearing up the flooring in the living and dining rooms, because there was more hardwood.

To make the refinishing of the hardwood easier Tyler decided we should pull it up. So we did. This revealed that the sub floor underneath was rotting and squeaking. So we replaced the old sub floor with new stuff.

It was during this project that Tyler managed to put a hole in the floor with his foot/leg, and a nasty hole in his knee.

(There is a picture of the hole in the floor(upstairs)/ceiling(basement) further down the page)

We laid travertine tile in front of the front door.

We also got a new set of French doors to replace our old slider door.

We came to a stopping point before we finished laying the new sub floor, because we had to replace the water pipes in the kitchen with nice new copper.

We waited for money to work on the plumbing. When we finally had enough to purchase the copper pipes we began working on the kitchen plumbing. This is when the second major incident happened.

Tyler claims “Three black men came after me and beat me up, but I got a few punches in myself” What really happened though is his cutesy pipe wrench and cheater bar slipped off of the pipe and bashed him in the lip. This led to taking Tyler to the Doc-in-the-Box for stitches in his lip. Thank you, Janis and Steve for talking some sense into him on this matter.


Tyler’s lip is now healed and we finished the plumbing project without any more incidents. We laid the rest of the sub floor and now are putting up drywall in the kitchen.

For more then a little while now, we have been living in a construction zone. Bare stud walls, old sub floor, and no kitchen, dining, or living room. (Thank God we have a family room downstairs).

Along with working on the house we have managed to squeez more things in throughout the year. We went to a rock crawling exhibit outside of Nampa, helped our friend Ty work on his house, celebrated Halloween, and Christmas.

Since our upstairs is tore up we didn't get a real tree this year, so instead we put up Tyler's little 3ft tree in Josh's bedroom. (Notice the NASCAR theme)

Finally an update

Yeah, I know. Anna has been remiss in her blogging duties. So, I figured that I'd throw up a few pictures to pacify the natives.

So, we've been a little busy lately. I got Anna's french doors put in!

We went camping a few times this summer. Not as often as we'd hoped, but you know how that is.

A few pictures of Rose "Tounge with legs" the Puppy; an old and a new one.

Oh yeah, and my house is trying to kill me. Here is the aftermath of its most succesful attempt. Yeah, that's the ceiling... yeah, that's my blood on the nail head. I was lucky enough to extract myself (with Anna's help) before most of the blood started to flow.