New Landscaping

I guess the universe has decided that it is time for us to do some new landscaping in our front yard. This is what our house looked like this morning after about 6 hours of very intense wind. I'd say we woke up to it, but there wasn't much sleeping going on at our house last night as we listened to the wind, occasionally hearing stuff hit our house. (I'm pretty sure we were hearing our neighbor's roof shingles.)

We lost all four of our trees in the front yard, including the enormous pine tree, and our little apple tree in the back yard.

As you can see, the pine tree also took out half the flower bed, a bunch of grass and tore up three sprinkler lines when it went down.

This is how it looked this afternoon after our wonderful neighbors helped us cut up the trees so that we and our next door neighbors could access our garages. We are so grateful that the trees didn't damage our home and that we live in a place were people look out for each other. There was a group of men and teenage boys with chain saws going around our neighborhood helping clear up fallen trees all day long. Our neighborhood looks pretty bad with trees and fences down all over the place and blown off shingles and debris everywhere.

I'm a little sad at how drastically our yard has changed in the last 24 hours. At least I won't have to rake up pine needles any more, and I can plant a tree that I like in place of that big pine tree.

Bathroom Redo, After

So, I've been putting off posting about the bathroom because it's not officially finished yet. But I finally decided that since the only thing we still need to do is the back-splash, and who knows how long it will be before we get it done, I better just go ahead and post some after pictures of our bathroom and be done with it.



Here's the bathroom before.




And here it is now. I am SO happy with how it turned out. I ended up painting the cabinets pink and I LOVE them! I want to get some glass knobs for the drawers, but I haven't been able to find what I want yet.

I actually ended up moving our shower curtain from the master bathroom because I couldn't find anything I liked. I love this shower curtain, but knew I didn't want to keep it in the master bath anyway. The walls are a butter yellow. I think it is such a happy and friendly yellow.

We ended up spending more than I had originally hoped, but at only $500 I feel like we still did a pretty good job on a small budget. That covers wallpaper removal; paint for the walls, ceiling, door, baseboards and cabinets; new light fixture, faucet, floor, baseboards, towel rod and toilet paper holder; new towels and bathmat; and accessories/decorations.

It makes me happy every time I walk by and look in my beautiful, clean, new bathroom. (I do have to say that I think it's kind of ironic that the first bathroom we redid was already the NICEST bathroom in the house, if you can believe that.)

Last night we went from this:

To this:

Doesn't it look lovely?! We're ready for your visit, Shannan, although there's no longer a toilet, just a hole in the floor. And the walls are sticky and yellow. Not to mention some remains of wallpaper in the tub. And the floor is partly torn up. And the cabinet is taken apart. Maybe there's still a little more work to do. ;) I am so very excited to have ONE bathroom that feels nice and clean - and colorful. I love me some color!

At least I can cross painting the hallway off my list:

P.S. I hate wallpaper.

Clutter Busters!

For the last month, Jeff and I have been working at getting our home organized and clutter free. We don't have a basement in our home, which means we don't have a whole lot of storage space. Plus, I've become anti-clutter the older I've gotten. I used to be a saver and would hang on to everything way past its usefulness. Now I'm the chucker in our marriage and Jeff and I are constantly debating about what we are going to keep and what we are going to trash. Part of the problem is that we inherited a lot of junk when we bought our house. Jeff thinks that we should make use of what we have and I think it belongs in the dump. The garage was a mess and the former owners had turned the master walk-in closet into a computer room and the storage room behind it into the master closet. We finally got new shelves and clothing rods put up in the closet (The Saturday before Emily was born!) and last weekend we tore down the old shelves in the storage room and took everything out and organized it, getting rid of a bunch of stuff in the process. We had all ready organized our other storage closet the week before. Today we tackled the garage. This was probably spurred along by me breaking of my side mirror off our new car when I was backing out of the garage last week. It feels so nice to know where stuff is in the garage and to feel like I have room to get kids in and out of the car. I love to live in an organized world! (Which is no shock to anyone that knows me.)

In a very Jeff like moment today, I left garage cleaning halfway through and started pruning some of our trees. I could not believe what a difference it made to our yard! I cleared off some low branches right inside our gate in the back yard and it really opened up the area. Today, for the first time since we bought our house, I felt like we were actually making some headway with our yard. There is still a lot to do, especially in the back, but it felt so nice out there today under the shade of our trees and the grass in the back only looks bad in the back half of the yard! That probably doesn't sound that great, but it is major progress for us and gives me hope that maybe next summer our yard will be an enjoyable place to hang out.

Attack of the Flies

A couple of weeks ago we had about six flies buzzing around our house. I thought this was odd since we had only had maybe two flies before in the 2 1/2 years that we have lived here. They were gone after a couple of days and I didn't really think any more of it until a few more showed up yesturday. Then this morning when I went downstairs to open the blinds I found about twenty flies in my living room. I felt like I was in the fly version of the movie "Birds". They were all just sitting on my walls and windows, waiting. I hope they don't decide to attack.

(I actually vacuumed them up a couple of hours later. Max keeps calling them spiders, even though I tell him over and over that they aren't spiders, they're flies.)

Silence!

It looks like our little friend has finally moved on. Just when I was going to toss my hands in the air, give her a name and let her move right into the house, too! ;) I am loving the silence in my house right now and very excited to sleep without the radio in the background tonight!!

bye, bye raccoon.....

So after 48 hours of blaring a stereo into our chimney, Jeff opened the damper this morning and didn't see or hear any raccoons. Yeah!! The chimney sweep came this afternoon, opened up the damper and said, "She's still there." I guess she was just hiding from Jeff this morning. Not what I wanted to hear, especially after getting all excited thinking the constant noise we had put up with over the weekend was going to pay off. He stuck his camera up to see were she was, since he had spooked her up the chimney when he opened the damper, and couldn't find her anywhere. After looking for a while he decided to go look down the chimney and make sure she was really gone. No raccoon. He checked the other chimney while he was up there, and there she was, down in our other chimney. Since she was out of the original chimney, he capped it and cleaned it out.

Apparently she had made quite a little home for herself, dragging a bath mat, towels and a bunch of plastic into our chimney. And let me say, her little nest did not smell to good! He didn't find any baby raccoons, though. We're not sure if she moved them, or if it has really been only her the whole time. I guess we'll never know for sure.

Here she is, sitting right at the bottom of our other chimney. The chimney sweep tried to get her to come out, but she would only go half way up. The pipe for the wood burning stove is at a right angle to the chimney so he can't force her out. The plan now is to move the stereo into the wood burning stove and hopefully she'll leave tonight and then Jeff can cap the other chimney himself. The chimney sweep said it's pretty likely she'll move because she knows this isn't a safe place to be now. We're keeping our fingers crossed!

Extended Stay

So due to some extremely bad weather last night, our little friends have decided to stay. (For those of you that don't live in Utah, we had a major rain storm last night with some very strong wind.) The chimney sweep called me this morning to see if I could hear our little visitors so I went and turned of the stereo, after having it blaring for 36 hours straight, and immediately heard little baby raccoons. It was also snowing when he called, so we opted to wait on the chimney cleaning. We have a very steep roof, and I had visions of the chimney sweep falling off our wet, steep roof. The weather is supposed to get better over the weekend, so we rescheduled for him to come on Monday. We are really hoping we can get the raccoons to move out on their own since it will cost a couple hundred dollars just to have the chimney sweep remove them and we are all ready going to be spending a pretty penny to get the chimneys cleaned and capped. The chimney sweep is all for this as well. I guess they aren't very fun to remove, especially when there are babies. In the meantime, I've turned off the radio and we are going to wait until Saturday or Sunday to turn it back on. I'm hoping we can skip town for the weekend so that I don't go crazy from the loud music. Anyone up for visitors? ;) I'll let you know how it all goes next week. For right now, I'm just enjoying the silence while my kids are napping. It's amazing the little things you appreciate when something like this happens!

Our New Addition

Yesterday I was sitting in our living room reading while Max was watching "Cars" when I heard a cooing sound coming from our fireplace. I thought, "Oh great, we've had a bird fall into the chimney." We had a bird fall into our other chimney last year and it was a pain, but I figured since that chimney goes to a wood burning stove and this one goes to a fireplace this time it would be easier to get out.

After the kids went to bed, Jeff opened up the damper to get the bird out and saw a raccoon staring back at him. Apparently the sound I heard wasn't a bird but a raccoon who had decided that our chimney would make a great little home. I immediately went into panic mode and started scouring the internet for information on raccoons living in chimneys. While Jeff sat downstairs watching TV, I was reading about raccoons and how they can have rabies or bring fleas into your home and how they use your chimney as a bathroom, basically working myself up into a frenzy. (Of course, Jeff just sat there amused by my rantings about how we had to get that thing OUT OF HERE, and how it was going to give my babies fleas, etc.) I read on about eight different web sites that you should put a stereo turned all the way up in the fireplace and then put a piece of plywood in front of it. This is supposed to make the raccoon decide that this isn't a good place for it to live and hopefully it will move out. We put the stereo in and went to bed.

Eight o-clock on the dot this morning I was on the phone with animal control and a chimney sweep, and while I'm talking to the chimney sweep he tells me that the cooing sound I heard was raccoon babies. That's right, BABIES!!! He tells me to leave the stereo on all day, really loud, and hope that the raccoon moves out tonight, with her babies. He's coming tomorrow morning to see if they're gone, remove them if they're not, and sweep and cap both of our chimneys. In the meantime, I'm about ready to move out myself, the music is driving me that crazy. Max on the other hand thinks it's the funnest thing ever and wants to spend every minute in the living room dancing. (He gets his dancing skills from his dad.) ;)

Random Stuff

We haven't really done anything eventful in the last few days so I thought I would just post some recent pictures of random happenings in our life.

I went out of the room for a minute the other day and came back to find that Max was trying to share his football with Emily while she was sleeping.

It is often amusing the things that Max will do with his toys. I looked over today and watched as he positioned his blanket very carefully over Hobbes and himself and then sat with his hands on his knees staring at the wall.

I was trying the get a photo of Emily smiling, but of course whenever I pull out the camera all she does is stare at it like, "What's that?". This was the best I could do, but I'm sure I'll get a picture of her smiling one of these days. If you haven't noticed, her hair tends to stick straight up on the top of her head. Usually it's just in the back, but sometimes she gets a full blown Mohawk. I think it's pretty cute and call her my Buckwheat Baby.

Ah, the yearly ritual of raking up all the cursed pine needles that fall all over our front yard. I hate this tree because it is constantly covering my yard with pine needles and a ridiculous amount of pine cones. I have to rake up the needles about three times a year and then we have to try and figure out how to get rid of them because they won't all fit in the garbage can at one time. It's impossible to get all the needles because they get stuck in every bush, flower, and weed in the yard. We're hoping that it won't drop so many once we get rid of the bug infestation that it has, but so far all the spraying doesn't seem to have made a difference in the amount of needles it drops. The one redeeming thing about this tree is the great shade we get, especially in the summer, which is why we'll never chop it down even though I hate it!