Merry Christmas Eve!

Things I learned from being snowed in

with my husband for 48 hours...

*** He makes hot chocolate with water, no milk. I make mine with mainly milk, maybe a tiny bit of water. This caused some major discussions this weekend. I finally got him to agree that hot chocolate with milk tastes MUCH better. Of course, it doesn't hurt when you pour half a bottle of Bailey's in it either.

*** I'm never going to be able to convince him that Lifetime movies don't get old after watching them for 8 hours straight. He is still not a fan.

*** Setting the thermostat to 62 degrees is not acceptable to me when we're in the middle of a blizzard and can't leave the house. It was 57 degrees in our house on Sunday morning - he turned it down hoping it would "save money". I told him I'd rather have a $500 electric bill than freeze to death. I wanted it set to 76 - we compromised on 69.

*** He still thinks I looked pretty even though I barely showered or got out of sweatpants all weekend - awww!

*** He is just as obsessed with celebrity gossip as I am. Case in point: fighting over all the trashy mags I bought on Friday before the storm hit.

*** We didn't want to kill each other TOO many times by Sunday night - a success!!!

We spent about 5 hours yesterday digging out of the snow. We made little tunnels all over the front and side of our house and got all the cars cleaned off. As much as I did enjoy the lazy weekend, I'm seriously ready for it to melt already!! Once you have to start going out in it, it's not fun anymore!

Unfortunately, I had to come into work today - major bummer! At least it's a short week...can't believe Christmas is like 3 days away!!

20 inches!

Official measure (from our deck) - 20"!!! 

Well...

We got snow! and it's still coming! By 9am, we had at least a foot and now at 2:30pm, I'd say we have close to 15 inches. And it's not supposed to stop until tomorrow morning! I wanted to be snowed in and I'd say we are DEFINITELY snowed in!! They are saying we will have over 2 feet by the time it stops. Wowza. 

Our deck at 9am when we woke up. 

Our deck at 2:30pm. 

Looking out our front door - this was after we had already shoveled it once. 

The one downside of not having a covered front porch! A mountain of snow at the doorway! (this was also after we had cleared it away once in the morning as well)

This is also Spencer's first experience with a major snowfall. We let her out this morning and had to drag her back in the house after an hour. She LOVED it!

This was at 9am - the snow is definitely over her head now!

Sprinting around like a mad woman. And yes, I admit, I went out and bought her a sweater yesterday to keep her warm in all this snow!

It looks like she doesn't have any legs in this picture!!

Looking down our road. 

I'm totally enjoying being snowed in - I doubt we will even be going to work on Monday!! 

Let it Snow!

We are in the dark purple - fingers crossed we're totally snowed in this weekend! 12"+ of snow would make me a happy girl! I've already stocked up on hot chocolate, soup and stuff to make grilled cheese sandwiches!

Getting there

We are making progress on our bathroom renovation. It's a long, tedious process and we've definitely hit a few speed bumps along the way. Our current issue is the plumbing for the new pedestal sink we are installing. Apparently the pipes don't work (fit?) with the sink we bought and Jake is going to re-plumb (What??? is that actually a word?) the bathroom so everything fits and looks pretty. Wowza. Please cross your fingers that our house is not flooded by my husband who is apparently adding plumber to his resume.

Anyways, we got all the NASTY wallpaper removed from the entire bathroom with the help of an industrial wallpaper steamer. Our friend Will owns his own painting company and has a hardcore wallpaper steamer that he loaned to us (and actually helped J with - it took the 2 of them about 15 minutes to get all that paper off). Underneath the wallpaper was about 2 inches of horrible wallpaper glue, which looked like boogers. Sorry for the gross visual, but that's what we're dealing with here. See, I told you! This is the walls and ceiling over the sink post- wallpaper removal.

After Jake scrapped all that off, it took 3 coats of Killz to cover the walls and ceiling to get them to resemble anything semi-livable. He then painted the top of the walls in Glidden's "Water Chesnut", and started working on installing the white beadboard.

We're doing the beadboard up 6 feet high. The reason is that all of our bathrooms have built in, wall-recessed medicine cabinets in them and the old owners were nice enough to cover the one in this bathroom WITH WALLPAPER! But not before they painted the entire thing BLACK. So we really couldn't salvage it, so we decided to just rip it out and cover it with beadboard. Here's what I'm talking about...

Here's the hole in the wall after we ripped the medicine cabinet out...

Here's the lovely medicine cabinet in all it's wallpapered glory - it has no idea that it's about to meet it's final resting place at the dump...

And here is that hole covered with the beadboard paneling. And a good shot of the new light J installed.

Now, I won't leave you hanging with just ugly demo pictures. Here's the current state of our bathroom:Lovely beadboard - still need to do the corner trim pieces, but J is working on those this week.

We have real walls and a WHITE ceiling - I really think this is my favorite part!!

The new light. I found it at Ballard Designs, on sale, then an additional 10% off, plus free shipping. Majorly excited about that one! (still have to install the beadboard behind the sink, but we need to work on the plumbing issues first obviously)The non-installed pedestal sink. We just set it in place so we could see what it was going to look like. You can see the pipes behind it - I really hope Jake can perform some miracles to get that to work.

Still need to do the baseboards and the top molding above the beadboard, but I love how it looks with the new floor!

So that's our current progress. We are having family over the Sunday after Christmas, so our goal is have the entire thing finished by then. Do you think we can do it??

I heart this

Sigh.