Introducing Tommy, the actor:

Yesterday morning Tommy informs me he has a play at school.. fortunatley we've hit a dry spell at work and at a drop of the hat I was still able to make the performance. The little turkey didn't tell which part he had so I kept scanning all the little faces trying to find him and I just couldn't until the part where they said, "the pioneers kept going until Brigham Young said" and suddenly the cutest little voice you ever heard pipes up and says "THIS IS THE PLACE!" No wonder I couldn't find him, he had a big old grey beard on his face. Here was his part in the play, he was handing out books to the kids (it was a play about Utah's history), between my World's Crappiest Camera and the little outfit he had on, he's hard to pick out in this picture. He's standing up in front of the temple.

Here's a better pic of my bearded little man:

And... drum roll please... here's the world's cutest Brigham Young. You may have to sit down for this picture:

I never loved Brigham Young so much!

Sasha's Wedding & Finishing the House

We've made some real progress now; we're pretty much all the way moved in except for a few odds and ends left over at the old place. Stuff that we probably really don't need to move ;) We are hoping to be at least done with the stuff left in the house by this weekend. The garage, however, is an entirely different story.

I wanted to post a few more pics on how things are coming along. We are definitely not done (is anyone really ever done with their house though?), but we're making progress. Here's the bedroom wall all painted.

The kids finally got the carpet in their rooms; it's a really nice, super soft carpet that's made from recycled materials and sustainable crops. Plus is super stain resistant, here's a couple pics of Rena's room w/the new carpet:

Here's a shot coming from the living room and looking into the dining room:

The living room:

On 1/1/11 my sweet little cousin Sasha got married to her handsome and just as sweet man, Derek Lloyd. Their wedding was beautiful and to start it off, here's my BEAUTIFUL sister:

Here's the happy couple during the ceremony:

This is not a very good picture, super bad lighting and my super crappy camera didn't do a good job. But I still liked the picture anyway:

And last, but by no means least, here's all the little creatures settling into the new house and calling it home:

He looks like he belongs right there doesn't he?

Trip to Arizona

In December we took a little trip to Arizona... my boss gets season tickets to the Cardinals games and when we found out they'd be playing the Broncos, he offered to give those tickets to me. Of course, at the time (way back in August), I was totally excited about it and couldn't wait. Well, as their season has gone on (we've ended it at 4-12) and as our lives/finances have progressed, I was not as excited about going when the time came. The good thing about was that I got to see my Grandparents!! I haven't seen them since August and prior to that it had been a couple of years. I got to see their super nice house in Littlefield/Scenic and we drove up and saw the house they have for my mom - which is also way super nice.

One thing I will say for the University of Phoenix stadium; it was really really easy to get to, no crying whatsoever, and we had a parking pass so that part was really really easy too.

We had incredible seats again; we are getting so spoiled!! How's it going to be when we have to sit like normal people up in the nosebleeds at our next NFL game?

We drove for two days to see the Broncos get their butts absolutely kicked... we left after the 3rd quarter. There is always next season :(

Our Mountain Cabin in the Middle of the City

Eric and I made a big leap - we bought our first house together! We looked at quite a few, but kept coming back to the very first house we looked at. It has a total cabin feel to it and it just spoke to us. We bought it in early October and have spent what seems like every waking moment of our lives working on it. It still needs a lot of work, but we decided we can live in it and work on it! All of our Christmas stuff was there so we moved the beds in and slept there Christmas Eve.... well, here's a room by room story from how it looked at first to how it looks now... or well, how it was starting to look. I don't think I have any pics in yet of how it looks now, but I will!

Here is the living room, the view of how it looks right when you walk through the front door. Where Eric is is the stairs to go either up or down and right behind him is the garage door. (Yay, I'm parking in a garage again!!!)

Notice the nasty green carpet. I'm sure it was nice when it was new, but it was not new anymore.

The living room -you can see the front door there on the right side. We tore all the carpet out in the kitchen, dining room and living room and had my dad tile the whole thing (and the bathroom too). It was a hell of a job and it took a while, Eric and I did all the grouting. We chose red grout so when it snowed and we would throw the buckets of grout water out, it looked like someone had been murdered in our yard. Here's the front yard crime scene:

And the back yard:

Here I am in the kitchen (it is, unfortunately, a very tiny kitchen) cleaning the grout.

And here is my handy man (this is the entry way coming in from the garage, right by the stairs) grouting the tile.

This is the living room all tiled and grouted (though obviously not cleaned of the dried up grout):

This is the dining room, shot from the kitchen.

Here it is in the middle of the tiling process:


All done! Well, except for the grout.

Now we're going to jump to the main bathroom (currently the only bathroom as you will see later): It's hard to see the colors, we have the world's crappiest camera. These are the white walls before I started painting.

Here's the pretty green color that's on the walls now:

There is now a darker color of green on those boards that come down by the mirror and on the baseboards. I'll try and a picture of that in here, but like I said, with our camera it's really hard to see the colors.

Now we're going to jump back to the kitchen. I don't have any pictures of what the kitchen looked like before (stupid, stupid, stupid). But here we are in the middle of the remodel: This is where the dishwasher goes..

The fridge goes here:

The inside of my pantry, at Syrena's suggestion I painted it white along with the kitchen - it was just wood but I like it painted white. It gives it a cleaner look:

If I had pointed the camera up just a little, this would be where my sink is:

The range goes in here:

Here's a shot of the whole kitchen before we had the appliances put in:

Here's after the tile/grout done, in the "range hole."

Ta da! All finished!

And my new fridge! The space would only allow a normal freezer on top type fridge, everything else was too wide. But we still got a really nice looking one:

Now our adventure continues upstairs, here's our loft area. This is where we had our Christmas tree and where I want to put our desk and computer.



This is the kids' bathroom, or at least it was.

When we ripped up the carpet so we could put tile in, the floor underneath it was BLACK!!! All rotted and nasty, you could tell there had been some serious water issues in there. So we messed around with the shower and discovered that all the water would come down through the kitchen ceiling. So my dad an Eric tore out the shower and found there was no pan under the shower to catch the water and send it down the drain. Commence bathroom destruction:

These are the last shots where it was at least a functional 2nd bathroom.

When I arrived home from work that day, this was my new bathroom:

Same area, but at least all cleaned up:

Here's what was my shower:

Look at the bottom of it, you can tell how black and nasty it was from all the water.

So now it's just a wooden shell of a room until we have the money/time to put a new one in. My dad got way hurt during our job and hasn't really been able to work since :(


Here's Syrena's room as it was:


We painted her room a crazy ass color of lime green and ripped out her carpet as well. When we did that there was huge area that was blackend and rotted that had been right next to the shower leak. My dad ripped that out and put in new sub floor. I had some left over paint from the kitchen, so the kids painted all kinds of stuff on their floors:

Here's a good shot of the new sub floor - I didn't get a chance to take pics of the nasty damaged floor.

The toilet from the bathroom temporarily is residing in her room, here she is with a goofy little pose on it:

We've had this ongoing carpet saga with them and we still don't have it in. But it's supposed to get put in tomorrow and then I'll have new pics to post with their rooms all done. Right now they are still bare with the paint on the floor.

Here's Tommy's room to begin with:

Here's his room with all the bathroom stuff in it:

I am all over the house, now we'll go back downstairs to mine and Eric's room, here is what it looked like when we bought it:

And here's the view from the other direction, of the wall before I painted it:

That's all the pictures I have for now, but more to come as the house starts to take shape :)