Christmas

Nate and I drove down to Bandon on Christmas Eve. What a thrill to be in a house with electricity and a kitchen! =) Here are a few pictures of our time with my family.

The Boyd Family

Anna's first Christmas as part of the family

Moses hides under a present while Maxwell looks on

My parents' huge, beautiful tree...I took this picture from upstairs

Freezing Rain

So, most of us probably don't want to even think about the storm anymore, but I wanted to post some of our ice pictures from Sunday, December 21. I didn't do it sooner because that's the day we lost our power for FOUR DAYS. It was not at all fun, though I tried to convince myself we were camping. No power meant no heat, and our house got down to 47 degrees. Yikes! We lost a lot of branches and a few entire trees, but thankfully none did much damage.

Frozen trees and our barbed wire fence

Our neighbor's poor trees leaning with the weight of the ice. Two of them fell.

Focus on the crazy amount of ice on that tiny little twig, not on the weird expression I'm making! =)

Thanksgiving Weekend

Nate and I didn't make it to Bandon until 4:30 on Thursday afternoon. We spent the morning painting the walls that would be behind the cabinets. We didn't have time to paint everything and I didn't really want to choose a color until I could see what the cabinets and countertops looked like.

We had a nice evening with my family and then Nate, my dad, and Joe (the cabinet shop owner) headed to Salem at 5:00am on Friday. The guys worked hard all weekend, except during the Civil War. (What a disappointment!) Forrest and Paul also helped.

My mom rode up with me this afternoon. Our kitchen looks AMAZING, though FAR from done. I have so much space!! Here are some pictures. The wood is hickory, so the color varies a lot. Our counters still have to be sanded, along with about a million other projects. It's super exciting, though. My mom wanted me to include a picture of how the rest of our house is looking...Am I getting any sympathy?!

Progress!!

Our kitchen is starting to look like a real room again!

Are we having fun yet?!

Okay, so I won't answer that question. But I will give a little update on progress. Nate worked really hard on redoing the breaker box last week. That was a major undertaking, and it involved the rewiring of several things (heat pump included). I'm not sure how much needed to be done and how much Mr. Perfectionist just wanted to do! =)

We spent the entire weekend working on various projects related to getting the area ready for insulation and sheetrock. Despite valiant efforts from Nate and his brother Paul (who helped us out a ton), we had to push the insulators and sheetrockers back a day. They're came today and our kitchen is starting to look like a room again. Yay! (Nate's brothers left at 11:00 last night and then Nate and I stayed up until 1:00am. Nate was up at 4:30, finalizing things before the insulators came at 7:30.)


In addition to living without a kitchen, our heat pump hasn't been hooked up yet, we don't have a bathroom sink (due to fixing dry rot in the hall between the kitchen and the bathroom), and our living room is a WRECK. There are tools EVERYWHERE!! Fun times for sure. =)

More pictures

Let the blogging begin!

Okay, so I'm starting a blog. I have no idea how to do anything fancy and it appears as though the pictures are backward chronologically, but it's going to have to be good enough. =) Time will tell if I will be able to actually find interesting things to post. For now, I do. We tore out our kitchen today. Completely. I'm sort of in shock. We hadn't planned to start today, but we had people available to help, so the demolition began. Forrest helped all morning and Nate's uncle Paul and his cousin (a contractor), Ross, helped us all day. Because there was going to be major sheetrock patching and there were THREE different textures on the ceiling, Nate decided he wanted to just tear all of the existing sheetrock out. It was a huge undertaking, as the insulation in the attic and in the exterior walls was blown in (which means it's loose). When we tore up the linoleum and plywood (or whatever it is), it reeked of cat pee, so we decided to rip out the linoleum and subfloor that was below what we'd already torn out. **Disclaimer: Our cats are not the ones who peed in this house. Promise! ** So now we're down to the very bottom layer of floor. Hopefully the bad smells will be gone for good. Anyway, demolition went really fast, so it was quite exciting. Now Nate has to put in recessed lighting, redo the circuit box, rewire a bunch of things, and figure out if we're going to hire someone to do the insulating and sheetrock. Oh, we also have to choose flooring and paint... The plan is that Nate and my dad will put our new cabinets in Thanksgiving weekend. That seems so soon, but now I'm without any sort of kitchen and my fridge is in my living room, so I hope our timeline sticks. (All of these pictures were taken today. Crazy!)