Halloween

Halloween during a pandemic with 2 little ones who won't even realize the day was different. I dressed them in some Halloween PJs and called it a day. 

What's cookin' good lookin'?

Little Miss is obsessed with food.  A steadfast favorite of hers since she started eating is anything with red sauce.  When I was going into the office full time she would get breakfast, lunch and snacks provided at daycare but with this pandemic she's been home with us.  All I can say is thank god for JR because anyone who knows me knows I am not the chef in this house and he is also much more mindful than I am about getting in rounded meals.

Breakfast typically consists of pancakes, bagels and cream cheese, egg sandwiches, eggs and hash (typically ham) or banana and cheerios

Lunch is almost always leftovers from dinner the previous night.

Dinner varies.  I could do a whole post on this but in the summer its a lot of grilled chicken and veggies.

For snacks we had started out with Nutrigrain bars and gold fish but now that summer berry season is officially in full swing we are eating TONS of berries.  Blueberries seem to be the current favorite though 2 weeks ago it was Strawberries so who knows.

Our favorite meal time accessories are as follows:

4moms high chair I registered for this one because it checked off my must haves and I still love it for these reasons: 1. It's not cloth

green sprouts Learning Cutlery Set these have by far been our favorite, size and shape they just seem to work well. Though we also have been using these, for the price and quantity you can't beat it. And this Cloud Island 3 pack

mushie Silicone Baby Bib

BEABA Silicone Suction Plate

If you give a mouse a cookie, likely half the first floor will get ripped out

We've done quite a bit around the house.  Clearly blogging about it took a back seat.  I will be the first to admit that having a baby, re-doing a house and trying to do day to day life isn't the easiest.  Now we've thrown in a pandemic.  We have been all at home together since March 16 and it is slowly starting to wear us all down and we have gotten a few things done but not nearly as much as we would like.

Around the time I was 4 months pregnant the drain literally fell off of our main shower and flooded out our basement.  It turns out that the previous owners had jerry rigged a fix and to fix it again at the minimum the shower floor would need to be ripped out.  This turned into half of the main floor being ripped out due to very much "if you give a mouse a cookie" situation. 

It went something very much like this: if we were ripping out the floor then we mind as well just re-do the entire bathroom.  And if you're ripping out the bathroom then we should just split it in half as like the end goal.  And if we're splitting it in half then we will need the master bathroom entrance so we will have to re-frame the master bedroom.  And if we're reframing the master bedroom then we will have to re-frame the hall.  And if we're re-framing the hall then we mind as well rip the flooring out.  And if we rip the hall floor out then we will also have to re-do the dining room.  And if we re-do the dining room then we should just re-do the entry way too.  And this is how half of our main floor got ripped out.

The bathroom that started it all

The original hallway

We redid flooring here and changed the doorways and added a linen closet.

Can't wait to clean this up, but for now it's doing its job just fine.

And how our front hall looked when we moved in versus now

                           

Since we only ripped up half the house we still are in progress with the living room.  We are planning on cutting the wood floor into the hex tile as we did on the other side and JR rebuilt the coat closet.  Still to come also is painting the front doors.

2019 update

Shortly after getting pregnant the drain fell off of our shower upstairs and leaked into the basement.  This started a "If you give a mouse a cookie..." moments in our house.  If we tear out the shower we mind as well re-do the whole bathroom.  And if we re-do the bathroom then we mind as well do the layout we want.  If we do the layout we want then we will need to re-do our bedroom.  If we re-do our bedroom then we will need to re-do the hallway.  And this is how almost all of our first floor in our house got demo'd out.  Now that both JR and I are back at work and taking care of a 4 month old finishing the house has slowed down greatly and my ability to write, while taking care of said baby, and keep up with the day to day chores around then house has also been drastically reduced.  In the meantime here's some picutres of demo around the house.

Spring rolling into Summer

We have been so busy, nothing much has gotten done on the house since we spent 2 weeks in Germany in April and our electrican came and ran a bunch of wiring.  We have just been busy as per usual with our summer.

Lots of yummy German food and beer

Beautiful countrysides. 

And of course some cars.

The rest of the summer has been spent cleaning out a bunch of things from the house and the standard car show circut.

Last week our air conditioner completely kicked the bucket so we're looking forward to getting the new one up and running soon.

More Construction

The past couple of weekends have been a bit slower.  But we've been slowly making bits of progress.

JR was able to sheet rock part of the half bath and install most of the exhasts needed (half bath fan, media closet fan, and future kitchen hood exhaust)

And I took out a wall and channeled out the wall to move the vaccuum upstairs.

So not too much construction but sometimes you need a little time to relax.

Projects continuing...

Hard to believe we're already in Feburary.  With the hustle and bustle of the holidays behind us and our vacation offically over we are finally jumping back into our ongoing projects.

Just a lovely reminder of what the upstairs bathroom used to look like.

We've gutted it to fix the leak issue we found when we burst a pipe last winter and the critter issues we found.

As of the end of this weekend we have walls back up and only need a few more bays of insulation filled.

The other side of the wall has been closed up and only needs a few more finishing touches to be all set.  To the right we have started to open it up to see what it would look like with an open railing.