Monday, October 27, 2014

A Little Game of Eye Spy

We went to the ranch on Saturday to check the progress of the house and meet with the builder. They had only been framing for 24 hours and were making great progress.  


As soon as we drove up, I noticed something that made me unhappy, to say the least. See if you can spot what it might be.

These are the beams that will be on the front and back porches. They are pretty awesome.

 


I swear they haven't forgotten to do the middle. The living area will all be one big open space with vaulted ceilings that will be 18' in the middle. The front and the back of the house will be 99% glass.  It will definitely be the highlight of the house.  

From this view, the framing on the right is for two bedrooms and a bathroom. The left is the master bedroom, master bath, and mud room. The mud room was #1 on my "must haves" list. There will be a great bench to sit on to take off your dirty shoes and everyone will have a cubby to store them in. Let's see how long that will last.


This is the view from the front porch looking out into the meadow. 

Can anyone guess what I was upset about yet? 



This is the back porch. Steve had the builders extend the slab so we can have an uncovered area for a fire pit. Well, that's what he wants. I want an area to lay out and work on my tan.


Laying on the slab are the sliding doors for the front and back.


They. Are. Huge. (and awesome)


Here are the views from the back porch. Tranquil.



 The guest bedroom will be on the rear of the house and Davis' room will be on the front. We plan to build a really long table to have on the back porch and will probably eat most of our meals out there.


The master side. The door to the mud room is on the right side of the slab. The kitchen will be on the back of the house sharing a wall with the mud room.


We are going to simply stain the concrete slab for our flooring. This is a ranch house, no one has time for carpet.


Here is the view from the front porch all the way around. The hunter's cabin is right past those trees. 


This is straight off the front porch. Holler when you see the proverbial thorn in my side.


This is the last view from the front porch. Steve's parent's house is on the other side of those trees. It's nice that we are able to at least feel secluded.


All of our windows. Our builder said he has 'window envy' and told his wife they need to replace theirs. I could never be a builder; I would need a new house every year to keep up with all of the goodies my clients had.


So, that's it.  Construction is so much more fun when you don't have to do it yourself!

The framing should be done by the end of this week, then the plumber and electricians will do their thing, and then we will go up in 2 weeks to stain the floors before they hang the drywall. We figured less prep work would be required this way and the floors would be sealed in case anything spilled on them. Internet research has caused me sleepless nights when it comes to all of the things that can leave marks and ruin your floors.

If you weren't able to guess what has my blood at a rolling boil, let me help you out.


That thing is no more than 30 yards off the front of my porch. You know, the porch that you can see through the windows that make up THE ENTIRE FRONT OF THE HOUSE. It has added so much to our view. 

I am still so angry I can't really talk about it yet. I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus and say who trenched the ditch for the power line and thought that would be a great place for the utility box, but I will say that it has affected our marriage the last couple days. In his defense, no one would have expected the power company to set a box outside that would support an entire street, but still horrible planning. 

Now I have to think of a clever way to hide it. Because it sits out in the open, I'm afraid planting bushes will look awkward. I suggested a nice water feature but am not sure how safe that would be on a power box. Any suggestions??? I am DESPERATE for solutions. 

If we can't think of anything, I will be forced to paint it orange and blue.


Saturday, October 18, 2014

Back to my roots.

A few months ago, as we were driving away from the ranch (not my favorite place), I finally gave in to the reality that has become my life and had this conversation with Steve:

Me: I have come to the realization that neither the ranch nor I are going anywhere anytime soon, so we have to learn to co-exist.

Steve: Welcome to the real world.

Me: I think the only way I could really be comfortable staying up there, and taking Davis overnight, would be if we had our own place. Nothing fancy, just a little place that could be ours.

Now rewind with me just a little bit. I have been saying that I want to paint the inside of our house, take up the carpet and put down wood on the second floor, redo our bedroom, etc for months but have been told that now wasn't a great time financially.

I have this ONE, SINGLE conversation with Steve about the ranch and wouldn't you know, they poured the slab for our new house last week. Within 2 weeks of that conversation, an architect was working on plans, Steve was looking into builders, I was looking for decorating ideas on Pinterest; things were underway.

I'm not complaining or resenting this project though. We have already decided that our bedroom furniture and several other pieces will go to the ranch, so I get to do some decorating here at home!

Since this blog began when we were renovating our rental house, I feel like I have come full circle and this can be the Tool Belt Chronicles again.  Huzzah!

I will try to post pictures when I can, but because the ranch is 2 hours away and we are busy, I won't have regular updates like I did with the last renovation. Maybe I will leave a camera up there with our worker (and Davis' favorite person) so he can document the progress.

***note***
About a week ago, a friend from college posted an article on Facebook that said two spaces after periods are now obsolete. Please know that I just went through and removed all of the extra spaces.

I'm trying to stay hip to the times.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

The Winter Has Come!

Well, not really, but Davis is all about Frozen all the time.

He puts his blanket around his shoulders and tells me he is Elsa.


He runs around the house yelling for Christoph.

Contrary to the last video (how embarrassing), he knows most of the words to the songs.

(You will need to turn up your volume for this one....he's not one to show off.)
(Also, that isn't your oven going off, it was mine telling me it was ready for my fritatta to go in.)

He holds our eyelids open and asks, "Do you wanna build a snowman??"


Then yesterday I saw him laying on the ground with his arms stretched out saying, "I can't!  The sky's awake!"


He is also convinced that thunder comes from this guy:


I thought with a boy we would avoid all of this...

What the what????

I was putting pictures in a different post and something happened.  Look at this:




Those were a bunch of individual photos that have magically been transformed into these little clips.  I would love to take credit and let you all believe I am clever enough to do this on my own, but if even one of you were to ask me how I did it, I couldn't even make something up.

Magic!

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Scary!

Recently, Davis has been complaining that his room is scary and his window is scary. He is in a "scary" phase.  Music on the radio is scary...even soft ballads, the front door is scary, toys are scary, mommy is scary when she's angry.  None of those, except for the last one, are scary at all.  Given all of that, when he repeatedly tells me his room and window are scary, I think he is being dramatic and tell him there is nothing to be afraid of.

For the last month or two, we have been finding poop on our back patio (directly downstairs from Davis' window) and have no idea who is putting it there.


I'm no poop specialist, but I can tell that it is coming from a small animal like the size of a cat or raccoon.  It is usually in his kiddie pool which is full of water since it has been raining a lot, (before you can ask, yes I clean it with soap before I let him play in it) so that had me doubting that the mystery pooper was a cat. I mean, honestly, would a cat poop in water?  How would he even do that?  Do cats know how to hover?  I guess if it was a girl cat, it might know how, but what if it was a boy cat?  If a cat pooped in water, would it kick the water to try to cover it's poop the way it does kitty litter?  I have so many questions!

OK, fast forward to last night.  Annoyed with my drama-queen of a son, Steve and I laid in bed watching TV and heard what sounded like a cat being killed slowly.  It wasn't dying a quiet death either.  I'm surprised you couldn't hear it at your house...even those of you reading this from India.  (Yes, I have international readers....this blog is a really big deal.)  It was this loud, low-pitched, howl/meow.  I remember, when I was a kid, my cat used to give that meow when he wanted to be left alone, was being threatened by another cat, or was just being an a-hole, as cats can often be.  Just another reason I love cats; I get them.

It sounded like the dying cat was outside of our window, but Steve got up to investigate and said it was coming from the back yard.  Could this be the mystery pooper?  Was he wanting privacy while pooping?  Was he telling another cat to scram so he could drop the kids off at the pool (literally in this case)?  Does he need more fiber in his diet and was having a tough time at it?

No matter the reason, now I feel like the a-hole because I have been ignoring my 2 year old's fears of his window, meanwhile he is living above what appears to be a feline torture chamber.

Still killing it as a mom 365!  



Friday, August 1, 2014

Parenting 101

Lately I have been knocking it out of the park with my parenting.  I am just waiting for the phone call from the powers that be offering me a book deal to share my parenting secrets.  I don't think it would be too much to say my son is extremely lucky to have me.

Before my major book deal (I'm thinking a series of about 3-4 books) comes in, I thought I would share some of my most recent parenting wins with you, my friends.

Teaching your child to eat a balanced and healthy diet is incredibly important.



Yep, that's Chick-fil-a sauce he is eating directly off his finger.  I stopped the 
video just before he picked up the container and attempted to drink it.  




Killing it over here.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Please don't be intimidated by my intellegence

Every once and awhile, I wonder what my IQ is and I immediately take to the internet to find out.  This happened to me a couple weeks ago, so I found a test online and took it quickly, and honestly, quite flippantly. 

In about 7 minutes, I had completed what I will defend as a very credible IQ test with a score of...

wait for it...143!

I knew that was good, but I didn't know how good, so my good buddy Google and I were off to solve another mystery.  Turns out, the threshold of entering "genius" standings is at 145.  Had I counted the number of rectangles a second time rather than getting annoyed and just guessing, I would have been there!

High on life, and apparently superior intelligence, I couldn't wait for Steve to get home so I could share the news. 

Now he wanted to take it.  Little did I know this would turn into a 1 hour, pen and paper exam.  I should have guessed it wasn't going to go great when on the very first question he says to me, "I just don't understand what the hot tub on the page means" and I had to answer, "babe, that's an ad..." 

I won't tell you his exact score.  It was respectable (although not accurate because I helped him with one), but we now know who really has the brains in the family. 

Good thing he's cute.