Painting

We have spent the last week painting in our house. Last weekend we got the whole house primed. We then worked on the living room, kitchen, and dining room throughout the week. We have the upstairs mostly finished except for the ceiling. The guy doing our drywall recommended a certain technique to do the ceilings, so we are going to try that sometime this week. The whole painting process has been frustrating and toilsome; I am VERY ready to be done with painting! I am still holding on to the goal of being in by Christmas. We are actually getting close. Once the painting is done we can do the flooring. Everything else can be done while we are in the house! Yea!

Today we celebrated Nate’s 26th birthday. 26? Wow! That’s so old! :) We spent the day with my family and tomorrow we will have a party with Nate’s family. We both decided that the best present this year will be moving in the house (plus all the big purchases we have to make yet…yikes).

We hope all of you have a blessed Thanksgiving and enjoy spending time with friends and family!

Cleaning up after priming the upstairs

Okay...so we were tired and sick of it

All this painting will give you gray hairs!

Nate telling Samson some"tricks of the trade"

Gettin' some love from the pup

Samson all tuckered out after a hard day's work

San Diego

A few weekends ago I had the opportunity to go to San Diego with Nate for a business conference. His company had an end of the season grower weekend.

The first night we stayed right off the coast in Carlsbad. It was great walking down the beach, feeling sand in our toes once again. (We don't really get out in the summer, so we have to enjoy any nice weather we can get). The next day we checked into the Hotel del Coronado with the other attendees. That hotel was a beautiful, old building from the late 1800's. Our room had a partial ocean view and was very nice.

On Saturday we went to the San Diego zoo with everyone. I had never been there before and Nate had been long ago, so we had a fun time there. That evening we went downtown to a beautiful restaurant on the 14th floor of a building with a panoramic view of the city.

When we returned home on Sunday we were met with a great surprise. Before we left we decided to hire someone to do our drywall. He ended up getting most of the drywall hung that weekend. We were VERY glad with our decision to hire that part out. Once he is done taping and texturing we should be ready to paint. And then we can do flooring...and then move in! Well, that's extremely sumarized but you can see we are finally moving away from demo work towards improvements you can see.

Overlookinig part of the zoo from the SkySafari.

The view from our room

Our baby is getting so big already!!!

Popcorn ceiling and WSU

Last weekend Samson and I went to visit my sister-in-law Naomi at WSU with Barb and Natalie. We had a great weekend together and it was fun to finally see where Naomi has been spending the last several years. She is over halfway through vet school. Samson was a SPOILED puppy that weekend. We didn't want him to keep others up in her apartment building, so he was given attention at every whine and bark. We did a lot of walking around the campus and his little puppy legs couldn't keep up, so Natalie carried him around in a bag. He actually liked it and would fall asleep in there and just hang out. We smuggled him in lots of places...an ice cream place, bookstore, and even Wal-Mart. :) Naomi, Natalie, and I played volleyball Sat. afternoon with some of Naomi's friends. It was cold that weekend but we still braved playing with bare feet! I am definitely not ready for winter yet. It got cold over there!

While I was having fun in Pullman, Nate was quite miserable at home. He tackled our popcorn ceiling removal project. Fortunately my brother-in-law Randy offered to help Nate with the horrible project. We found out the ceiling has asbestos, so the guys wore haz-mat type suits. They spent all day working on it and after many frustrations and lots of hard work, they got all the ceiling off. Unfortunately Nate started getting sick the day before and he has been battling his cold/flu for the past week now. Today he is finally looking more like himself. We both spent a lot more time down there yesterday removing carpet, paneling, and cleaning. The next step is to texture the ceiling and put drywall up where all the paneling was.

Dr. Naomi givng puppy a check-up

Samson so content in his "sling"

Us girls at WSU

Nate and Randy in their HazMat suits

Puppy Update

Well, so far life with a puppy has been pretty exciting. We are glad that Samson has been sleeping through the night. :) He only cries in the morning when he is hungry and ready to get out. He absolutely loves cuddling. Yesterday he played hard with Frodo and Natalie and by that night he was pooped. He fell asleep on Nate and was absolutely out to the world. It was quite hilarious. We are definitely having fun with the little guy.

Some people "baby-proof" their house; we decided to "puppy-proof our house. We put plastic up everywhere so Samson doesn't get anything dirty.

Hahaha...just kidding. We have plastic everywhere because this weekend Nate is going to be taking down our popcorn ceiling. It will be a big job and fortunately my brother-in-law Randy offered to help. Hopefully it won't be too difficult and they can get it all done on Saturday!

Samson out to the world!!!

Introducing...SAMSON!

This past Saturday marked the beginning of a new adventure...we finally got to pick up our puppy, Samson. We had to drive down to Tacoma to get him. He did great on the trip home and just snuggled on my lap the whole time. My nieces came over and he did great around them. He loved following Raya around. He also met his uncle Frodo the pug. Frodo was bigger then him, but Samson will overtake him in not too long. We decided to wait to introduce him to the big dogs...a giant chocolate lab and a crazy golden retriever.

Samson had a really good night and didn't even cry until morning. He was pretty spoiled today...he got lots of loving and attention. He LOVES cuddling on someone's lap and is content to stay there. We aren't looking forward to leaving him when we have to work. He cried when we left him for church this morning and it was so sad!!!

We have been making some progress on our house. We almost have all the plastic on the floors and walls for our popcorn ceiling removal project. Hopefully this weekend Nate will tackle the project. We ordered some pretty sweet safety gear and Nate will look styling in his mask and Tyvek suit. :) I am definitely looking foward to doing constructive work on the house versus demolition work. Right now we also are taking out the paneling downstairs. Wow...so much ahead of us.






We provide a comfy pillow, but he still chose to sleep in his water dish all afternoon.

An overdue update

Wow! I see it's been a long time since I posted. This summer went so fast; I can't believe we are a week away from October! Nate and spent most of the summer working and searching for a house. We have been looking at houses since April trying to find the "perfect" house. We probably looked at every single house in our price range in the Skagit Valley and none stuck out to us. We wanted a good investment house--one that needed some TLC and updating. Well, we finally found that house! It was actually staring at us from down the street the entire time. To make a long story short, we submitted an offer for a vacant house near my parent's. The owner passed away last year and his elderly siblings live on the East Coast. They knew it needed lots of work but couldn't do it themselves. So they accepted our offer and several weeks later the house is officially ours!

We are very excited to have finally found a house although our move-in date won't be for a while yet. We have lots of work to do before moving in...remove popcorn ceiling, paint all the walls and replace all the flooring. That's just a small list of what needs to be done. It is really nice that it is close to where we are living so we can work on it whenever we have time. The house is 2-story, 3 bd/2 bath with an additional family room in the daylight basement. It is on a 3/4 acre lot, so Nate is very excited about room to have a garden and a dog.

About that dog...we are getting a puppy next weekend. We found Newfoundland/Lab mix puppies that had been rescued and put our name down to get one. Nate's family had a lab/newfie mix growing up and it was their favorite dog ever, so they are all excited we are getting one. So this weekend I should have pictures of our puppy!

Well, I will hopefully do a better job keeping the blog updated and get some pictures on here.

Nieces and Nephews

I (Lisa) was able to spend the last 2 weeks visiting my sisters. The first week was spent with Tami, Chad, Levi, Tori, and Elliana in Cloquet, MN. I met 8-week old Elliana for the first time and immediately fell in love with this beautiful little girl. We had lots of snuggle time together as we got to know each other. The week was spent relaxing, playing games with Levi and Tori (lots of Bocce!), reading books, going on walks, and just enjoying being together.

From Cloquet I drove down to Sioux Falls to visit Sheri, Ryan, Kiera, Caleb, and Joel (thanks to Chad for letting me borrow his car!) The twins are already 5 1/2 months old, so it was fun to see how they had grown since Christmas. I also got lots of baby time here between the 2 boys yet still managed to play with Kiera and read her lots of stories. (I still have the book "26 Princesses" memorized.) She is extremely talkative and had us laughing constantly with her silly chatter. Sheri and I managed to get out several times and get some shopping or exercise in with the kiddos. It was so fun to spend time with everyone but it always so hard to leave. We just look forward to the next visits.

I drove back to Cloquet to drop the car off then took the shuttle back to Minneapolis to catch a flight to Chicago. Nate and I met up in Chicago as we had plans to attend a wedding in Michigan. This was also our anniversary weekend...3 years already! We spent the night in Chicago then drove to the wedding on Saturday. The wedding was beautiful and it was fun to see our friend again. We had to leave early Sunday morning to catch our planes and with that my adventerous trip came to a close!


Tori


Levi in his "farmer" costume


Elliana


Levi and Tori eating lunch outside


Elliana


Caleb and Joel in their bumbos


Joel


Kiera


Caleb and Joel


Good lookin' boys!

Tulip Time

Our friend Charlotte from Olympia came to visit Nate and I a few weeks ago. She wanted to see the famous Skagit Valley tulips. Unfortunately, the flowers were late this year and the fields were not in full bloom yet. However we were able to see a few fields that were just starting and enjoyed the daffodils in full bloom. It was great to see Charlotte and we had a fun afternoon together.

A few videos

I uploaded a couple videos from our trip. The first one is taken from le arc de triomphe in Paris. I think that these people need some help with traffic flow and figuring out how to use a round-a-bout. We had some good laughs at the cars, especially the one near the end that is perpendicular to the traffic. The second video is the elevator ride up the Eiffel tower. The last one is taken outside of Amsterdam at a sawmill windmill we toured. This working windmill was renovated a few years ago and demonstrates how the windmills used to work. It was interesting to watch the logs being sawed...as the wind blew harder, the blades worked faster.

Day 22: The Trip Home

We did it…3 weeks around Europe! Nate and I were very pleased with the itinerary we put together in less than a month. We saw tons of stuff, experienced many cultures, and didn’t miss a train once even though we rode on over 50 trains. This trip was something we have always wanted to do but it seemed hard to accomplish with limited vacation days. It was amazing to see God working throughout the last 3 months. Everything fit together perfectly; we couldn’t have planned any of this better ourselves!

We left Amsterdam Tuesday afternoon on a direct flight to Seattle. Our flight was about 10 hours, but we had plenty of movies and games to keep us entertained so it actually wasn’t too bad. However, we were ready to get home and it felt great to sleep in our own bed that night!

Our trip is over!