A couple months ago we decided to re-do the front area walkway by taking away the lame-o wannabe flagstone and laying down brick. The brick we got was so freaking cool – we found it at a used supply store downtown and the story was that it was used in a 100 year old building that had recently been torn down. The bricks aren’t uniform and are really big and fat so I wasn’t sure it was gonna turn out ok… but it looks absolutely awesome!!! I love it!!! ***We finished this project on Oct 11th*** (I am way behind…=)

 

Well, it’s official…the kitchen is ready for action!  Over the last 2+ weeks, we’ve been busting our butts to tear-out and remodel our kitchen and make it mold-free and livable (we’ll do our Broadway-style remodel a few years from now when we have the $ saved).  And as of yesterday afternoon, we’ve succeeded in not only getting a functional kitchen, but a pretty aesthetic one too!  We were able to salvage all of our old cabinets (minus the ones with mold damage), and add-in two new Home Depot ones.  We filled-in our appliances with ones found on Craigslist, and topped it off with custom particle board countertops!  We originally wanted to do laminate countertops, but with the new exposed brick wall, we had to deal with a custom depth, which meant lots of $$ and a long time to wait.  So our last minute, 11:30 pm audible was to stain the particle board and clear coat it to keep the water out.  So…for less than $100, we now have some pretty neat looking countertops!  All in all, not a bad lookin’ kitchen for the first cut!

 

 

 

Well, in true Lind fashion, we hadn’t owned the house for more than 20 minutes before we started ripping into it. We found out in our inspection that the kitchen had mold in it from a severe leak under the sink faucet. I was a little nervous about it at first, but our inspector, who was cool as hell, told us all we needed to do was spray the cabinets down with bleach and it would kill it all. Well, upon further reflection, we decided we were going to completely rip the wall out and expose the exterior adobe. I love brick walls in homes – they look so cool to me. So when that option presented itself, I lost all inhibitions and we were ready for the carnage. Tommy took that entire first week off so we could devote all our time to  it.

After ripping into the drywall, we found that the mold had traveled in both directions hitting the adjacent walls and then it actually spread a quarter of the way down the right side wall.  We had to throw away a couple of the cabinets because they were so damaged from the leak but were able to salvage the rest. We’ll keep them until we do our real remodel of the kitchen  – which won’t happen for a while of course, but they’ll get the job done until then. We also found out that the original house plan was only a 3 bedroom, 2 bath…but the first owners closed in the formal dining room and made it into another bedroom. (My red room.) We found the entrance when we ripped out the side wall and exposed the studs. I’m really glad they did that – it looked like it was a lot of work and we have enough on our plate!! =) We also had another interesting revelation…during that week of working on the kitchen, we had a huge rain storm that dropped tons of water. We found out that the leak was coming from the window -not the faucet- because it hadn’t been sealed properly. There was literally a waterfall pouring out of it. If we hadn’t ripped out the drywall, we never would have known because the sill was covered with it!!

We decided to removed the soffit above the sink and expose as much brick as possible since most of it will be covered up by cabinets. That left Tommy with the challenge of finding a place for the electrical wires to go – but as you all know,  whenever Tommy is challenged with something, he kicks it into 5th gear and pours out the most amazing ideas you can imagine. I don’t want to give away our final design, so you’ll have to wait, but the electrical is now housed in conduit that runs up, down and across the wall giving it a somewhat industrial look – which I LOVE. After the last house and now this one, I really feel like I hit the lottery when I married Tom – there is nothing he can’t do! He is so talented and we have saved oodles of money by having him do all of the work. How can I look at it any differently? (Same with you and Scott, B) I mean, I’m still playing the lottery every now and then, but hey…why not? Haha. So here are the pictures of our destruction in the kitchen – we’ll have more soon. Stay tuned!

 

So, this is our new house, everyone! We moved to an area about 10 minutes up the road from our old house – doesn’t sound like much but it really does add a lot of driving time going to certain places. Thank God there will be a new home depot going in about 15 minutes away and the Fry’s is only 5 minutes away if we are able to take a back road. The problem with the back road though is that it often gets washed out from the rain so it’s not always driveable…but that only happens in the monsoon season so the rest of the year it’s a viable route.

The house is roughly 2400 sq ft and sits on 1.03 acres of land. =) VERY nice. AND!!! it does not have a f***ing HOA!!! Pardon my mouth, but after having to deal with one for the last 8 years, I am OVER IT. So, it is great that we don’t have to deal with that nonsense. We got the keys on the 1st of July and got completely moved in this past weekend. (That only happened because of my brother and Grandpa…THANK YOU GUYS!)

So check it out…more to come – along with what we’ve been up to here. =)

 

So, this is a sad and happy post…and no it’s not about Henry. =) For those of you who don’t know, the reason we have been MIA for the last 3 months is because we sold our old house and bought a new one!!! The whole ordeal was an absolute whirlwind and completely out of the blue. We knew we needed to move to a bigger house but we just couldn’t get the motivation to start the process. Well, one day I was looking on a realtor website and I found a house that Tommy and I both fell in love with. Our neighbor, who is also a friend, happens to be a real estate agent and she helped us get the ball rolling. In the end, the house we originally wanted wasn’t the house we ended up with…but it turned out to be for the best anyway. The whole thing seemed to just creep by but actually went very fast. We got our house ready, put it on the market, found our new house, bought it and then sold the old one – and the process was actually completed yesterday. We were lucky to have the old house sell so fast – no dual mortgages and nothing hanging over our head.  It’s been difficult, just because we LOVE that house and we put so much work into it – it was essentially like a first child. We have had so many amazing memories there and it will always hold a special place in our hearts…but we said goodbye yesterday and I’ve had my cry and made my peace with it.  It will always hold a special place in our hearts – hopefully the new owners get as much enjoyment out of it as we did. (Well they’ll probably get more since there is NOTHING that needs to be done to it!!!!!) So without further adieu, here is a tribute to our first love and first home. Here is a link to a post when we first bought the house. You can go look at it first and them compare it to the pictures below. =) Enjoy! http://www.htmlpics.net/?cat=3&paged=6

 

Farewell, house! We’ll always love you!!