Fun With the Bishops (Part 1)

We had a great time with the Bishops here last week. For those of you who do not know...that is my sister and her family from Utah. This is their second annual Spring Break Trip to California. I can't say we had the best weather, but it wasn't as bad as we had anticipated, so we will count ouselves lucky! It is getting late though and this is more blogging than I have done in the last year, so this is going to be brief!

Bon fire on the beach! You're welcome, Stan, for not putting the picture of you when you fell over in your chair! The kids were freezing and asking to go home as soon as the s'mores were over, but I thought it was fun times!

Jake loved trying out the 4WD on the dunes. He didn't even need the shovel!

Kelsie was in rare form this week. I am not sure what has gotten into her, but she was throwing tantrums left and right. Here she is at the park, throwing her flip flops to let everyone know she is mad. What she was mad about, we never did find out!

Hiking out to Oso Flaco. The walk out was great. The beach was ridiculously windy. The kds were crazy enough to go in the water, but once they got out, the wind was whipping the sand against their legs and the fun was all over!

More fun to come when I get another chance to sit down and blog. Really...I will try! Have a great one!

Easter Cuties

As requested...pictures of Kelsie in her Easter Best (and Ty isn't looking to shabby either!) Look at the cute cousins! Kayli let Kelsie borrow her dress for Easter since it is too big for her. Wasn't that generous?! It really was just about the cutest dress I have ever seen. Kelsie LOVED it. She loved looking so pretty for Easter and loved it when people commented on how cute she was.

Some mostly finished pictures...

I hesitate to say "finished" because it seems like nothing is completely finished. There are little touch-ups to do in pretty much every area. We are living in it, though, and I think that deserves some recognition.

Here is kind of a cross shot from the family room, across the ktichen into the Living Room.

Here is the bookshelf. We obviously added the crown moulding, but not so obviously, we also beefed up all the edges and shelves. They used to be pretty skinny, so we ripped them all off and replaced them with some thicker stuff to make it look a little more substantial. What do you think? (I know...you would think I could at least clean off the shelves before taking a picture for my blog, but I don't care and neither should you!)

Look...we even have drapes up in this room! A new room from ceiling to floor. What else can I say?

This is one worth noting...the light fixture in the kitchen. Paula found a light we both loved on Crate and Barrel's website, but it was WAY out of the price range. We thought, "How hard can it be to find something similar for a lot less money?" The answer...a lot harder! Paula spent days and days looking and my head was about to burst after spending a few hours looking. I took a break though and when I came back, this is what Paula had found. Cute, huh?!

Unfortunatly, it took so long to find that we didn't get it up before the Nielsen clan showed up. Sorry Jen and Dave that we had no light in our house while you were visiting. Wasn't it worth the wait though? The only question now is whether we hung it too high. We are morally opposed to hitting our heads on the light, but we may have taken it a little too far. What do you think?

Okay...that is all the house energy I have for the evening. Ask Dal...I am burnt out. In between the Nielsens and the Bishops, I couldn't motivate myself to do anything. Now that Spring Break is over and we are all alone again, I still don't want to finish anything. The only motivation we have is that we have a lot of tools that we need to return to their rightful owners, so we need to get it into gear and finish this baby up. Here we go again...

More work in progress...

I have to say a BIG THANK YOU to all who have helped us on our little project. We couldn't have done it on our own. We had Bishop over here pretty much anytime he wasn't working for a while, Paula has been our interior design consultant every step of the way (yes...we needed a lot of hand holding), Alex helped out with all our electrical stuff, tons of people let us use tools, other friends entertained our kids on the rough days and Laura actually cleaned my house for 4 hours one night...without me...even my bathrooms! We have the best friends in the whole world. My family is amazed whenever they hear what everyone has done for us...I think we almost have some of them convinced to move to Santa Maria!

Now on to the pictures...a little bead board in the kitchen with crown mouldings installed throughout the living areas.

It got a little cold at points throughout so sometimes I had to move my painting inside. How lucky are we that paint doesn't stick to our new floor?!

My litte Dally...all grown up...usong a saw! Dal has been a real trooper...he works all day and then comes home and we work until all hours of the night!

Don't think this wasn't a family affair! Tyson and Kelsie loved to help whenever they got a chance. Thanks to Home Depot, they were dressed to impress and ready to work!

Don't worry...there are more pictures to come. I am just trying to do this in chronological order...kind of!

The Long Awaited Update

Ok...so the house took over our lives for a while and I had NO TIME to blog or do much of anything for that matter. I cannot say that we are done (as much as I wish I could), but we have definitely made some progress. The fact that my sister Jen and her family were coming at the end of March helped push the work along as fast as we were able. I'm not sure what day of the remodel we are on now...lost count after 30!

So let us start with what is not done...the fireplace. Oh the fireplace! This has to be the worst part of the whole project in terms of how much stress it caused. The stress came, not because it was hard to do, but because we couldn't make a decision concerning what to do with it to save out lives. We still have the tiling to do and then comes the hard part...deciding what to do about a mantel. Here is the progress so far:

We start with the lovely pink tile and even more pink grout. Please take note of the lovely brassy gold finish around the fire box and the knotty wood paneling behind!


Say good-bye to the wood paneling and hello to some serious clashing! It really is a good paint color...I promise!


Who knew a can of spray paint could work miracles on a fireplace?! This picture doesn't do justice to all the work that went into this. As much fun as Ty and I had kncoking out the old tile, it left a HUGE hole in the wall when it knocked out all the sheet rock behind it. Dal worked very hard to rebuild it with backerboard (another nightmare you will have to ask me about) in prep for our new tile.

Anyway, not all that exciting because it is not done, but I don't want to spring it all on you at once. You will have to wait and prepare yourselves for the next update when we actually get the tile in .We have made many of the cuts already, though, and plan on making some serious progress this weekend. Cross our fingers!