Back in CO

Two weeks at home and 3333 miles later, we are now back in Colorado! We had a great trip, saw all the family and a few good friends as well. Ate and ate and ate, of course. By the way, we've officially been in this foreign land for one year!

With all the holiday madness out of the way, its time to get back to business. The basement is full of power tools and plywood, so we should be getting started for real. Soon! The upcoming projects are:

• buy a dishwasher
• kitchen can lights
• kitchen cabinets - this is a big one! Let's try to be done by March when our ski visitors start arriving.
• kitchen drywall work and rewiring
• kitchen/foyer floors - needs to be done before we can install the cabinets

After this the main level will be DONE! Then we'll probably move to the bedroom area? I don't know... Completing the above list will likely put us well into springtime!

A Little More Holiday Cheer

Let's all remember what we were doing this time last year, aside from packing:

Wrapping It Up

We leave for home in just about 5 days. We're all three excited about seeing friends and family for more than just one day here or there. We will be in Jackson for the week of Christmas and then Columbus for the next week. (hello?!? big Golden Triangle New Years Eve!!) So let us know if you'll also be in the neighborhood, we'd love to catch up with any old friends.

No major developments on the kitchen project. Except we did score a fabulous microwave for $100 on craigslist... Used of course but you can't even tell. It matches our range too! Now we have only the dishwasher left, but that should be easier to find.

One other recent purchase - a snow shovel! Its sunny and a balmy 4 degrees outside. Quite cold... Freeze-your-face-off cold. Got about 6 inches of snow, and more on the way, and no chance of it melting off until maybe Thursday. It was inevitable though. How long can you live in Colorado without a snow shovel? We made it just 2 weeks short of a year....

Way Overdue

We've done a lot in the past few weeks!

New table saw:

Stacks of wood everywhere:

One chair down, one to go:

Baseboards in living room:

Skiing for Thanksgiving:

Charlie Brown tree in front yard:

Fabulous week with Hanna:New programmable thermostat:

Cozy Christmas tree inside too:

Curtains done, not sure what's next

Well, the curtains are done - check that off the list! This turned out to be a rather easy project. Maybe not too cost effective, because I used 11 yards of $10/yd fabric. Some money savings strategies I used to recover some of the thriftiness of the project:

• I ripped the thermal liner out of the old curtains and reused it. It was in good condition, and another $5/yd for the new stuff...
• Home made curtain rod. These things are expensive in the 120-inch category. Ours is a piece of 3/4" conduit, spraypainted black with the high temp paint left over from the fireplace insert project.
  
• Thrift store mounting hardware and finials. Though the ReStore didn't have any long curtains rods, they did have some really short ones. Our "finials" are just a couple of shorter curtain rods stuffed in the end of the conduit.
• Christmas decorations! I can't imagine what tree they would hang on, but those mysterious items from the last post are Hobby Lobby Christmas ornaments (half off!). I was originally going to make the finials out of these, but on second thought I just decided to hang them on the ends. This way i can change them out whenever I like...

The grommets posed one last problem for the budget on this project. I needed 4 packages of 8 and they cost $10/package. That's $40+tax - over a dollar a piece for a ring of plastic! I scoured the internet for some alternative but found none... Mom suggested that I go with rings instead, because there are many much cheaper options. Unfortunately I had my heart set on the grommets by this point. Hobby Lobby was running a 40%-off-one-full-priced-item coupon last week. So yes, I went to Hobby Lobby on four different days buying one package each time - that's $24 for some grommets - still over priced in my opinion! (They did work fabulously though.. sooo easy)

Curtains in the making

So Many Candles..

Happy Birthday to August!