Katie is home!

My sister on law, Katie, returned from her mission to Kennewick Washington. 

She was an amazing missionary there. 

We were super excited to have her come home. 

And Jane was excited to finally meet her aunt. :)

April 3, 2012 

March in photos

March was a little crazy for us. Both Zac and Jane got ear infections at the beginning. Then Zac's collarbone got fractured. So basically Zac (and I) had to just play trains all day for the first week while he kept his right arm down.  We laid low for another three weeks and he healed. Adding to that both kids came down with bad fevers and we had another round of ear infections at the end of the month. We have never been to the doctors do much!
So basically we did no work on the house, but we enjoyed having more room seeing how we stayed home a lot. Here are some cute pictures of the kids.

Bath time in the BIG tub.

So sick.

Matching items around the house to colors scavenger hunt.

Zac got new slippers! He was having lots of falls on his shoulder by running so fast on the tile.

Playing in the backyard. 

New bike helmet.

Visit to Pet store on a rainy day.

Going to the park.

Making the single stroller into a double.

April 18, 2012

April 18, 2012

  Jane at EIGHT months:
-Crawls! Really started going places right on her 8 month mark!
-Now that she knows she can really move, she wants down all the time. She is so hard to hold.
-Sleeps great. No real complaints. Sometimes she has random morning where she wakes up around 4 or 5, so she does some crying, but will get back to sleep (I usually have to rock her thou).
-We find it hard sometimes to get the morning nap in when we are doing things. She sometimes will skip it and just do one nap-if she slept in until 9 that morning. Other then that, she will usually do two naps.
-Laughs when anyone else laughs. Zac can get her going sometimes. We like to make her laugh.
-Smiles lots.
-EVERYTHING to the mouth. And with her two chompers on the bottom she can bite harder. (Not looking foward to the top ones coming in.)
-Will crawl to the coffee and train tables and kneel to see what it up on them.
-I have seen her get into standing position twice now. Once was getting ready to get into the bath. Yes, she LOVES her bath!
-Likes to drink out of my cup. She has a slippy cup that she drinks water from sometimes.
-Moving like crazy for diaper changes! (The fun has started!)
-Is so much fun to play with. She has a great personality.
-Outlets and door stoppers can be seen across the room.
-Today she was crawling around the kitchen floor eating all the Cheerios. (Probably a sign that I need to sweep more!) She is a vacuum picking up food or non food items.
-Likes to swing.
-Is included in conversations and playing with Zac. He talks with her like she really cares and understands. He also will keep out trains for her to play with when the two of us are playing trains and she is asleep.
-Most of her toys are taken away from her by her brother. We have been really working on sharing.
-Enjoys walks and runs in the stroller.
-Says, "ba ba" "ma ma" and "da da" and does a sounds that sound like "e-i-e-i-o"
-Likes the thought of real food, but needs to still work on chewing. She can bite off and eat a banana pretty good.
-Size 12-18 month clothes.

Zachary being funny.

 

And other news on April 18th.

My 27th Brithday!

I enjoyed the day with the kids who let me take 

a long nap! Went for a run and came back to a decorated house.

Then we went out to eat as a family.

The kids were supper good! And it was really fun.

 

Try, try again!

Randomly Zac will talk about Kiwi. 

He had never had one before, but because

of this Elmo (try, try again) video he knew that at least it was a fruit to eat.

On Friday we were at the grocery store and I saw one

so we picked one up to try.

We got a few different reactions.

At first he did not want to even try it.

He does not like things with seeds.

But I kept eating them, saying it was so yummy.

(I really do like kiwi, so it was no lie.)

The video was actually his second time trying it.

I love the shake. 

And the washing down with the gold fish.

At least he tried it more then once.

And acted like he liked it.

 

Jane on the other hand loved it.

Kind of hard to have her eat it, when she is really 

not that good of an eater yet.

But she needed to try it too. :)

House story

Where to start on our house?
Just the quick version.

I guess we start with years back. I don't think that Lee has ever not been checking out houses around the area. (Apartment living that comes with door dings and that does not make him a happy camper.) We really didn't know what we could afford so for a long time we just played around with it. We would check out model homes a lot and did open houses a few times. But we didn't really get serious about possibly getting a house until around the time Jane was to be born. (I think adding another person who has more "things" then everyone else combined makes more room look very nice.)

Well, we had loved living in San Ramon, and really liked our ward, so we wanted to know our options. Let's just say a total of five houses were our options (no exaggeration)! And they were options that needed more money to fix up then we would have. Why does the Bay area have to be so darn expensive?!

So we went to neighboring towns. We saw some pretty interesting homes, some nice, some tiny, some with good yards, but nothing really worked. We really looked into about two or three homes. But when things are in our price range out here-they go fast! By the time we had to even "think" they were gone.

To be honest we did not want to even look at where we live now. We had an exit in Livermore that we had made our last possible exit we wanted to live off of. Of course our realtor just "had" to show us this short sale of the floor plan of the house her son had. We were not opposed to checking it out. The day we went to go see the house the lock had broken so there was really no way to get in. Well there was a all doggy door that we put Zac in and he opened the sliding glass door for us. By the time we looked at it daylight had left and it was pretty dark (and no power to the house). But holy cow was the place big! Way bigger then anything else we had seen. We left wondering how we could pass it up. We called the next day to take a look at it again. Things were a little different in the light. We could see that a lot more work needed to be done. But the bones of the house seemed good.

We decided to put an offer in. It was a short sale so we were expecting 3-6 months of a wait. This was mid December. We didn't really tell anyone we put the offer in because we thought it would be months AND we didn't know if we would really get it.  Well on January 2nd they told us we got the house(!), but only if we closed by January 27th. They said it was possible, but that everything had to go smooth. Working with the two banks that the sellers loans where taken out for made it a little challenging. It came down to the last day. But things worked out and the house is now our HOME!

Like I said work needed to be done. It was not ready to be lived in  It was a crazy month moving out of our apartment on February 4th, moving all of our furniture into the garage of the house, and then moving into Lee's parents (who we can never thank enough!).

Prep for the house to get READY to paint took us about two weeks. In that two weeks we:
-removed wallpaper from six rooms
-filled on holes (a million of them)
-redid BAD patch jobs (again millions) We are not sure what they were hanging everywhere. Holes down by you ankle to shoulder to way up high. But they were everywhere!
-wiping down EVERY ceiling, wall, door, windowsill, and baseboard (it had not been lived in for almost a year.)
-texturing the walls (in California it is very common that walls have texture to them.)
-taking down mirrors in kitchen and family room. ( lots more filling in and speak texture going on there.)
-re sanding banister. (A dog had chewed it up. And it needed a new stain job.)
-staining stairs and putting clear coat on
-priming everywhere we textured. (mainly we primed entire rooms.)
-taking out all old appliances.
-cleaning and wiping down every cupboard inside and out.
-Taking down all binds
-taking off all electrical outlets and light switches.
-removing doors, taking off door hardware, and cleaning them
-and much more...

It was pretty crazy doing all of this with two little ones. Especially one who was nursing and would not take a bottle. So I had two to three hours where I could get things done until she needed feeding again. Like I said, the place was pretty nasty, so playing was hard for Zac to do. The carpet grossed me out the most. So much dog hair. And stains everywhere! So poor Zac followed us around and got really good at switching movies on the DVD player (so not like our kids to even watch more then a show a day!). It was rare when both kids had a good day while working on the house, but we managed to plug through it.

Basically I would get up everyday and go work on the house from 9-12 (most of the time with kids, but sometimes they would stay with grandma), then come back get everyone down for naps (including myself), take Zac to the park when he woke up, have dinner, then we would all go back and work with dad from 7-8:30, I would take the kids back to go to bed while Lee stayed and worked more.

A month of this. It was a long month. Our house is about a 15 minute drive from my in-laws. Luckily Zac loves the drive. There are so many trucks on the freeway. He is always in heaven. Both kids were really good sports about it all. Zac only asked me twice in the month to go back to the "old house." I have to admit there were times I wanted to go back too.

We started painting the week of Feb 6th. Starting with the most important rooms to us (before carpet would be put in on the 13th); kids rooms, playroom, hallways, and living room. We for sure HAD to get the living room done before carpet. We rented  scaffolding over the weekend, so Lee worked very hard for two days straight painting the ceilings, walls, and changing the chandlers in the two rooms. I can now say that I know how to put up and take down scaffolding (but don't have the muscles to really do much). With the divider archway between living room and dining room we had to take it apart half way and rebuild it, so that was fun. I got to paint on the lower level most of the time and lee was up high. I did join him a few times up high.
I can not even remember the order we got everything painted (and who knows if it really matters), but before we moved in officially on Feb 27th we had every hallway, door, door frame, baseboard, closet, and ceiling painted, with the EXCEPTION of the "guest bedroom" (third room upstairs) and master bathroom. There are still touch ups and such that need to happen, but everything is livable. We have loved our house so far. Now I have the fun job to decorate it all over a long period of time. :)

Oh and the yard...we are working on that. It needs a lot of TLC. :)

ANYONE who wants to visit the Bay Area or San Francisco you are more then welcome to stay at our place. Even if you just need to use us for a place to sleep. :)

Living/dinning Room

 So, pictures don't do some of the work justice, 

but here are some before and afters of the house. 

You can see that there is still work to do

 in the "after pictures." 

(And don't mind the lighting. I took all pictures at 8:00 

in the morning on a rainy day.)

Decorating or at least hanging up something on the 

walls will happen...someday. :)
I figure the pictures speak for themselves.

LIVING/DINNING ROOM
The living room/dinning room was a big undertaking.
There was no flooring in it when we got the house.
The walls were all a "cream pink."(like the entire house!)
Wallpaper needed to come down.
And the chandeliers needed to be changed.
But first off the banister (both sides) needed to be sanded down and re stained.
They had a lovely dog (I'm sure) that did some beauties to some
things in the house. Because of sanding and staining we needed to have the completed before
painting and flooring. It was Lee's first time staining. And I think he did a wonderful job!
The lights on the side of the dinning room are not really "us" but
they were not something we were going to undertake at the time.
(They are probably #115 on the list to fix on the house.)
Like I mentioned earlier we rented some scaffolding and did the two rooms over a weekend!
Everything was primed, and painted with two coats.
I washed the curtains they had up, but I'm not sure what I really want to do with it all yet.

Things to still do:
We still need to do paint the front door white (it is cream as of now).
One day own a piano that will be in our living room.
Oh, and maybe a couch or chairs? Right now it is play room #2
Decorate (it's going to be on every list). 

Before

After

kitchen

KITCHEN

You cant see it in the "before" pictures, but the kitchen had some 

wallpaper that had been painted over AND puttied to try and make it look like

it was not there-but you could totally tell. Taking that border off took an entire day!

The cabinets are in ok shape, so we decided to just leave them for now.

Eventually we would like to do something with them.

We were hoping that the appliances would have been in good enough shape

to save a little money, but in the end they were not saveable.  

We still need to put the hood above the stove in.

We took down the mirrors that were the back splash and painted.

 

 

 

the rest of downstairs

DOWNSTAIRS

Family room is no longer pink!!  I'm sure from the pictures you can't really tell, but the family room/dinning/kitchen are all a darker brown then the rest of the house. 

The mantal still needs to still be painted (somehow that got skipped).

and the TV situation still needs to be worked on. We are trying to decided if we hang it, or figure something out with the built in. That is a big project to be worked on.

The playroom is really what sold me on the house.
Having a place for all the toys is heaven! And the fact that there is shutters
on the wall that can be closed when it is a mess, or opened when I want to be
able to see in is nice.
The bathrooms in the house have some crazy wallpaper (it was a former model), but
they are kind of fun. Totally not "us" but we are not changing them anytime soon.

Craig's list dinning room set that we painted and stained.

Looking into playroom

Coming out of the garage door.

Turning right out of the garage door to our office.

Example of some texture work that went on just in the office.

Messy office.

To garage.

Bathroom across from playroom.