We have walls!

We are moving fast with our home improvements. Ever since we bought this house, I wanted to change this:

The 2nd level is open to the family room and can get noisy. Sometimes it is hard for the boys to go to sleep because they can hear the television and sometimes it is hard to hear the television if they are upstairs playing. Or if anyone is talking downstairs it travels right upstairs so I really wanted to close up these openings. I had no idea how much it would cost or how difficult it would be. I decided to go ahead and get some estimates to see if this was a possibility for us or not. And thankfully it was very possible! 

Yesterday they started by ripping off the ledges...

and then framing and building walls! 

Here is the back and what it looked like upstairs. 

 

They added soundproofing insulation, and drywalled everything.  

We have walls! I am so excited and hoping this helps keeps the noise from traveling up to down and from down to up a little less. 


Today they are finishing them off with the mudding and texturing, and then we are having everything painted.  I hope everything will be done by the end of the weekend and I will post more pics. 


Thanks for visiting me!

Home Improvements Are Happening Again!

Now that the holidays are over and our trip to Disney World is done :(, we are back to finishing up the kitchen. 


This is what we were left to finish:

We finally hired someone to come out and pull those three center cabinets out so that we can actually put those barstools under the counter. 

We also wanted to do something with this eyesore of a utility sink in our laundry room. This room is right next to our kitchen. The man we hired had the great idea to take the cabinet he was removing from up there, and put it here with a new granite counter top. He said he had a scrap piece of granite that would match our existing granite. 

He showed up bright and early this last Monday and got to work. 

This is right after he removed the 2 piece cabinet that would go into the laundry room now. 

Here is a pic of that cabinet pulled out. See someone familiar in the corner there checking everything out? She was so spazzy on Monday. She would want to check out what he was doing and would peek around the corner at him, but would not dare come close. And every time he would go outside to get something she would bark at him coming back in. All day long and he didn't leave until almost 6. You would think she would have got used to him coming and going after about hour 4, but nope. 

Here is the new cabinet in the laundry room with the new sink top just put in. Yea! Huge Improvement!

And now the cabinet with the third one pulled out and the new cabinet ends installed to give it a finished look. 

And here is the final product! We love it! I now need to get in there and refinish these cabinets and then the kitchen will be done. 

This was the only bad thing. When the cabinets were removed we found out what we were afraid of: no tile under them. The woman we bought the house from left us one box of this tile in the garage. I think it is going to just be enough to fill this space. I hope! 

One of the cool things we had him add were these pull-out recycling bins in the cabinet. We had this ugly, old trash can out for recycling and now we can hide them! 

And here is the new laundry sink and cabinet. Huge, huge improvement. 

 And of course when you start doing home improvements something will break and need replacing. Our dryer broke right before we started this whole thing. We had someone out to repair it and it didn't work and the next repair was going to be more costly. 

So we decided instead of fixing this dryer for the third time, we would just finish off our new laundry room with these:

We wanted to get stainless, but they cost so much more that it was kind of silly to do that. These are huge! I washed our king size bedspread yesterday with no problem. And with two growing boys, I think these are going to be so worth it! 

So that is where we are with the home improvements. I'm just waiting on the tile guy to come and fix the floor before I get into refinishing the cabinets. We have some more big projects we are going to do over the next two months, so stay tuned! 

Thanks for visiting me!

Our Disney World Vacation

We recently went on our fourth trip to Disney World and it was fantastic. We thought this might be our last trip for awhile, but both boys enjoyed it so much that I'm sure we will be back sooner than we thought we would.


This time we pulled the boys out of school so we could go during Disney's off season. Even though there was a pile of homework to do when we got back, it was so worth it. The lines were pretty much non-existent and the weather was just about perfect. It was a little too cold for swimming and we had a little rain on our last day, but other than that it was wonderful for walking around all day at the parks. It was so nice not to fight crowds and really enjoy our time there. One night at Magic Kingdom the boys rode Buzz Lightyear 6 times in a row. There was no line at all. They got off the ride and got right back on it. Amazing! 


I decided to try and make a little video featuring some of the pictures I shot and the ones we purchased through Disney Photopass. I also added in some video here and there, but I have to get much better at the video taking with my camera. I couldn't get it to focus a lot of the time so I need to be reading the manual and figure that out. 


There is audio on the video, so make sure you have your sound on. 


Here is it! I hope you enjoy it! 





Disney World February 2012 from Christie Ellis on Vimeo.


Thanks for visiting me!

Project Life-2012

I decided to give the Project Life project another go this year. For those of you not familiar with it, it means I take a picture every single day so that I will have a complete look at our life in 2012. Some people do this weekly or monthly, but I'm going to attempt one every single day. I tried this back in 2009 and made it until August and then fizzled out. I hope to make it the entire year this time. 


I'm off to a good start. I have the first three weeks of pictures printed, documented and in my album.  

This is my title page. I got the blue page from Cathy Zielske's blog. She offered it as a free download. It was originally orange, but I changed it to blue so it would match my beach pictures more. She also had it in a straight 6x12 photo sleeve, which I thought I had in my stash, but mine was broken into three 4x6 slots. I just cut my page into three sections so it would work. I actually kind of like it this way. 

When you flip that 6x12 page over, you see the full title page plus three bonus pictures from our photo shoot this last summer. A lot of you probably saw some of these pictures on our Christmas cards. All of these were taken by my Sister-in-Law Kathleen Frank.  If you are in the Satellite Beach, FL area and need a photographer, you should definitely give her a call!

This is my first week's layout. The only thing I have to complete is the dates for the week on the blue card on the left. I'm not sure how I want to do the dates yet so I'm waiting to complete them. 

All of the cards and page protectors are from Becky Higgins Project Life Clementine Core kit. I really like the colors in this set. On this first week, I did the journaling in my handwriting, but I think I'm going to change this as the weeks go on. 

This is my second week. I decided to go easy on myself this week and just took shots from around our house. 

This is how I did my journaling for this week and next. I got the idea from Cathy Z's blog again. I really like typing up the whole week and including it on one card. This way I can get more pictures in for the week or I can add more filler cards to add a little more creativity. (And of course, after I print this, take a picture of it and load it onto the blog, do I realize that I misspelled turquoise on the last line! grrr! I will have to redo that one now.)

This is my week three. I love making the pictures big and then splitting them between two slots. I think it helps to keep the pages from getting too busy. 

I made the Enjoy Life from this page, plus the camera on the pink from the title page myself in PSE. I have also made a variety of cards like these to use throughout the year. One thing I found when I was going through the kit, is that there weren't very many horizontal filler cards included. So I just made some for me to use! 

That is my first three weeks complete. I really, really want to keep up this year. I set up a dedicated area in my scraproom and plan on keeping everything out and visible all year. I'm hoping that keeps me on track!


I won't be posting every week on here, but every now and then I will just to show what we have been up to. 


Thanks for visiting me!!!

Our Kitchen Reveal-95% Complete!

First off, I have to say that we love our new kitchen!! It took quite a while to redo these cabinets (over two months) and I'm not completely finished yet, but for the most part it is done. 


To refresh everyone's memory on what we started with, how about a few before pictures? 

I don't believe I have ever posted the above picture before, but this is the kitchen on the day we decided to make an offer on the house. We were taking another look before we decided for sure and I snapped a bunch of pictures to look at while we were deciding between this house and another one. 

This picture was snapped on my Iphone right after I got everything unpacked and put away in the new kitchen. 

Then this last picture was when we tried to brighten everything up by painting the walls green. I really wanted that color to work, but it just didn't. I think it brought out the yellow in the cabinets even more and just didn't look right with the granite. 

So next I decided to take on the huge project to redo all of these cabinets too. There were times when I was in the middle of this when I thought what in the world have I got myself into. It felt like all I did was cabinets for two months. I was so sick of cabinets. 

So. Sick. Of. Cabinets.

But then....I finished. We painted the kitchen a nice chocolate brown. And we got new light fixtures that Chris installed. And we decided that the white refrigerator just did not look right and on black friday took advantage of a killer deal on a new stainless refrigerator. And our old dishwasher would leak on the floor sometimes. Not every load that was washed, but after about every 10 or so there would be a puddle of water on the floor. And it was loud. So very loud. So we decided to replace that too with a black friday sale. 

And now we have this beautiful kitchen that we absolutely love!!!!!!!

Once again I used the Rustoleam Cabinet Transformation Kit. (I really think I should be a paid spokesperson for them at this point!) The outside cabinets were done with the Pure White and glaze. The island was done with the leftover Expresso kit I had from redoing the boy's bathrooms earlier this year. So far I have bought two of the white kits and one dark kit, and got two new bathrooms and a new kitchen out of them. Not including the new appliances, this kitchen remodel for the kits, new hardware, paint and new lighting ran us about $600. Not too bad!!!! And another bonus from redoing all of those cabinets is that I don't hate the kitchen floor anymore! I think it really works with the new cabinet colors. 

I still have one last part to finish, which is why this post is titled as 95% complete. 

I decided to wait to do this part after the holidays. We want to have those three center cabinets removed so that we can actually push the barstools under the counter. We will have to hire a handyman for that because we have no idea how cut those out and keep the granite from crashing down. 

So for the year 2011, I have refinished 46 cabinet doors (fronts and backs), 25 drawers and 2 medicine cabinets and completely redone 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself! 

Thanks for visiting me! 

Fort Worth at Night

A couple of months ago, I bought a Groupon for a photography class. It was an hour a week for four weeks. And then at the end of the class, we would get to go on a nighttime photo shoot at the Fort Worth Stock Yards. Tonight was my night to go and the weather was just perfect. 


Basically all we did was set our cameras up on a tripod and just took a bunch of different pictures to get used to shooting at night without a flash. 

This next one I tried to get the cars trailing lights. I think it turned out okay.

Then I noticed the moon up in the clear sky, so I tried to get a shot of it with the sign. 

Here is the building where I think they hold the rodeos. 

At the end, we walked down this alley/sidewalk area and our teacher had us set our cameras up to capture some "light writing". It was super fun! I have a few more of different words she wrote, but this one turned out the clearest. She wrote that with a small flashlight and since we had our camera set to a slow shutter speed, it picked up her writing. 

Then she set something on fire, and swung it around in a circle. I think she said it was some kind of brillo pad. I won't be trying to do this myself. lol! We captured the "Ring Of Fire" and I think it turned out really cool. 

It was a fun way to spend the evening. And when we first set up on the street, I must of had 25 people ask me what we were shooting. Some guy even asked me if we were Paparazzi! :0)


Thanks for visiting me! 

Kitchen Cabinet Sneak Peak

I had every intention of not showing any pictures of our kitchen until we were completely done with the remodel. But we finished the first section this last weekend and I am so excited with how it turned out that I just had to post some pictures!


I forgot to take before pictures of the first section we worked on, so I went hunting through my old pictures and found this one from last Christmas. 

It is a little blurry and not the best pic, but this shows the section we started with: the desk area plus the cabinets to the sink. It was a big area to start with and I won't try and do that many at the same time again. I learned that smaller areas will be better for me to tackle and still manage to keep up with the rest of my life. Last week I felt like all I did was kitchen cabinets and I had to neglect other areas of the house. However, I'm glad that I got a section of top and bottom cabinets done so that we can see how it is going to look. 

Ta da...........The after:

Chris added all the new hardware. Look how perfectly lined up they are! (He made himself a template out of an old cereal box.) 

The green wall color is going to go away too. Imagine a chocolate brown on the walls. And now our kitchen table chairs match the new cabinet colors! That was a happy accident. Gotta love those! 

And for another comparison of what the cabinets looked like before, here is the other side of cabinets that still need to be done. This really shows how the new cabinet color is going to look so much better with the granite counter tops and backsplash. These golden oak colored cabinets don't bring out any of the granite colors at all. 

And here is the keeping it real picture. 

I still have 3 doors to get done for this side. Aww, the wonders of photography to hide things we don't want you to see. :)


I still have lots more cabinets to do to get this job completed. There is also an island that you can't see that has 12 doors and 6 drawers to refinish on it. My goal is still Christmas to be done with everything, but secretly I'm hoping for Thanksgiving! I just have to stay focused on the job. :)


Thanks for visiting me!