Friday, July 24, 2009

A Tour of Our Home

A few of you have asked for some pictures of our place so I decided to give you a real tour. It's probably too many pictures but for those of you that like all the details (like me) I think you will like it. So let us begin...
This is where you walk to the front door.

Our lovely front door-I know, it's not that exciting.

Right by the front door is the gate to our backyard.

We are working on the patio furniture:) It's okay, we feel like we have a while because it is way too hot to sit out here right now.

They did the landscaping in the backyard right before we came. I am not sure what to do with this rock area. If you have any suggestions please let me know!


This is a view of the living room coming in the front door.

The kitchen is open to the living room. You all have heard of the famous drama table.


One of my favorite parts of the house-the kitchen! They recently put tile down and I love it!

This is a view of the living room from the kitchen.

This is all that is exciting about the garage-my beloved washer and dryer. So far, I still like the fact that I can do laundry so easily but I know that soon will fade.

The view of the living room from the kitchen window.

Here's the guest bathroom.


Here is the guest bedroom. Right now I am currently working on this room. We just bought a mattress and Andrew put the bed frame together tonight. It should be done soon for our guests.
Come with me further down the hall and you will see our room ahead.





As you can tell we are currently in need of a bigger desk. This little thing is overloaded!

My favorite part of the room-the closet!

Our room has sliding doors that go out to our backyard. We really like the view from our backyard and try to keep the blinds open for as long as we can.

Our master bathroom.


Thanks for taking my tour. Please come and visit in person! I promise the tour will be much better.

Parents' Visit

My mom and dad got to come spend some time with us in our new place. It was fun to show them around Redding. We tried to find places to cool off and only go outside late at night. My dad kept saying, "Yeah, it is hotter here."
Andrew trying to scare the geese away.
We tried to cool off by having lunch up at Manzanita Lake near Mt. Lassen.
We took them to the Sundial Bridge but we had to do it at 10:30pm. Good thing we are night people!


Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Herd

















Andrew decided the youth group needed a name. So going with the whole cow theme he decided to call it the Herd. We have really had a good time getting to know these kids during the summer. We have had a few Summer Sunday nights where we go over to a families house and swim and play games. We have also had one of our summer day trips and that was going to the local lake and hanging out and tubing. We have one more big trip planned to Eureka in a few weeks and we are excited to go to the beach up here.

Visiting Erin


A few weeks ago I was able to visit Erin while she was staying with her sister Ashley. We had a fun time together and I enjoyed the cooler weather. I even had to wear a jacket at night! It was so exciting. Thanks for letting me come down during your sister time! Notice how the sisters are used to posing in pictures together-such naturals!

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Kitchen Table Drama

My mom was up here to visit us last week and I warned her before coming that our little project would be to paint our kitchen table. It was a table that was given to us by Andrew's sister-thanks Joy-and just needed to be touched up. I like to think that I can handle these kind of projects but this is the second one to be a little dramatic so I am going to take a break from my painting projects, well at least for a little while. The drama makes us all laugh (during the fiasco made me want to cry) so I thought I would share it with you to get a good laugh as well.

We started off early one morning sanding the table down. That took a few hours but we got to use muscles we didn't even know we had to so that fine. That night we put on the first coat of paint. We decided to use a roller to do the top of the table and that worked out great. We figured we should do a second coat the next day and then do some kind of varnish. The next night I completed the second coat and right when I was done with the last little part I looked down on the whole top of the table and saw little fuzz from the roller throughout all the paint!!! I was in denial that it was really happening but hurried and got my mom and Andrew. They rushed to get wet towels and wipe off everything we had worked on so far. I stood there covered in sweat and paint thinking this is not happening and then why do I talk myself into these kind of things??? So after they wiped everything up we were all exhausted sitting on the couch them laughing about it all and me trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Andrew says, "I can't believe the roller did that! Where did you get that roller?" Then it hit my mom and I that we had made a very poor choice on where to find a decent roller and said softly together, "The Dollar Tree." He then was in shock and could totally understand why it fell apart in the second coat which gave us all another good laugh. Side note**never buy a roller at the Dollar Tree! So then the next morning with renewed energy and a good night's rest we started sanding again. This time we didn't have to sand as hard so that was good. I did another coat of paint and then we figured we would wait until late that night to do the varnish. We go to the good people at Lowe's and get advice on what varnish and brush to get. They recommend one and then tell us we can do it with a roller. So late that night, already exhausted from the early mornings and late night work for the past 2 days, I attempt to do the final step, the varnish. I paint the ends with a brush and it goes on fine, not as smooth as I anticipated but okay. Then I pull out the special roller we bought and proceed to do the top only to find that the roller makes it bubble all over! So I toss that aside and start using a brush to fix the problem but it is just not going on smooth. At this point I was want to throw this table away but know that it can be fixed so my mom helps me yet once again get wet towels and wipe off the varnish. At this point, I am just scared to touch the table. I feel like anything I do, no matter how hard I try to do it right will go wrong. So we decided I should just do one more coat of paint and be done with this table. I did that and the table project was complete, well at least on my end, everyone agreed I should not touch the table anymore! I just figured God was using this to humble me and if the table was not perfect that would be fine becuase it would be a daily reminder to me of how imperfect I am. So now we got our chairs to go with it and now that there have been a few days of rest I have grown to love our new table. I would advise all of you to never ask for my help to paint any kind of furniture:) Here are some pictures for you to see how it turned out.