Falling in love all over again!!!

Check out my backsplash! Still needs grout but OH MY GOSH, I am in love!

Please...

...somebody pinch me!! Is this really MY kitchen????

Ouala!

So most of the house is a total DISASTER...

But naturally, the first room I got up and running and looking GREAT was the kids room. And oh my gosh, It's SO CUTE!

What you don't get a sense of in these pictures is how BIG the room is. It's HUGE. Super spacious, lots of empty space, not cluttered at all. It's like a dream come true. Big closet with tons of storage, huge open space for playing on the floor in the middle. I'm LOVING it!

And look who made the move with us!

We're not sure how he knew where to find us (and frankly impressed with ourselves that we even remembered him) but the kids think he's about the best thing that ever happened to him. And THAT makes me happy!

I meant to take pictures of the mess in the rest of the house, but must have been throwing up in my bathroom. I'll get to them tonight!

Sick & Moving - not a winning combination!

So the move is complete, and no post has been written in a week. I realize it's TERRIBLE as a blogger to leave all my dedicated readers (haha) without any news for such a long time! But it's been a WILD week. First of all you will remember that we lost the internet connection at the old house, so I had no way of posting anything from home. Then, we started packing and moving, and once that starts, there's no hope! We moved all day Saturday, worked all day Sunday, and Monday I got food poisoning. Throwing up, unable to get out of bed, it was a disaster. So needless to say, my excuses for not posting have been LEGIT! I'm finally feeling better though and will get some new posts with pictures up ASAP. So stay tuned (and stop your bitching!)...

Almost there!

Well, the bathroom vanity has been installed and has water!! It looks great! But here's the thing, and this is what I've found with every project in this house. Once you think you're done, there's always one more step you weren't expecting that has to be done to really finish it! In this case, Angel finishes the installation and calls me to say "where's the backsplash?" What backsplash!? You mean the vanity didn't come with one?

So now I'm running around looking for something that I didn't even know I needed! So I'm not 100% done yet, but the bathroom definitely looks 100% better!

Still need the new lighting and mirror. It's a work in progress! And who knows what missing "necessities" I'll need once those go in!

The Move is Underway

Today was like a dress rehearsal for next Saturday's big performance. We packed up several boxes last night and began the daunting trek to the new house. Sone progress was made and we are going to continue some gradual moving through the week. I am so excited!!

The Devil is in the Details...

So this is the mundane (but critical) work that is being done on the house right now. This is why I'm not as fired up as usual to get home and write posts and send out pictures of everything!

This is a picture of our soffit screens. These run along the perimeter of the whole house, and basically these allow the attic to "breathe". You can see that it's like a metal mesh piece running the length of the inside of the roof line. Angel has replaced these around the whole house. Before he did his work, these were torn & ugly looking screens. I think they were the perfect material for rats to crawl through! So we are thrilled to have something more durable and MUCH better looking protecting us from creepy rodents getting into our attic.

We had a pretty decent amount of rotten fascia board around our house when we bought it. So Angel has also been cleaning up the rotten fascia and replacing it with clean new wood. You can see in these pictures he's done the piece right above that window, and he's also replaced the wood that runs up above the house. He had to remove some roof tiles in order to do this and I know this wasn't an easy task.

When he was up top on the higher section, he pulled off the rotten fascia board only to realize that all the wood behind it was also destroyed. It wasn't wood rot though - it was the product of TERMITES!  Angel's words to me: Lynley, the termites had breakfast, lunch AND dinner on this wood up here! So it was really bad. This is what it looked like before they replaced it.

Um...yes. That is NO GOOD!

So it's all taken care of now and looking SOOOOO much better.

In other news...:
- The granite has officially been ordered and will be installed the week before Christmas. That is about the best Christmas present I can think of!

- The bathroom vanity pieces have arrived and we will be working on getting that repaired and *hopefully* installed this weekend.

- We have officially set the moving date for next Saturday, December 17th. Someone remind me why we thought it would be smart to move into a new house the weekend before Christmas?

And the fun continues...!

Light on the Posts

So it's really hard to maintain a blog without an internet connection...

To all my loyal readers (I think there's about 2 of you), our internet connection was terminated at our current house because they set up that account at the new house. So in order to write on here, I either have to do it from my iphone which is about as fun as a root canal, or I have to do it at work, which is less than ideal...

So I have been bad about posting, but I'm trying to be better. A few fun things going on so I will update soon...

MIA...

Sorry I've been so MIA. Life is getting incredibly overwhelming right now! Between getting ready for the holidays, being out of town and general mommy challenges, I haven't had a minute to update this blog! We haven't had the type of progress at the house lately like we've had in the past, but good things are happening.

Last weekend, the electrician did all the lighting in the kitchen! It looks FANTASTIC!! Of course, once we get the ceiling painted it will look a ton better, but what a vast improvement over the ugly fluorescent light that used to be there.

We had some serious issues with the toilet installation and I now know more about toilets than I ever cared to know! But Angel came to the rescue and figured it out and installed the toilet in the kids' bathroom. It's one of the water efficient toilets and it looks great. I'm really excited about it! Thanks to Habify for the great deal too - and Miami-Dade is giving us $50 back for buying it!

Granite counters are being ordered as we speak. We found a great guy who is helping us with counters and he came in RIGHT at our budget which makes me SO HAPPY because everyone else is coming in over budget, and I frankly thought we had under-budgeted for this one thing. We're going to do the whole kitchen AND the outside patio counter as well, which makes me REALLY happy. This is the granite we chose:

It's a really light grey/tan color (looks darker in these pictures than it does in real life) with small specks of black.

It's going to be double thickness like the black piece on the right. And I think we're going to finish it with the straight/square corners. Not rounded corners. Do any of you have opinions on that front? Gheorghe likes the rounded corners but I really prefer the modern look of the square cut...

So we're moving along! AT&T installed our phones, internet and cable yesterday. Granite is being ordered today and will be installed the week before Christmas. Electrician is hopefully coming this weekend to change out all the electric. All the soffit screens are being replaced as we speak. It feels like we're getting really close to being READY for the BIG MOVE which will inevitably occur on December 17th whether we are ready or not! BRING IT ON!!! And then Christmas is the following weekend. Someone remind me why we decided to move into a new house the week before Christmas? When exactly am I supposed to find time to shop for my children and family????