Sympathy Diversion Pics

To those of you that exposed yourself to my toe, I offer my sympathies. And then ask, "What the hell were you thinking??"

Anyhow, to try and cleanse your brain of that image, I offer cute pet pictures to bring you back to a happy place.....


There. If that did not work, seek therapy. And no, I will not pay for it.

This Little Piggie....

...GOT SMUSHED!

Graphic Image Warning: You are about to see my toe. I have never had a pedicure thingie in my life, so this is raw toe. View at your own risk. Protect the children....

This is what happens when you drop a full sheet of drywall on your toe. And you are not wearing shoes.

I am willing to bet Drywallers of America have some guideline about wearing shoes. I say real men drywall in their socks. Just look at me!

What?

I think it is just bruised. It's turned more red than purple today, which I think is a good sign.

Another reason I work behind a desk.....

They were right! (for a change...)

We actually had a winter storm! And they called it! Though I think we got more snow than they expected.

The pics below were all taken within a 4 hour time period this morning:

Maybe we'll get a snow day tomorrow!!

Then again, these guys made their rounds to make sure we can get out......

Drywall Day 1!

Things are REALLY taking shape now! We started putting up the drywall:
We started with the inside of the closet. We're leaving the other side un-drywalled while we install the closet stuff. Makes it easier to add studs and braces to support whatever hardware, clothes racks and stuff we put inside the closet.

We also drywalled the new door, so we can actually lock out the pets if we want to!
We also did the outside wall of the bathroom wall, so now we can close the bathroom door (and again, lock out those pesky pets if we want to!):
I forgot to clean the camera lens, so the picture above is a little blurry.

I decided to tape this to the inside of the closet wall:
It's the original first sketch we made when we were designing the space! On the other side is a listing of all the electrical work we were going to need. If someone ever tears down the walls in the future, they will have this nice little surprise! Haha.

I'll add the Abe Lincoln bottle of maple syrup before we close in the rest of the wall :p

Moving the floor vent

Today's mission with the Master Bedroom Remodel Project was to relocate the floor heat vent, which is in the now-closet, to the other side of the new wall. This way, we can have heat in the bedroom part, which, after our first winter here, is clearly a good thing.

First, we cut a little bit of the floor out, so we could remove the vent duct:
Then we figured out where to locate the new floor vent, and cut out a new hole in front of the new wall framing:The next step was to re-position the elbow duct 180-degrees to face towards the new vent hole:
We found some really cool flexible, expanding heating duct pipe stuff that goes from 3 feet to 8 feet, just like that! So I attached one end to the vent duct, cut another hole in the floor, ran the vent to the new hole, and ran the duct under the floor:
We then pulled the expanding duct through to the other half of the floor to the elbow duct, and attached it with duct tape:
After testing it to make sure it worked, we patched up the floors, and presto!We were quite pleased that we were able to do this ourselved. It was pretty simple looking back, but we had this fear we would "find something" after we cut the holes in the floor that would cause a big problem. Luckily, we did not. Yay!

Exciting Project Updates

Yesterday was a very exciting day for the Master Bedroom Project - the electricians came out and did their thing!

First, they relocated the ceiling fan box to over the bed and put up a new fan:
Then they re-wired the master bath lighting and outlets:
They also replaced the wire that we accidentally cut into when removing the drywall.

And, we got 2 new recessed lights, and a new light fixture and switch in the new closet:
Finally, we replaced the dingy hallway light with 2 new recessed lights - what a difference that makes:
It was great progress! It took 3 guys 4 1/2 hours to do everything. Money well spent.

We picked up 12 sheets of drywall yesterday, and will start working on that this weekend.

Who Killed Anna Nicole?!?

Well duh! THE GOVERNMENT!

I've given this some thought, so don't go and shoo-shoo me away on this.

Have you seen the latest on the astronaut lady that drove half-way across the country in a diaper to "talk to" (read: KILL!) her man's other lover? Have you?

NO! Of course not. And do you know why? Do you?

Because ALL THE NEWS IS ABOUT ANNA NICOLE!! The astronut lady story has fallen off the front pages completely since Anna Nicole died.

So. Putting it all together - NASA killed Anna Nicole Smith to create a diversion from themselves and the astronaut lady incident. And it appears to have worked!

I am off to crack the DaVinci code....

Dear Mother Nature: GET BENT!

It is a sick and cruel joke. All day, the weatherpersons taunted us with "IT WILL BE 50 DEGREES BY WEDNESDAY! MAYBE 60 BY SUNDAY!". Yet, this comes out of nowhere this afternoon:HEY! We're done with this! Did you forget? At times, we could not even see across the street. It only lasted a few minutes, but that didn't stop me from running around the house yellling "SNOW DAY TOMORROW!".

Joe and all 3 pets vetoed that idea real quick....

Great Sledding!

The great frozen tundra :...should melt away next week, with temps supposed to be near 50! Yay! I've never seen such solid ice - poor Spike slid down the back yard and had to be rescued. The ice has made for some great sledding for the neighborhood kids.

The electricians are coming on Tuesday to do the electrical work in the bedroom. They better hurry before I electrocute myself with all the wires running all over the place:

I did finally manage to remove the last stubborn board in the ceiling, and finish the drywall patching. What a pain!

The plan is that once the electrical is done, we can start drywalling. And with any luck, we can start that next weekend. Max is most anxious to get this completed.
I also have to cut a hole in the floor so we can move a heat vent about 8 feet, from inside the new closet to right outside the closet wall.

Happy Valentine's Day!

YAY! We finally got to use the snow plow!!
Ok, granted, we only had a few inches at best, and only because it drifted enough in front of the garage to justify firing it up. But that's not the point! This was a very exciting moment....

And we were not the only neighbors out plowing! So there! We even had to put the tire chains on. Joe figured out how to attach the lift lever thing. Took him less than a minute....I've been trying to figure it out for the past 3 months.

We're not sure what to expect tomorrow. Anything from 4 inches of snow to 1 inch of ice to rain. Or some combination of all 3. Should be interesting!

So. Anna Nicole Smith! I am leaning towards a conspiracy theory with Howard K. Stern killing them all for the money! Am I right? Am I wrong? Does anyone care? And who the hell is Prince Frederic von Anhalt? And why is Zsa Zsa not kicking him to the streets? I didn't even think she was still alive.....

Wow, it's HUGE!

We made a little more progress on the Master Bedroom Project this weekend by removing the rest of the wall that made up the master bath. Now the room is HUGE!
We'll replace this little single vanity with a new 5-foot double vanity. Yay! Max continued his supervisory role and gave us 2-paws up after we finished:

What I really like is that now we will have a nice big window as part of the bathroom, which floods the room with natural light. And even better, when you leave the door open to the bathroom, it also brings in light to the bedroom. And, having windows on both sides of this room should allow for a nice breeze.

We also decided to take off this panel to see what was behind it - we're curious types.
As expected, it's got the plumbing stuff for the shower, and also had some A/C ducts. I also made this exciting find back there:
A plunger! Someone left a plunger back there!! Too funny.

So this got us to thinking - We plan to leave stuff in the walls to let someone find in the future. My first thought was to print offf all my blog posts as a scrapbook! Haha.

What should we leave in the walls?

Art

We went to Leesburg, VA today to do some shopping. Leesburg is a very cool place, and we drive through some very pretty country settings (and huge estates!) along the way. We always pass this one horse statue, and I finally remembered the camera and got a pic:
We've spotted a number of painted animals in our short time here in Maryland. This fish was found at a shop in Baltimore:And these guys were found scattered around the Inner Harbor area:When we were in Minneapolis, they had painted Snoopy statues all around. In Des Moines, we saw painted pigs. I wish I had the talent to paint something like this.

The Big Snow

So! It snowed!


The good news: it was actually measurable, at about 4 inches! The bad news: it was so light and fluffy, it melted by the middle of the afternoon.

This morning:...and this afternoon:
So, we were not able to even get the snow plow out! Damn...

Oh well, Spike and Max loved it and got a chance to play this morning. Max ran around like a nut, and Spike kept eating it.It would have been nice to have a white-covered yard for more than a day, but I guess this will just have to do.

Master Bedroom Project Update

Slowly but surely, we're making progress! We got the estimate from the electrician, and hopefully they can come out this coming week to get things going.

Meantime, we relocated the existing bathroom door, seen here:
...to the new bathroom entrance!
We also started tearing down the bathroom wall, which will open the bathroom up to about double the size.

Do you see all those wires? Gah! Any thoughts of doing the electrical work ourselves went out the window when we saw all this. The wires come from the ceiling into a light/fan switch, then go over to an outlet, and then some go over again to the bathroom next door, and some go down through the floor, to the bathroom downstairs. I'm not touching this!!

We'll replace the current 1980's style vanity and sink with a new double vanity and double sink. Yay! We officially relocated to the spare bathroom this weekend. At least it's on the same floor!

We're still debating what to do as far as the bathtub area. Originally we were thinking we'd just re-tile. But, the tub is so small and shallow, that its useless for taking a bath. Do we replace with a bigger bathtub? Maybe one with a jacuzzi? Or do we remove the tub and make it a tiled walk-in shower?

We checked with our realtor, and got her advice. What do you think? If you were buying a house, would you miss a tub in the master bathroom? Our house currently has 3 full baths.

Now That's a Big Office Building!

So! We're moving to a new office building in a few months! Exciting!

Joe and I decided to take a drive out to the new site this morning and see how things were progressing. Our first impression as we drove up was "Wow! It's HUGE!":

310,000 square feet! Dang!!!

It looks like the construction company is nearing completion on time - the Spring of 2007.
There's now way my pictures will do justice to the actual size of this place. It looks very cool. The design is similar to our office in Des Moines:
Meantime, all the talk this week of a "significant winter event" was bunk. This is NOT the aftermath of a significant event....
Though you can see from this action shot how much Max enjoys the cold weather. I will be really disappointed if we don't get to use the snow plow at all this season....