Summer through my iPhone

Considering that this happened in the first week of summer vacation:

I wasn't able to do much typing, and frankly I was kind of down and out for a while after breaking my arm.

So I figure I will just share with you through pictures what my summer has been.

We replaced these ugly light fixtures in the front of the house:

‘

With fans:

I bought a jersey heifer:

(isn’t she adorable?!?)

We found out Ace HATES thunderstorms!

I canned for the very first time:

Our chickens started laying eggs, YAY!

We had a visit or two from these cuties:

We went to the fireworks in Otis:

 

 

We celebrated two birthdays!

      

We worked on the house, a lot!

We filled in the “window”:

 

 

 

And AFTER! I am sooo happy with it:

      

We replaced light fixtures:

Before:

 

 

So much better!  We also replaced the hall lights, but alas, no iPhone pictures.

We also finished painting! (ish)

I wish I had before pictures on my phone.  I only have this “after” one of our guest bedroom.  I do have before and after pictures, but it is on my big camera.

I also did a few crafts:

I made this TV stand out of a dresser a lady from work gave me.

          

And this is a dresser I got for free from craigslist that I gave a nice face-lift.

  

We also did a quick road trip in a motor home with Chris’s parents to Indiana:

And on the trip we got to hang out with this cute girl for a few days:

I got my cast off:

and immediately got sunburned where my cast was :/

We also found this big guy hanging out on the 4-wheeler in the barn:

YIKES!

Two Days in Paradise.

The day after Valentine's I had off for a comp day (parent-teacher conferences). We were excited to actually get to spend two full days, uniterrupted, together. Because it has been a year since we have been bowling together (I would say a year and leave it at that, but I think I might have been bowling this summer, like once, maybe?) We ventured our way to Sterling for a fabulous meal of Taco Bell, and then we went to the bowling alley. We were only about 6 frames in, when the lady working at the alley made us leave. I was really upset. She gave us a gift certificate to come back another time, but I don't think she realized what a rarity it was for us to be able to be there and go to begin with! It took a lot from me not to cry. I know it wasn't a big deal, and it really wasn't her fault, but it's something we don't get to do very often, and she was kinda raining on my day date.

After I finished my little pitty party, we ventured over to Bomgaars which got their second shipment of chicks in. We bought 9 last week when the kids were visiting, but the green egg layers (Americanas) didn't come in the first shipment.  When we bought 9 we were only planning on 6. This time we were only going to get 1 Americana, but we both felt really awkward asking for just one chicken, so we ended up with 3 and rationalized it that we were making it an even dozen.

Our 2 Americanas and 1 Sicilian Buttercup.

Wal-mart was last on our list, where we were only going to buy sour cream and milk. But they had all the gardening stuff out, and we just bought all our trees and bushes for the garden from Gurney's but didn't get any seeds so I convinced Chris we needed to get our seeds for our garden too! He made so much fun of me because of how excited I got over a packet of seeds. He knew I loved Easter and Springtime, but I guess he didn't realize how much!

Chris also suprised me with a boquet of tulips! I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE tulips. They're probably my second favourite flower (next to Sunflowers of course!). I was so excited, (and of course okay with it because it wasn't valentines day or roses!) Every time I walk into the kitchen I make a comment about them.

But they are so beautiful! And I adore them.

Saturday we went to the hay auction and then kind of sat around the house and dinked around. We took the "window treatments" off of our kitchen windows. We also hung a few frames and pictures that we've been meaning to get to.

Again dummy-me, I forgot to get a before picture, but the "treatments" were just 6 in pieces of wood attached to the front end of the cabinents, so they weren't even true window treatments.

(After I took this picture, I realized we REALLY need to do something with this light fixture. It is UGLY and DIRTY!)

These are the kitchen signs I hung. Totally got them off of pinterest- free printables. Man I love Pinterest! This only cost us $3 for the frames that I found at the dollar store, and they look really nice and just gives it a little something extra.

The more time Chris and I spend together the better it gets. It's so much easier to get stuff done to the house when we're off together than just one of us trying to get stuff done on our own. We are slowly making progress, and making this house a home, and making it our own.

Ding Dong the Doorbell's Dead

So our house is old. Straight up that's All there is to it.

Well, we have updated it with some fresh paint which has been SO refreshing. I'll post pictures soon, we still have a bit of trim to paint before it's finished, but it already looks 10x better. I think I've ranted about this before, but our house was painted 10 different colors when we moved in. Now the downstairs (minus the hallway and laundry room) are all painted. Now our front room and tv room is one color, our dining room and kitchen is one color, and the bathroom and bedroom are one color. Much better.

I am actually surprised at how well I did taking pictures to document the doorbell update. I wish I had done this with the rest of the house. I think you would appreciate my documentation/ pictures of the house so much better if you saw what it looked like before we started working on it.

I know Chris has a few pictures, so I'll see if I can get them to show the pre/post house look.

So far, we have installed ALL outside doors, which means they actually lock now!!!!! And we have keys now!!!! (The one door didn't close completely and two of them didn't lock, so MAJOR improvement right there, and you can probably see now a little more why I started crying when I first saw the house like I mentioned here.)

Anyway, I'm slightly digressing from the purpose of this post. We painted the dining room and kitchen yellow. It's a nice "mellow yellow"

In our dining room is where the doorbell is.

As you can see, before it looked like this, very 70s. Which is fine, and I'm sure this is an antique I just ruined and I will probably regret it when I find out how much it was worth in good working condition, but it was ugly, especially with our updated wall. It just didn't look good. I wanted to take the whole thing off, but that looked like even more work that would probably end up doing something to the wiring of the house, so Angi told me I should just paint it.


I took down the box, and took out the fabric that smelled of the 70s (I don't know how to explain it, but that fabric just has a certain smell,) and said goodbye to the regal eagle.

I spray painted the box gray and cut out a piece of fabric using the old one as a pattern.

After the box dried I took some liquid nail, and glued the fabric back inside the box. There was a piece of screen that was behind the old fabric that I kept so the shape would hold.

We thought we could just take the pipes off and then spray paint them, but after we looked at them closer, we realized that we couldn't, and if we did take them off, we wouldn't be able to get them back on.

I figured I would find something later to paint the pipes with, but when I was at school one day, Angi beat me to it.

I like it so much better now, and it actually goes with the rest of the house. (We have gray trim throughout the house except the bathroom/bedroom).