triumph!

praise God! we submitted a tile sample for some scary ceiling tile in the basement. it needs to come down for HVAC...we wondered if it is asbestos tile. the results came back negative. yippee!

a snapshot of the past few weeks

life has been full of events, both at work and at home. here are the highlights:

1) this past weekend, i heard andrée seu speak at the bethlehem women's conference. she was awesome, unconventional. i want to be her friend. she even described herself as "melancholy." she was a bit stream of consciousness, and entirely practical. God used her words to speak into my life about how to tackle fear. what a blessing she was. (and what a vocabulary! she's definitely a writer. i even got to meet her and she signed my book! i told her i was a bit starstruck and she looked around and said, "why, did someone walk by?") our pastor's wife blogged about her here, too.

2) i've got the itch to garden. i planted some basil, parsley, and chives to keep in the kitchen window. they are practice, so we'll see how they turn out. i have a beautiful ranunculus plant out on the front step, and a few house plants i'm learning to care for. oh yeah—the hostas my mom and i split last summer are coming up! i had a long conversation with my managing editor today about gardening and plants, and i'm totally motivated. however...

3) our side yard looks like this [see above!]. at one point this was a nice garden, according to the reports of neighbors. but now it is overgrown and unkempt. we tore out the stakes and wire (and the random oar???), and ben started tilling it. we'll seed it and it will hopefully be grass before too long.

4) in other yard news, our neighbor painted our shed for us. here's the before pic. the after will come before too long (i've said that before, though...). let's just say ben and i are like-minded in our preference for blue.

5) speaking of like-mindedness, we need to pick out tile for the master bathroom—floor and shower. i pulled some samples from kate-lo, but ben didn't really like any of them—and that was fine by me! it kind of made me laugh afterwards, because i picked ones i thought he might like, but they weren't ones that i was particularly crazy about, either. shows how little i know about his taste! anyways, we'll go look again on saturday, and hopefully we'll put our heads together and find something we both like. because, like taylor swift says, "two is better than one!" [cheesy, i know.]

two feet

what a difference two feet can make. when we redid our kitchen, we took out two side-by-side closets to expand the space. how much did we gain? two feet. and it felt like much more than that.

after getting the header/permit situation figured out for the master remodel, our contractor was able to come today to do some framing for us. he took down a wall that was part of a closet and put in a header. the walls and new doorways are now in the right spots, and boy, do the rooms feel changed. again, we shifted walls to expand the bedroom by about two feet, and the rooms feel so different. when i walked in, there was shrieking—the good kind.

you can see where the wall used to be. this outlined area was a closet between the bedrooms, but we are creating a walk-in closet elsewhere, so we didn't need this closet anymore. we took down the wall and incorporated the two feet into the master bedroom (to the left). the opposite side (to the right) will be the master bath.

the wall we took down was load bearing, so we needed to have this header installed where the wall was. it comes down from the ceiling about five inches. not the most ideal, but doing so allowed us to gain that extra two feet!

 more zoomed-out shots. the framed doorway on the right will lead from the master bedroom into the master bath.

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we may or may not have ordered a little too much lumber. :)

tomorrow, we are set to help my brother and sister-in-law paint their new house! they moved in today, and we haven't seen it yet. can't wait! it will be nice to step away from our own project and help someone else on theirs. they are expecting their first baby in august, so i'm especially excited to help them begin to build their "nest." until the future!

birthday happenings

whew! it has been a busy week.

i have a lovely sister. she turned 23 on tuesday. we celebrated with our family on sunday, and we met some sweet friends from her work. it was a beautiful day—sunny and warm—so we ate lunch outside.

i got the chance to try out a recipe i've been curious about. it's the pink lemonade layer cake from the deen brothers cookbook. it called for lemon zest in both the cake and the frosting, but i left that out because i wanted it to be more sweet than tart. in my opinion, it came out plenty tart, so i think i'll leave that out in the future.

anyway, kristy put in a request for a strawberry or raspberry dessert, so i added strawberries. i also got a chance to use the cake decorating tools ben gave me for Christmas in 2008!

of course, i wanted to use the camera. so here's the visual story of the cake's life.

k for kristen. it was soon time to blow out the candle and...we all know how the story ends.

i was feeling extra crafty, so i decided to make her birthday card myself. i had saved this post to try and i decided to make the most of all the leftover paint color samples we have around the house. i had everything else on hand.

what fun to make things out of stuff you already have.

p.s. free coffee today at starbucks if you bring your own mug! happy tax day!

another p.s. instead of posting pics of the kids from easter, here's a video ben took of klaas teaching those kids crazy things. ha!

saturday {4.10.2010}

well, we got the load-bearing wall situation figured out, thanks to my husband's perseverance and dedication! he got the permit from the city yesterday, so we are full speed ahead to make up for some lost time.

but first, a side story. when i came home from work on friday night, i was so confused to see tons and tons of vans, suvs, and cars with trailers trolling around our neighborhood. i also noticed that there was a toilet in the front of our neighbor's yard. what was going on?

it took me a while to realize that this weekend the city would pick up junk and trash from people's houses if they put it all by the curb. and the trollers were looking for treasure! i'm not kidding, people had desks, chairs, mattresses, beds, old christmas decorations, and all sorts of other things out on their front lawns.

so we decided to join in on the fun. we put out three old doors that we had torn down, as well as our very own demo-ed toilet. but this morning, here's what we saw:

a rejection notice. apparently, porcelain isn't accepted into the program. it's okay, we have a dumpster for situations such as these!

anyways, today's work included a trip to cannon recovery (which we have had good experiences with in the past) to look for doors. but we looked at vanities, tile, etc, too.

that last one made us laugh. we didn't have any luck, so we went to order some doors at menards: poplar two-panels with brushed nickel hinges.

when we came home, we pulled a bunch of nails out of the studs to prep for some contractors who will hopefully come this week. then, ben stepped on a nail! praise God that he just had a tetanus shot a few weeks ago. hmmm, i should probably get one of those, too...