A Whole Lotta Nothin’

September 22, 2016

Normally on Mondays the girls go to my dad and step mom’s, and Tuesday – Thursday they go to day care. That gives me 4 days a week to do day job stuff. But a funny thing happened: my dad and Wendy AND day care are gone on vacation the exact same two weeks! My wonderful friend has been coming for a couple mornings each week to watch the girls so I can get in a couple hours of work, but trying to put in 32 hours worth of work into about half the time is, well, not really happening, lol.

Instead, there’s been a lot of, “uh, that’ll get done later,” and attempts to bring a 3 year old and 1 year old along to work with me. On one adventure Merritt inadvertently turned on the water in a showroom’s shower

Luckily they’re one of my favorite showrooms and are a husband a wife who own their own business and have two kids they used to bring into work with them too, so they just laughed.

Last night we went to a tile shop with both kiddos in tow

That was an adventure. Luckily I waited till Chris got home from work so he was on kid duty while I looked at tile. Still, the tile shop employees didn’t find our children as endearing as the showroom….

Mostly it’s just been about hanging out together more though, and with the kiddos being pretty good, it hasn’t been quite as stressful as I thought it would be

Baby + diaper wandering = adorable

I’m super thankful for my friend because otherwise I’d basically be getting none of my work done, and I can’t exactly take a 2 week vacation, so thank you Stephanie!

Next week I shall return, maybe even with some work we’ve gotten done!

That Trip to Alaska…

September 19, 2016

So, like TWO MONTHS AGO now we went to Alaska. Jesus, that was a while ago. For my 30th birthday we went to a theme park, but we had sort of always planned for us to go to a cruise to Alaska, it’s just that Merritt was only about 3 1/2 months old at the time so obviously that was not happening. Chris and I have traveled a lot throughout the United States. Before we had kids we went on MANY road trips (a baseball one, the renovation road trip, our yearly college football trips, a Southwest USA trip, etc.) But the one state Chris had never been to was Alaska. That’s right, Chris had been to all 49 other states. And not just like, touched down in the state but stayed in the airport, but been INSIDE the state lines and traveled through it. I was at 48 – only Rhode Island and Alaska not checked off.

We had thought the idea to go to Alaska on a cruise would be pretty awesome, but didn’t really know when we would do it after we had kids. Then the idea of doing it for my 30th birthday seemed awesome. But then we had a very little baby. So we put it off and decided we would do it in a little while. Well, then we got itchy about it and thought, “Maybe we can do it this year?” The only kicker is that, well, we needed our girls looked after. We didn’t NEED them looked after, but it would certainly make going a lot easier and a vacation we would more easily enjoy because having a 1 year old and 3 year old on a cruise seemed EXHAUSTING (although we saw a lot of it, and every time we saw it the parents looked very, VERY, tired).

So we asked our parents: would you be willing to help us take care of our kiddos while we’re gone? It was going to be 8 days and my mom is away 6 months out of the year, so we coordinated it during a time she would be here and asked if she would stay at our house so the girl’s schedule wouldn’t be too disrupted. They would have day care 4 of the days we were gone, go to my dad and step mom’s one of the days, and we arranged for Chris’s mom to take them 1 of the days. But my mom would always be the one at home with them so their was some consistency for them. AND ALL OF OUR PARENTS SAID YES! More importantly, they all told us incredibly enthusiastically to, “PLEASE GO!” Chris and I hardly ever take vacations (the one before that was more than a year ago for only 3 days, and I don’t know when the one before that even was). That felt good. So we booked it!

We booked a Princess cruise, one direction (so we go to see more places) out of Vancouver and to Anchorage. We booked through Costco and then booked our excursions through the cruise (in hindsight I’d probably book the excursions at each port on their own to save money, but this was our first time and we kind of wanted to do things as simply as possible).

We had a super tough time leaving the girls that morning, but we knew it was good for us. We left very early and neither of the girls were awake. We had told Zoe what would be happening and she was excited to stay with my mom, but also sad we were leaving. Merritt only being about 13 months at the time of course had no idea what was going on.

We headed off to the airport and on our way to Seattle! As a birthday present from my brother he used his SW points and flew us round trip from Oakland to Seattle, but we hadn’t really figured out yet how we were going to get from Seattle to Vancouver. Everyone thought we were CRAZY because we were literally getting there only a few hours before the cruise left and most people get there about a day in advance just in case there are any problems. Well, we didn’t want to do that because we didn’t want to add another day of travel away from our girls. So, instead we decided we would just rent a car and drive about 95 miles an hour

It was a little stressful. Especially when the border crossing looked like this

But we made it JUST in time. This is literally what the prep area at the port looked like

Yup, one of the LAST groups of people to get on. We were still on time. Just REALLY close 🙂

Our little cabin was very cute – small and space used wisely. We opted for a cabin with a window so we didn’t feel claustrophobic. We didn’t get a balcony like many people suggested because we decided to save a bit and then go on some cooler excursions.

Our first port was Ketchikan. We only had the morning there, so we ventured around town a little bit when we first got there

A recurring theme in every town was just HOW commercial the areas around the port were. It was a little weird. SO MANY cheesy souvenir shops and weird jewelry stores. The strange thing was that people FLOODED those places. It was a little depressing actually because so many people weren’t getting out an about and discovering more authentic places. Although, it’s not like we were either because we went to plenty of places and did plenty of things that weren’t authentic. But I just don’t understand why someone would go all the way to Alaska to buy crappy jewelry at some strip mall place. Especially when after I looked into it there are a bunch of court cases against them regarding money laundering an human trafficking. Lovely.

Anyway, sorry to get depressing there… after walking around town we met up with our excursion and it was time for our first adventure! It was an all you can eat crab feast and seaplane ride!

It was pretty awesome. I think I ended up eating 4 or 5 crabs. I could have eaten more but it was almost time to go 🙂 Our fellow adventurers were a lot of fun too. They were really friendly and we had a good time talking with them. In fact, one was from West Virginia, and so was our seaplane pilot, so he actually flew us around for a bit longer

I thought I would be a bit more nervous to be on such a small plane, but it felt a lot safer than I thought. And it was GORGEOUS. SO BEAUTIFUL. The scenery in Alaska is just so amazing. So much more untouched than down here and just green, lush and cleaner. It was beautiful. That was probably both Chris and my favorite excursion we did: the food was amazing and the plane ride was awesome.

When we were done Chris of course had to inspect things

And I made us take the necessary “pose in front of the plane!” picture 🙂

We had to get back on the ship to make our way to Juneau so we headed back. Those days of sailing were a bit rough for us. Chris and I are people who like to DO SHIT on vacations. We are not sit on the beach people. We are visit as many museums, baseball games, National Parks, etc as you can people. We like to discover shit. So being stuck on a boat was pretty difficult. There were activities that the boat had (we played trivia MANY times each day), but we still struggled with so much down time.

We did make friends with a group from Nashville who was obsessed with one of the gambling machines

Chris was minorly obsessed as well, but he never played (or he might have played a dollar). We saw these folks lots and lots and became friendly with them. They were 3 couples celebrating various anniversaries (mostly 25 years). It was funny because we probably never would have talked in “real life,” but on the ship we became friends and they were hilarious. Each time we ran into them we hung out for a while and my cheeks always hurt from laughing so much. Those kind of interactions were really nice.

But again, the LONG cruising, we had to find lots of things to entertain ourselves

When we got to Juneau we walked around town a bit. Again, HEAVILY tourist trap like so close to port (for good reason, people went to those crazy shops). But we ventured a little further into town and found a SUPER yummy breakfast place

Ummmm, yes please

We tried to eat OFF the boat as much as possible. We’re a little spoiled living in Oakland because there are SO MANY food options that are so awesome, so the cruise ship food was….well… not super yummy. Plus, one of our favorite things about traveling is eating at all the different yummy places we can find.

After breakfast we visited a small museum (Juneau is the state capital) and then made our way back to the port to get on a tour bus. We did a “Best of” tour for Juneau because we couldn’t quite decide. So we got a salmon bake, whale watching and a hike to a glacier. I had no problem eating all the yummy food at the salmon bake right after that monsterous french toast 🙂

I didn’t think I would find the whale watching as awesome as I did. Do not let this picture fool you because I loved it, Chris just likes to take “awesome” pictures of my when we’re on trips

We got to see Humpback whales (a group of about 6 of them) and Orcas. Even our guide said we got a really good day. It was pretty awesome.

Almost as fun as the whale watching was watching all the people. I tend to get annoyed with people easily and man, they would just go CRAZY when they saw a whale and almost shove you to take a picture. These people needed to get their life together a bit.

After whale watching we hiked to Mendenhall Glacier. It was both beautiful and depressing. AMAZINGLY gorgeous

Like from a magazine

But so depressing

Makes you always remember how fragile our world is.

We had dinner in town again and tried to trek away from the city center to get a more authentic meal. And again, it was awesome.

The next day we were in Skagway which is a super cute, very small Alaskan town

Some of the buildings were REALLY cool

And we found out that much of the town shuts town after the tourist season and only a few places are open during winter. The town also shrinks WAY DOWN in size. One of our guides (a theme was awesomeness from the guides)…

…loved it so much that she stayed year round. All our guides were really fun to talk with. We had fun learning from them and just gabbing about life, they were all super awesome people.

In Skagway our first adventure was a train ride and then kayaking in a glacial lake. It was BEAUTIFUL

They asked me if I wanted to try to stand while kayaking, it was pretty cool

Even though literally about 4 seconds later the tip of that kayak pictured ran into our kayak while I was standing. Come on people. Our group on this adventure I was not so fond of (a lot of selfish, rude behavior), but Chris and I stayed mostly with ourselves, and who could hate this scenery

After kayaking we still had a bunch of time, so we did some zip lining. Again, awesome guides

(they took our phones to take pictures of us, but then snuck in some selfies. Again, the guides on this trip were so awesome). We had never been sip lining before, so it was a lot of fun. Chris was of course interested in how everything was constructed. The owner actually also owned a construction company, so we got to talking with the guides about that and just how they got interested in doing this (most guides are not from Alaska and come from all over the country instead). It was a lot of fun

After that we spent two days on ship on our way to Whittier – our last stop. We went through Glacier Bay National Park which was – obviously – amazingly beautiful

Then there was much time spent entertaining ourselves with trivia, mini golf, the Newlywed game, scavenger hunts and just general wandering…

Then, we got to Whittier, took a bus to Anchorage and started to make our way home. We got back the next day about mid-day and were able to get all unpacked and then pick up the girls at day care. I’ll never forget, when Merritt saw us she just flung her arms down and cried in joy and relief. She didn’t let anyone else hold her but Chris all night. Zoe danced around in excitement. Merritt’s eczema got a lot worse from the stress while we were gone, and I felt so guilty about that. Zoe did well and my mom and her made a calendar where they checked off each day that we were gone.

All in all it was an AMAZING trip that we were so thankful to take. All our parents said they would love to help out more and get us weekends away here and there, but we all agreed that 8 days was too long at that age. We missed the girls, it was a BIG responsibility for all our parents, but especially my mom, and it was A LOT of work when we came back getting back to clients and scheduling things and getting caught up. We had a outgoing message and email that was sent to people that we were on vacation and we would get back to them when we returned, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to contact us. When we got home Chris was booked out about 5 weeks within a couple days.

We were amazingly thankful for the time we got to spend with just the two of us though. Sometimes when you have kids or own your own business/work together it’s hard to remember to take those FUN times together and not take life so seriously. We have responsibilities and things and people that we need to take care of, but it’s also important to ENJOY life. And this trip really reminded us of that. Thank you Alaska!

Garage Storage has Begun

September 14, 2016

It’s hard to believe that this space looked a lot more barren just two weeks ago. I’m glad we finally made this space a priority because it’s been really exciting putting things together. Chris has been incredibly thoughtful about which things go where (including what isn’t used as often and therefore goes downstairs in the basement). And then almost every other day we spend anywhere from 10-30 minutes talking about how things are progressing, where things should be shifted, how we can maximize the space, etc. So how ARE things progressing?

The west wall

One easy item is that Chris has frosted the windows

They probably need about one more coat to make things even, but it’s nice to get the light in while also providing some privacy so you can’t look in at a plethora of tools.

He’s also built a little house for our air compressor

That mother fucker gets loud, and eventually we’ll insulate it to keep the noise down.

Against the wall right next to it will be where we store about half of our levels

Most of the remaining ones are on Chris’s truck.

Further down the line on this wall will be the miter saw work station

The Rigid was our first miter saw and Chris has decided upgrade to the Bosch. Hopefully we’ll be able to sell it for a decent amount to offset some of the cost. The miter saw will have a pretty decent feed extension out on both sides. In addition the planer will be stored along this wall, as well as the screws and other similar hardware.

The north wall

Ladies and gentleman, we have a work table!

Pretty awesome, right??? We used the wood we had intended on using for our sports ticket table (because we bought a vintage solid wood table EXTREMELY similar to the one we had designed). We had already joined a lot of portions of it YEARS ago, so Chris didn’t have to do much

But he did add a bit on the outsides to make it a little bit longer than we had intended for our dining room table (its original use). He made it longer so that it would fit two sets of double wine boxes and a section of Festool cases in the middle

Once it was all built (using our reclaimed lumber we’d previously bought for about $70 and two sheets of plywood), Chris put the wine boxes inside and he got some drawer slides for the Festool shelves

To the left of the already built work table will be another work table with the Kreg foreman inset between the two. We’re not entirely sure what will be above each work table yet, but likely the router bits and a small peg board. It’ll probably shift around though.

Lastly on this wall is the clamp storage

The heavens sing from above 🙂 This is a weird area, especially the alcove between the doghouse and the wall. We made very good use of that space.

And lastly, the east wall

That tool chest, bah! It’s pretty awesome. Is it possible for a tool chest to be sexy? Because I definitely think it is. And it’s funny, I used to think our old one was big and tough, but after wheeling this one in there, it looked pretty puny. And this mofo can fit A LOT of shit

And the top is our charging station – we have outlets here behind it on the wall and the tool chest has holes along the back to accommodate power cords.

Our sheet goods are stored to the left of it on the ground. It was an area that wasn’t super usable because of where the door was on the north wall, so it’s a really good use of space. Above the sheet goods is a really simple cabinet for spray paint, poly, stain, etc.

To the right of the tool chest is the sink as well as some open area to the immediate right of that.

We’ll build another cabinet for wine boxes that will store cleaning supplies, safety equipment, etc. Against the wall next to it is the sandpaper and tape storage

Pretty awesome. Such a better way have all the various grits of sandpaper for a couple different machines stored instead of boxes stacked on top other or a mish mash drawer (which is what we had before). And you better believe we’re going to go CRAZY with some labels when this is all said and done.

Cutting a Tree Down & Why You NEVER Pay a Contractor Up Front

September 12, 2016

We had a GIANT tree in our front yard

That pine tree that’s leaning over, and doesn’t look too hot? Yeah, no bueno. It was infected with something and was really not looking good – so it had always been in our plan to get it cut down some time. It was all entangled in the power line and even though you can’t quite tell in the photo, it was leaning over to the side across our driveway a good amount.

We knew it would cost a pretty penny, so we thought it would be a while till it came down. Until I talked to our neighbor…

Our neighbor across the street was gardening in front of her house many weeks ago. I hadn’t met them yet so I wandered outside with one of the kids in tow and introduced myself to her. We got to chatting and she mentioned that she was getting some trees in front of her house cut down. I asked if she didn’t mind telling me how much it was because we wanted to get the dead pine cut down too. She had two trees (not quite as big) that he had quoted, and to cut and remove them he said $1200. WHA!? That is dirt cheap for around here. With my jaw dropped I asked for his contact info. She laughed and gave it to me. She also warned that he was a bit of a hustler. He came to her house several times asking if she wanted her trees cut down. She wasn’t in the market to do it at the time like us, but he gave her a good price, so she figured, why not?

When he was at her house later in the week I asked him about our tree. Right off the bat I knew he had no idea what he was talking about – he used WAY more information and description in anything I asked him than he ever needed. Red flag. I feel a little bad saying that because I’m someone who talks a lot and frequently gets intimidated about work and I wonder, “am I good enough?” WAY more often than I’d like to admit – but he was just going in the most round about way of explaining everything. And incredibly unnecessarily. Finally I got him to nail down a price, kind of, $900 – $1,000. Not too bad at all, but we asked if he offered a cash discount. A LOT of contractors will offer people discounts if they pay in cash, so we frequently ask this on jobs we handle for clients as well as ourselves. Another red flag: he had no idea what I was talking about. Right there I knew that he didn’t work many big jobs. I wasn’t expecting him to be licensed and honestly couldn’t care less if he was or not, but a handyman or person in the construction field not knowing that was a common question was a big sign that he didn’t do a lot of reputable work. However, Chris and I didn’t really mind that. If it meant that we got our tree cut down for a lot cheaper, it wasn’t any skin off of my back. He asked, “What does that mean?” I told him, “You know, a lot of contractors will offer a discount to clients if they pay in cash.” He just replied, “Sure.” To which I received a blank stare. And I asked, “Sooooooo?” figuring he would tell me what the discounted price was. I got another blank stare. So I asked, “$850?” He agreed. I’ve never named my own price before, but whatever.

We asked when he would start. It was a Wednesday (MANY weeks ago) and he said Friday. Friday came and went. He wasn’t there. Monday came and went, he wasn’t there. The next Friday came and went, he wasn’t there. He gave me his number (because he also tried to get me to hire him to redo the concrete on our driveway – that is DEFINITELY not happening), so I called him. He said he’d be there the next week. The next week came and went, he wasn’t there. He called me, said he’d be there in a day or two. He wasn’t there. He came by the house, said he’d be there the next couple days. He wasn’t there. He called again, said he’d be there in the next couple days, he wasn’t there. It got to be kind of funny. I always wondered – when will he claim he’s going to be there?

I was annoyed, but it was also par for the course. I couldn’t expect him to be on top of things because he obviously didn’t entirely know what he was doing – and this is the kind of service you get when you get a price like this. I watched as he worked at the neighbors house periodically and when he hadn’t been there for a while I asked her how things went and told her about how he was supposed to cut our tree down, but hadn’t been there yet. She had a HORRIBLE experience. She agreed to have him cut 3 other trees on her property, but the price kept going up and up and she kept paying him. And he kept taking FOREVER. There were a ton of log slices left and she finally told him to just stop. She had paid more than she initially agreed to and he wasn’t finishing it up like he said he would, and she saw him throughout the neighborhood working on other jobs, so she was annoyed. I totally get it.

FINALLY he showed up on our door step one morning before I was taking the girls to day care and said he was going to do the work right then. HOORAY! The only thing, he wanted half the money right there. Before he started any work. No, no, no, no, no. Not happening. I told them, “I’m not giving you any money before you’ve done any work. I’ll gladly give you the amount of money for the amount of work you’ve done at the end of the day or even at lunch time, but I’m not giving you anything before nothing has been done.” He and his helper tried to talk me into it, round and round and round. I am not the girl to be fucked with. I told them, “I’m leaving to take my girls to day care, you’re making me late, you can either cut the tree down or not, but you’re not getting any money before no work has been done,” and I closed the door.

I wondered if when I got home if they would be there. Before I left with the girls I made sure all the doors and windows were closed and locked, and when I returned home later that afternoon from work they weren’t there, but OUR ladder that they took from the side of the house was propped up against the tree. Okayyy…..

Another week rolled around, I figured the tree wasn’t getting cut down. I got another phone call a few days later letting me know that he would be coming by in a couple days to do the work. Yeah yeah yeah. But then he actually showed up. Surprise! He had another guy with him and told me about how he had been in the hospital, and in a separate incident also fired the other guy who he was working with because he had no idea what he was doing. Whatever. Are you going to cut the tree down or not? Finally, they actually got started. I had to go to work, but Chris was there for about half the day. He told me that night what a rag tag group it was and how amazing it was to watch these HUGE trunks of tree just drop everywhere as they were cutting it down because they had no idea what was going on. It’s a good thing we aren’t tied to any of the existing landscaping because they definitely destroyed the tree right underneath it and a bush a bit lower down the hill. By the end of the day they had a chainsaw out there cutting the trunk down in smaller pieces. They were still there at 7pm and Chris gave them half the money for cutting the tree down but reserved the rest for when they took away all the debris – the other half of the job

It was cut down, but our driveway got a lot more narrow (Chris can barely squeeze the truck through the opening they left). He said they’d be back in the next couple days to take everything away. Uh huh. No one showed up. Then he called. No one showed up.

Finally, last week when I was driving home from dropping the girls at day care he called and told me his friend was going to, “describe all the details of the necessary events that will need to happen,” and he handed the phone to him. His friend was just like him – really round about way of just giving me 1 single piece of information. He finally spit it out: $1500 to take it all away. I told him to put the other guy back on the phone. I said, “No, that’s not happening. I’m not paying twice as much as the original quote just to get the debris taken away. Please do not do any work and leave.” He said he understood and hung up the phone. I am not the girl to fuck with. Not happening. If he had done even some of the work when he said he was going to I might have haggled him on the price, but more likely just not ended things so abruptly. But, for you to just fuck around the whole entire time and then try to slide over on us and jack up the price: not happening. Not my problem. I wanted him to leave and not do any work because I didn’t want him to claim I owed him any money.

May this be a lesson to all of us: NEVER PAY ANYONE FOR WORK THEY HAVE NOT DONE. NEVER give a contractor or other worker money up front for work that has not been completed. In the state of CA it’s customary to put a deposit down to secure a job, but it cannot exceed 10% of the job’s contract. NEVER make progress payments that are unfair to the client. We have reworked contracts with contractors when we work with clients (and for our own home) to reflect a more fair payment schedule. And if a contractor doesn’t like it, tell them to kick rocks. NEVER be afraid to say no. If a contractor doesn’t want to work with you because you want to be fair with your money, then they aren’t worth working with. You are PAYING them for a service, and they should provide a fair service.

What this guy didn’t know was that this wasn’t my first rodeo.

So, we got our tree cut down for $425, but now we’ve got QUITE the pile to contend with

And yes, those are trucks of the pine tree that have split another tree.

We’ve posted the fire wood (pine makes excellent camp fire wood), and some people have taken it. But I see a run to a green waste facility with our trailer in our near future 🙂

Our Epoxy Painted Garage Floor

September 8, 2016

SO, let’s just get right to it: the garage floor looks really pretty

It was a little more difficult to get there than you might imagine, unfortunately.

This past 3 day weekend while I spent a lot of time working, my step dad CBH came over to help Chris clean the garage. The first step in getting the floor painted was a super masterful cleaning job. CBH – in all of his OCD glory – was just about the best person you could ask for to help out on this task. A really, really good cleaning is necessary to make sure that the epoxy paint is going to adhere properly to the concrete surface.

Part of this process meant that alllllll the tools had to be stored outside. Which was slightly terrifying

The garage needed to be all cleared out, and that meant that our front porch and driveway was crammed with many dollars worth of tools. They were outside for about 3 nights – it was nerve wracking to hope that things were okay, but necessary.

CBH and Chris cleaned things on Sunday. They needed to dry fully overnight before we could paint. Monday I was back at work, but before I left early that morning I took care of the girls while Chris painted. We used this product. We had high hopes for things, but pretty early on Chris wasn’t entirely thrilled with how things were going. It’s a fairly simple process of painting it on and then tossing on some flecks on top of it. Which Zoe thought was awesome

But it wasn’t that easy. It was very streaky, almost looked oily and didn’t seem to be going on even. It’s an epoxy that should fill in a little bit of the un-evenness of things.

I was busy tending to wild and crazy children and then running out the door late for work, so I didn’t really get to see how things were looking. Instead, while I was at work Chris and I were texting back and forth. He wasn’t happy for the above mentioned reasons. I tried to point out that while we both have incredibly high expectations for ourselves, it is also going to be a dirty and very used space, do if it wasn’t 100%, it was okay. I also, however, VERY MUCH understand the feeling of wanting things to look and feel good. The biggest thing we learned with our Picardy house is that – when you really care about something – take the extra step to make sure that you’re doing it right. There are things we wish had done at Picardy that we were too lazy, or tired, or frustrated to complete 100% the way we wanted to. We got to like 90%, and that was good enough at the time. Later, we really wished we had gone that extra 10%. So I told that to Chris: if we needed to spend an extra night, or day, or week to take an extra step to make sure that we were completing it up to the standard that we were expecting it to be, than we should make sure we do that.

So after the girls went to bed, we painted another coat

In hindsight Chris wishes he would have picked a different product because after our experience he looked at a lot of info online and MANY people had the same problem. That’s not to say he didn’t do his research beforehand (this man loves his research and message boards), but after he had this problem he looked up the same problem online and saw that it was a fairly common shared experience (in fact, Chris wrote a review about it on Home Depot’s website and THEY REMOVED IT). The good news is that with the second coat the epoxy had a chance to fill things in better, it’s not as streaky, it’s not as uneven in its finish and it’s not as oily looking. Now, to the naked eye, it looks pretty great, it’s really only when you get up close that you see the imperfections

It’s not perfect, but you know what, it’s a garage space that is going to be used A LOT. It’s going to get dirty, it’s going to get messy, it’s going to get imperfect. So it’s okay. Is it as good as we wanted? You know, it’s not all the way there, but it is great. Sometimes things aren’t perfect, and that’s alright too.

And it’s easy to move on once you start moving things in

Things aren’t looking too shabby, right?! Yay!

Here, There and Everywhere

September 6, 2016

We’ve been a little all over the place the last week or so. I feel like this happens sometimes – there is a lot of work to be done all over the place and we both can’t completely focus and we’re too excited. We like getting lots of stuff done, but at the moment it’s like frantic progress. I wish we could somehow take a month off from work to work on the house. Don’t we all wish that? I wish we also win about a million buck so we could complete a ton of other projects. Don’t we all wish THAT?! 🙂 But alas, there is real life to contend with.

In the meantime though, while dealing with real life, we have managed to get some stuff done, none worthy of a post all on it’s on, so I’ll just throw in a collage of mini doings today.

We got the lights hung up on the porch! About a week ago we were testing to see where we wanted them to hang

(clearly we need to make a dump run because this is the trash that is overflowing from not being able to fit in our trailer)

If you remember we were waiting on new glass to replace all the broken glass that came with the lights. Once that came we sat on the lights for about 2 weeks before we did anything. But we found a spare 3 minutes while the girls were playing with each other and ran outside to see how high we should hang them. We got lanterns, but we didn’t want them to hang too far down because one of the lights will hang right in the middle of the walkway to the side of the house. We agreed that two additional links on the chain would be perfect and over this 3 day weekend while I was away for 2 days and 1 evening at work for the A’s, Chris was able knock out hanging them

They look AWESOME! We got the recessed lights in the porch replaced as well with new LED bulbs and trim kits that we painted to try and match the stain on the ceiling. We’re still waiting on those new doors though, DAMNIT! Believe me, I WANT TO DO THE HOUSE REVEAL, so hopefully those new doors come soooooooon and we can get them replaced, and painted and FINALLY do the Before & After of the exterior paint job. PLEASE. I’m probably more annoyed than you are that’s it’s taking so damn long. I want to check an item off the list! I also really want bright, happy green doors to welcome me into my home each day.

Chris has also been working away diligently on the garage. Last we left off the plywood was almost up on all the walls

Since then he’s finished the plywood and even gotten the sink in! Remember these sinks?

We got these salvage many months ago (both for $150). The bottom one went downstairs in the big room as our utility sink in our laundry area, and the other has been sitting in our driveway for – no lie – about 4 months. But not anymore!

Chris really wanted a sink in the garage so he worked on bringing water and a drain line over and built a super simple 2×4 frame for it. We didn’t need it to be glamorous – it’s a utility sink for a very functional garage/workshop. It took a couple tries of lifting it into place because he had to modify the frame a little bit. But now it’s in place!

Since then the sink has gotten cleaned (holy crap it was dirty from sitting outside for months) and he’s put a coat of paint on the top of the frame to help seal the wood in from water.

We’re also STARTING to get the big room closet redone. I call this the art/office closet

We’ll keep our office materials and all of my art supplies in here. It’s a fucking MESS at the moment and I haven’t been able to unpack any of my art supplies because like so many fucking closets in this house there is practically no storage system in place. Now I know part of why this house was such a mess with shit everywhere when we got it – these people had no place to put anything because their closets had basically no shelves. THAT will be fixed. This is the last closet on my 2016 House Goals to organize.

We need to rip down the ONE shelf and closet rod that’s in here, but then we can install all the standard rails and brackets. THEN I can organize the shit out of everything. That’s my favorite part 🙂

Our Address Label – My Pinterest FAIL

September 1, 2016

About 2 months ago I shared my hunt for the perfect address label. It was hard. And expensive. Well, not actually EXPENSIVE, but I have a hard time paying $20+ for a small number that is about 5″ tall. And because our address has 5 numbers, that would clock in at over $100. That just seems ridiculous to me. In all of my hunting I found this and thought it was awesome

from here

I was super excited about the idea and finally found time about a week ago to get started. The awesome part about this idea is that I could go with any style of lettering I wanted. Because of the style of our house’s construction (Chris’s mom and I were talking last weekend and we defined is as a “Mission inspired, mid-century modern-ish California ranch,”) I wanted to go with something both clean and stylized. Here are the fonts I liked

There were elements of each one that I liked, but all together my favorite was the second one down. What sold me was the shape of the “0” and the curve of the “2.” I also liked that the “4” was more solid.

With the font figured out I decided to make the size of each letter 5″. I printed out all the letters with Merritt’s help…

…and got to work placing them on the outside of the house. I knew I wouldn’t like them lined right up against the eaves, but I started there to give me an idea of how much further down I wanted to move them

You might be getting slightly excited about those doors – but they’re still the old ones with all the gaps in the stiles. Hopefully we get the new ones sooooooon (at which point they’ll take back the old ones which have now been safely stored in our garage). But back to the address label…

Both Chris and I thought it should shift down about 8″ or so

After I got the placement down I selected my nails. We thought nails would be easier to work with than screws and I selected ring shank stainless steel nails (so they wouldn’t rust and drip all down the post and so they held into the post well after being nailed in). Once the nails were chosen, I got to work

My goal was to keep things grid like, organized and neat with as equal spacing as I could manage

I’m not going to lie, it was actually kind of fun for my brain to do this. I used to draw graphic patterns on shoes with a Sharpie and things like this are a great mind relaxer for me. So I just tap tap tapped away. After about 2 rounds – one of 25 minutes and the other of about 40 I got through the “1” and 1/3 or so through the “0.” How did they look!? Awful

Chris thought so too. Neither of us were a fan. It wasn’t 100% perfect – which nothing ever really is. But it was also pretty far from 100%, and when it’s a fine lined grid like that, something that’s about 70% looks like shit. And that’s how we both felt. Here’s what we didn’t like about it:

It was extremely difficult to get the amount of individual nails banged in exactly the same on every nail
If the angle of the nail going into the wood was slightly off, it made everything look like it was leaning
The grid, ohhh the grid. It was hard to keep everything so straight. And even if I thought I was doing it, 1/2 a centimeter off made it look very wonky
Imperfections in the wood made nailing difficult – for example if I hit a tougher spot on the wood like a knot, I had to be prepared to go to battle: Meryl and hammer vs. knot was a tricky tricky thing on such a small area

So what did we do?

I ripped it all out 🙂 In the end it wasted probably 90 minutes all together and only a $10 box of nails. So it wasn’t a huge investment, and better to learn now. But, we also realized we were back to square 1. THEN I remembered what we were thinking about doing for our address label up by the street when we put a new one and a new mailbox up there

from here

We really liked this idea, but would come across the same adventure with the address numbers, so we had actually brainstormed that we would like to have the letters punched out of the metal. And we thought it would be cool to carry on the same idea on our porch! We won’t have the succulent planter included – we liked that the address label up by the street would tie in with our succulent garden down by the house, but didn’t feel the need to outright duplicate the same thing in two places. Instead, the one on the porch will just be the metal frame with the letters punched out, mounted on our post. We like the idea of using a metal that will rust or patina, however, so it doesn’t damage the porch we will treat it so it rusts faster, than seal it with a varnish, then mount it. What do you think!? I’m rather liking this idea that our Pinterest fail spawned.

Trailer Park Gang

August 29, 2016

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know we accumulate a lot of trash

Like, all the time. All the trash. All the time. Constantly renovating your own house and constantly working on other people’s houses means that there is ALWAYS trash. And because when Chris put together his plan to organize his truck, we don’t actually have a full bed to haul stuff to the dump. We’ve got about half a bed

And a lot of times the people at the dump still charge us for a full load, even though tell and show that we’ve only got half a load. So we get charged for double what we actually have, and we can’t actually fit very much. Which means the garbage never really actually goes away. The pile just gets smaller. But not too small. Always big enough to still make us feel like hoarders.

We decided it was finally time to get a trailer. At the new house Chris and I both park our cars in the driveway. This leaves the street in front of our house wide open for space for a trailer. And luckily in our neighborhood there are a lot of people storing trailers, RVs, boats, etc., so it’s not a totally strange thing to have. Chris found a fairly large place a few towns away that had a very large selection of trailers. He settled on one that was smaller (5 x 8 – in hindsight he wishes he’d gotten one a bit bigger), and had a hydraulic lift so that when we take it to the dump you just press a button that says “up” and all that shit pours out for you, awesome.

We actually got the trailer a couple months ago and I just haven’t blogged about it yet, because, well, I’m lame. The day we got it, it rolled down the driveway to take a load o shit to the dump – right to work! It’s definitely taken some getting used to to maneuver it because it’s a large load attached to the back of our already large truck. But it’s handy as shit

What we quickly realized after a couple loads though is that could use even more space 🙂

So Chris bought redwood 2×4’s and 2×6’s to extend the walls of the trailer higher up so we could load more. He decided to get redwood because it’s obviously a great outdoor building material that can weather a storm, but redwood lumber these days isn’t what it used to be, do he also elected to seal with a solid stain to make it last longer

And once he and Zoe had finished painting them he built the walls higher up so we could fit about 40% more

It’s pretty awesome, I gotta say

And it’s still open in the back which makes my 5’4″ self happy because I can still easily sling trash into it

And with it up on the street it makes it easy for Chris to unload trash from his truck into the trailer before he backs up into the driveway. It also makes it easier to hitch it to the truck when it’s time to take a load.

I’m SUPER happy we splurged and got this. It’s incredibly useful for us – saves MANY trips to the dump and will over time save us money because we’ll actually be paying for a legitimate full load. Hooray for less trash!!! 🙂

Shades for our Giant Windows

August 24, 2016

Ummmm, it’s been a while since we got these shades, so maybe I should blog about it?

If you don’t remember, we have a long string of windows along the back of our house

I LOVE these windows. It was a huge draw when we first saw the those. It’s amazing that there is so much privacy because living within the city limits of a major city and to literally have no neighbors in the back of your house that can see you is a luxury that we know we’re lucky to have. And that view is awesome

But the sun in the morning is blinding. It’s not absolutely terrible now with the long days (the sun has risen by the time we’re all hanging out in here), but come winter with later morning sunrises, that sunshine is BRIGHT.

We thought a lot about what kinds of shades we wanted on the windows. We did a few Roman shades at Picardy, but we actually weren’t super into them by the time we left. Chris and I are a little lazy when it comes to shades: I want them open or closed, I don’t want to have to fuck with them. I know that sounds really lazy – but I didn’t like that I needed to supervise the Roman shade going up – I always had to make sure it was folding properly as I was raising it and fold and tuck along as it went. Our goal with these windows is to make them AS EASY AS POSSIBLE TO OPEN AND CLOSE. We’ll want to be able to really take advantage of the view and privacy as much as possible. But we also want to easily block out that rising sun if need be. And also, there’s a window in the dining area that faces the TV and during the day the glare is so bad you basically cannot see the TV. That window shade we figure will be down most of the time.

All together there were 10 windows that needed shades: 2 in the dining area, 3 along the wall in the living room at the back of the house, 3 along the wall in the living room at the front of the house and 2 more in the hallway. Certainly we didn’t have to do all these windows at once, but we wanted them to all look the same and sometimes products, patterns or colors get discontinued, so we figured it would be a smart decision to get them all at the same time.

We thought about a lot of options – making curtains ourselves, getting fabric shades custom made with fabric of our choice, or getting shades from some big box place. We weighed our preferences and our budget and settled on roller shades from a big box. First we went to HD, but compared their prices to Blinds.com (no sponsorship, just full disclosure) and found them to almost be 2/3 of the price for the identical product. Yes please I’ll save money.

First up was that we ordered free samples of the fabric we were interested in (it’s been a while since we did this, but I think you got up to 10 for free)

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I had thought I’d like white, but I picked a couple dark ones to switch things up and some that I thought had texture to them but instead they were just an awful print. I didn’t like a lot of the whites because they felt plastic-y. And surprisingly Chris and I were both drawn to some of the darker ones. In the end, this was our panel of finalists

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I was a little intimidated to pick something so out of my comfort zone by going with the dark one that we both liked the best: I always like white blinds. So obviously I went to Pinterest

Roller shades are a modern window look - go as minimal, organic or upscale as you like. Starting at $89.:

from here

I actually liked the lighter walls with the darker shades a lot, so Chris and i went for it: Signature Blackout Rocklin Pewter it was!

The next step was measuring all 10 windows and then placing our order. It took about 2 weeks for the shades to come and they were actually a little bit more difficult to install than I thought they’d be

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There was some swearing involved. But eventually we got them all installed with the exception of one that we slightly miss measured. The good news with Blinds.com is that you’re permitted to remeasure and reorder blinds at no cost (up to a certain amount of times) if you made the same bozo mistake like we did ? So we measured again, ordered again, waited again. And then they came! We got that last one in pretty easily, and with that all our windows were covered

I am happy to report that the shades are awesome. I love how easily they open and close. And we do open and close then frequently. The good news is that we still leave them open most of the time, but when it’s BRIGHT sunlight, it’s nice that they’re easily pulled down a bit.

I’m also very happy with the color of the shade. I was nervous to go so dark, but it’s a nice difference – a jump from what I’d normally pick for myself and I’m happy with the choice. We both don’t like that you can see the roller mechanism, but buying the valance with the window tacked on a hefty price, so we decided we’d build our own valances later.

All in all it was money we didn’t intend on spending so early, but I think it was well spent. We bought all the shades while they were having a sale and all 10 clocked in at about $1,000. Not a small amount of money, but honestly not terrible for 10 windows, 5 of which are 6+ feet tall and two of which are also about 6 feet wide.

Garage Progress!

August 22, 2016

It’s been a while since I posted about the garage. So let’s get to it.

Right before we moved in we got the concrete poured for a new slab because the old one was hurting pretty bad

Since then we’ve been really slowly working on it. Which sucks because we’re always going in there to look for tools for working on our own house as well as working on other people’s houses. Not to mention we have a few clients who want us to build things for them, and well, we’ve got absolutely no room for that.

When our house was getting primed our painter so generously offered to prime the ceiling of the garage which was pretty awesome because it was light sucking dark brown drywall. It took two coats and there was still yellow bleeding through, but it was a great improvement. Once we get lights up the white ceiling will be a much better reflector of light than the terrible brown it once was.

Two weeks ago while family was here for our work party i made sure to make it a priority to make some progress on the space. Chris had already wired for a shit ton of outlets, but we still needed to get plywood up on the walls. Before we were able to get to that we went through almost every stud bay on the outside wall and put in blocking at the bottom so we would have something to nail the plywood to. Once that was done we got to hanging the plywood

It was a little slow going because there were plentiful outlets, lots of windows, the doghouse to cut around and all sorts of other obstacles. I helped in the morning, but around lunchtime and afternoon it was just Chris and my dad working along. By the end of the day 2 of the 3 walls were done (the 4th is the garage door). Over the last 2 weeks Chris has wired in many of the outlets and cleaned up a lot of the third wall (installing nail plates, set up the plumbing for the future sink, remove the old sub panel). Then yesterday morning Chris’s mom took the girls for an outing so we were able to knock out a chunk of work. We intend on having no door from the garage to the kitchen (more work space for both the garage and the kitchen), so Chris removed the door and framing for it

While he did this I got motivated to remove another kitchen item: the peninsula cabinet. Back when I posted about hating the kitchen, many of you had some wonderful suggestions. We’ve removed all the upper doors because they never stayed closed and although I’d taken everything out of the upper peninsula cabinet, I hadn’t taken it down yet. Until yesterday! It took some muscle and a little longer than I thought, but having this cabinet down is a HUGE improvement

And now

Like? I looooove. I still hate this fucking kitchen, but having this space open is a nice bandaid for the time being.

Back to the garage. With the door out Chris added framing for the new plywood wall and I helped hold up the plywood while he nailed it in. By nap time we weren’t done by any means, but things were looking a LOT better

Wanna know something that’s sitting in our garage? Our doors!!!!

But that’s where the good news ends. Shortly after we got the doors delivered last week we noticed there was some separation in some of the stiles

I’m aware that it’s hard to make things perfect, but this is egregious. Even the hardware store acknowledged it. So we took pictures and they sent them to the manufacturer. The news came back over the weekend that they would manufacturer new doors for us and rush them (there were about 8 stile joints that were called out, a pretty large percentage for large gaps). It’s a little annoying that they weren’t constructed with better quality control the first time around, but the good news is that we’re getting ones that are built with more attention to detail. Hopefully with the rush it will take less than 7 weeks. Let us all pray.

Our Succulent Garden

August 17, 2016

The wonderful news is that Monday afternoon we finally got the call that our doors have arrived! And yesterday morning the truck dropped them off at our house!!! Now we just have to find the time to install them. Then find the time to seal them. Then find the time to paint them… But they’re here!!! AND our last light arrived on Saturday, woo-hoo! And the replacement glass arrived yesterday. Yay!!!! PROGRESS!

So with that progress and the prospect of a before and after looming I decided it was finally time to plant our succulent garden in the front. When we first moved in, the house looked like this

And as you know we posted the palms on Craigslist and they got taken away for free, hooray! But then, like so many things around the house, the front planting bed sat only partially worked on for months. Until Saturday, woo-hoo! I was supposed to hang out with my mom Saturday morning with the girls, but plans got shifted around a little bit and she ended up not being able to frolic with us, so I decided to take the girls to Annie’s Annuals. Who knew going to a nursery could provide so much entertainment for small kiddos?

Merritt of course was incredibly handsy and tried to rip everything apart. She finally got obsessed with one particular succulent so I decided to just let her destroy that one and keep her off all the others. The employees chuckled when we purchased it, but I didn’t want to have my 1 year old hack the shit out of a plant and then leave it for them to deal with.

I didn’t really have a specific plan about which ones I wanted in particular, we just wandered up and down their 10-12 aisles of succulents and picked ones that looked pretty awesome and some that were also pretty cheap 🙂 I want this planting bed to be beautiful, but I also didn’t want to spend a shit ton of money.

When we got to the end Zoe took a liking to one of the workers and wanted to help him count things up. Merritt joined in on the action and helped hand off the plants. It was pretty adorable

When we were walking to the car Zoe asked, “Why do me and Emmett love each other?” (that was the employee’s name.) I just about died of adorableness.

When we got home it was time to work on digging the planting beds out. In the pest report there was some drainage issue that was called out in this area of the lower floor’s foundation and we were thinking that we wanted to weather proof the planting beds

Of course this was a job for the three of us (apparently it’s kind of difficult to keep a 1 year old from eating dirt)

I dug for about an hour with Zoe and Merritt’s help, and then another 30-60 minutes at nap/quiet time

I wasn’t coming close to any bottom, but I was hitting the house’s foundation on the left side in the above picture. When Chris got home from work we went out to the front and checked things out. We resolved (after all that digging) that the water penetration issue must actually be from the front of the house not having any gutters or downspouts. Water from about 1/3 of the roof pours off the front of the house and then DIRECTLY into this planting bed. There is no waterproofing so it seeps down into the foundation – not a good thing. We had thought we would weather proof the planting bed, but it didn’t appear to have a bottom anywhere near where I was. We resolved that we would just put our gutters on the house sooner rather than later and this would divert the water and hopefully eliminate the water issue. It’s already been on our to do list, but this will just make us do it a little sooner rather than later. It’s difficult to understand why they never put gutters anywhere on the house, but luckily it will have some soon!

So after all that digging Saturday I woke up at 5:45 on Sunday and decided to shovel all the dirt BACK into the planting beds and get it ready for planting

I added pumice to the soil (as advised by Annie’s) and mixed it in. After that I laid out all our succulents (I got all of these for $188)

I wanted to add some sort of weed blocking element before planting. In all of our gardening experience we have found cardboard to be the best weed block. I fucking HATE all weed block fabric and have never found one that actually works for longer than 6 months. We used specific landscape cardboard in our front yard at Picardy and it was awesome. 3-4 years later we still really had very little weeds. I could not recommend cardboard as a weed block more. The unfortunate thing is that a roll can be a tad pricey, but luckily we get A LOT of boxes delivered to our house

Between purchasing materials for various jobs for work, going to Costco, and buying tools we are never short on cardboard boxes. So I decided to save these for a while to use as weed block 🙂 It’s a little unsightly, so I also took the opportunity to break down the ones we didn’t use into a much smaller pile so our neighbors don’t hate us as much (although the nice thing about where we live now is that our house is set back more from the street and there are only 7 houses on the street so we get a lot less traffic). I broke down some smaller boxes and laid them out in the planting beds

Classy fruit snack weed block 🙂

I cut out holes for each plant and then got all 26 succulents into the ground. Then Zoe wanted to help me water

By this time it was about 9:50am and I had to leave for work at the A’s at 10:15, so it was time to take a shower, make my lunch and head out. But we still had the rocks to buy. On Monday I went to a newer landscape place in Oakland for us (we go to Larm’s a lot, but they can be a little frustrating to deal with and some of their products are over priced). I checked out what they had in terms of rocks and settle on Pea Gravel. I also asked about their pricing on pavers and various other landscape materials (we’ll pave a patio area in the backyard in 1-15 years 🙂 heheheehe). They were SUPER nice and incredibly helpful and had really good prices, so I would really recommend Oakland Landscape Supply if you’re local. I was hoping we’d get the rocks picked up this week so we could check the progress off the list (I don’t want another partially completed project on my hands…) but we haven’t had the time yet Monday or Tuesday. HOPEFULLY today or tomorrow we’ll be able to pick them up and get this project done!

Our Bedroom Closet! Be Still my Heart!

August 15, 2016

Our bedroom closets have sat like this for 3 months

Just patiently waiting to be organized. Why have they been waiting so long? Well, there’s a giant gap between the top of each cabinet and the ceiling, and I wanted to give the units a more built in look by adding some molding. We had to figure out which molding to use (very, very simple – we looked at what they used in the kitchen where the cabinets are original and will match that closely), so we would know how high to build them up off of the ground. And well, we’ve got a bunch of other stuff going on, so this wasn’t a priority. But I finally silently got frustrated enough that when we had our work party two weekends ago Chris showed me how to use our new Kreg Pocket Hole Machine (it’s awesome)

Chris hadn’t used it before either and bought it for a couple jobs for work we have lined up to make life easier (it’s amazing what having the right tool does…) It took about 3 minutes to figure it out, and after that I used it to drill out pocket holes into 2×4’s to build an extremely simple 2×4 frame that we would have the Ikea Pax units sit on top of to make them high enough for our molding. It took me about 30 minutes to get 2 of these constructed

Then we brought them into the bedroom and while Chris lifted the cabinets, I slid them underneath

NOT quite ready yet for organizing… At the end of last week Chris got those babies attached to the wall, and THEN it was time to organize! But of course my mind was on other projects. Like our succulent garden. Because that always makes sense

I wish I had finished it this past weekend, but we still need to add the rocks (it was a pretty busy Saturday and Sunday so despite waking up at 6am and working on it before I went to work at the A’s for the day at 10, we didn’t quite get it all done). But back to those cabinets! Yesterday afternoon after I got home from work it was time to organize the shit out of those suckers! There were still a couple things we needed to build, but mostly it was all about assembly. And naturally the children assisted

Things were looking pretty good

It took about 3 hours to get it all finally assembled. I had the plan printed out, but there was fine tuning and shifting things around. It definitely took longer than when we do it for clients, but I REALLY wanted to make sure things were exactly laid out as I wanted. So after that 3 hours I had a beautiful blank slate to get things organized!

Over the next 90 or so minutes I brought all the clothes out from the various places they are stored: the existing closet, the cabinet in the bathroom and my dresser in the big room and put things away very particularly. I really wanted things to be perfect and laid out in a way that made sense and how I would use them. I LOVE organizing like this and it was even more exciting than normal to work on it because I hate our existing closet so much and I have to go to several different rooms to pick my clothes out. After 90 minutes…. ta da!

There is still so much room!!! I was worried not everything would quite fit. But we have plenty of room and even some extra space. Ahhhhhhh, it was so nice to fall asleep looking at that 🙂

The left cabinet is my clothes

Along the top I have my very infrequently worn shoes (dress shoes, tennis shoes I don’t wear much and some of Chris’s infrequently worn shoes). The long hanging rod is my every day clothes organized into 2 sections: on the right are all of my tank tops. I have a long torso and a lot of times in regular shirts a little strip of my belly will show if I reach my arms up at all. I’m pretty modest about my body, so I always wear a tank top underneath so that doesn’t happen as much. Then on the left are all of my shirts in color and then sleeve length order, because, DUH 🙂 The shelf right below are my most frequently worn Converse – I wear Converse alllll the time. I’m basically a walking Converse or Nike ad, they’re basically the only shoes I wear (I’ve got really long and skinny feet) In all the drawers are my underwear, socks, sports bras, belts, pajamas, swimsuits…. all that fun stuff. All that used to be in my dresser in the big room, so it’s awesome to have it all in here now. The right full length is obviously dresses and then the shelves right below that are more shoes that I wear pretty frequently. The shelves are 2 shoes deep, so I can fit 8 pairs of shoes in these two shelves

On the right are Chris’s clothes and more of my clothes

On the left are his dress clothes (which he might wear something of about 3 times a year. In the 11 years we’ve been together I’ve seen him wear a tie 3 times). The shelf below are his sweatshirts and the drawers below are my workout clothes. On the right top shelf are extra work shirts of ours, the closet rod are his frequently worn non-work shirts and the shelves below are my pants). The very bottom shelf are my work clothes. Our bed has drawers in it and that’s where Chris’s socks, boxers, work pants/shirts are (he wears those every day). Ahhh, it’s so beautiful

We still have to get doors for it, but I’ll still sigh sweet sighs of beauty while staring at this. And so happy that I don’t have to stare at this anymore

The dungeon closet is no more! And my shoes will hopefully stay more organized because Zoe can’t easily get to them and wear them all over the house 🙂

Hooray for organization!!! 🙂