Tearing down walls

Zach and I decided to jump right in and tackle two of the biggest projects we have planned: replace all the carpet with wood laminate, and tear down part of the wall connecting the kitchen to the dining room, to make the opening bigger and better accomodate our side-by-side fridge.

I ripped up all of the carpeting and tack strip in the formal living/dining yesterday, while Zach got to work on the kitchen wall. Before, it was a standard sized doorway with a pocket door.

 You can see in the picture below how the freezer door opens up into the wall.

Zach, looking somewhat deranged, and demonstrating his new reciprocating saw, which we bought on Craigslist for 15 bucks!

So far Zach has removed the pocket door and trim and widened the doorway by several inches. Once the doorway is trimmed out, we'll be able to start laying the flooring.

Our New Home

Our new home! It's a colonial style 3 bedroom 2 bath built in the 1960s.

I managed to take a few before photos while we were unloading the truck.

Dining room (view from the formal living, which will be our home office)

Kitchen

 Breakfast nook

 

Living room

Hall bath

Master bedroom

Master bath

My mom  hard at work cleaning our bathroom. Thanks mom!

Second bedroom

Third bedroom

Now back to cleaning and unpacking...

Moving Day

Our living room last week. (Dressed up for one last date night in Austin).

Enter our wonderful friends...

who helped turn our box-filled home into this:

 Our empty living room and confused kitty. So sad.

We'll be posting pictures of our new house soon...

Farewell

Our good friends Matt and Kelli threw us a going away party Friday night.

I created special party favors for the guests, with a nod to Zach's future career as a pharmacist:

Don't worry, those aren't prescription drugs, just over-the-counter candy.

I posted a wanted add on Craigslist for empty Rx bottles and ended up with a box full of free bottles. After soaking them in water to remove the labels, I soaked them in bleach water, followed up by a wash in warm soapy water. After they dried, I  filled them with a variety of candy, including Mike and Ike, Good and Plenty, and Sweet Tarts. Good and Plenty looks the most convincing, especially when you sort out the colors.

I printed out labels with our new address and contact information, including a QR code that links to our blog. Zach created the code using this website. The directions read "Call or visit as needed".

Note of caution: if you post an add for pill bottles on craigslist you just might be contacted by someone looking for drugs.

Sold

Image source

After only 11 days on the market, we got an offer on our house! God has really blessed us in a big way, and the timing couldn't be more perfect. We'll be saying goodbye to Austin in a few short weeks and moving to Houston. We'll share some photos of our new house as soon as it's officially ours. And of course, a new house means new projects!

NPunnieR

Much to his surprise, my friend Brian heard my voice coming through his radio this morning on NPR. Since he actually came out to see me yesterday it must have a been a National Peer Repeated sound bite at breakfast.

You can also listen to it on NPR's website.

Pun Off Video

My stomach got TYPED up in knots and I knew the KEY: BOARD myself up in the bathroom...but things took a fieRE TURN for the worse. When TEXT-mex went EN, TURds came out with a QWERTY smelling FUNK SHUNning away all my friends TILDE started taking SHIFTs to be near me. My twelve friends, I’ll call ‘em F1 through F12, were keeping TABs on me, AM-PERSANDly, only a few cared while the rest stared out the WINDOWS KEY because they’re just CHAR ACTERs.
My sister cruelly said  “Go see Doctor Mark. Your nasty VOWELS are all CONSONATED”
CURS OR ARROW of a tongue “Don’t give me anY LIP SIS” but I went anyway.
“I’ve got a QUESTION MARK, can you fix my BACK SLASHing gut pain?
He said with EXCLAMATION, “POINT to where it hurts!”
“This BACK SPACE here”
“Lean FORWARD, SLASH that, just COMMAND get on the table”
Nurse Paige took an imPRINT, SCREENing my stomach.
He told her “PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN” to move the scanner.
“Your bowel flow is UNDER SCORE for your age.”
Suddenly his fingers made a DASH for MINUS and in a second they’re sooo HYPHEN there.
Quickly my knee CAPS LOCKed up and senses went dead, a NUM LOCK if you will.
“You have a rotten CARET and a PEAR IN THE SEAS of your COLON. Additionally your oozing PLUS. Under these CIRCUMFLEXES, you’re ASTERISK for a SEMI-COLON. You must restart your bowels, to get things under CONTROL, ALT DELETE the blockage by inducing a COMMA and INSERTing this SPACE BAR to open things up. Where you’re AT, SIGN up for a return visit”
“Give me a QUOTATION, MARK, on the price”
“From one PERCENT to another, you can’t take anY QUALs this close. Don’t think about the DOLLAR! SIGNs indicate that if you don’t put a FULL STOP on POUNDing away all that HASH, you might get a PERIOD. If you slow down your habits I’ll award you with APOSTROPHE and you’ll be SCROLL LOCKING through the hills before you know it.”