Pitter patter of little feet

Last week we noticed some tell tale signs that we had some furry guests back in the house.  Likely relatives of Sneakers who we had to encourage  to move out last year.  We put some anti mouse goodies down over the weekend in the hopes that they would get the hint and leave/die.  Yesterday morning we noticed that something had taken all of it and we had a bit of a mixed reaction. Garret and I are both rather large hearted people, so we don't really like the idea of hurting something, but we aren't really of the "mice can be trapped and released into the wild" mentality either.  We had a moment of silence for the little critters and G made a joke that he feels bad, like we are killing Fievel.

[caption id="attachment_988" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Fievel Mousekewitz adorable mouse with great pipes.[/caption]

I found the image here

We established that we don't want any furry roommates that steal our food and poop in our kitchen so we had to be strong and get rid of them anyway.  We put more stuff down and went to bed.

As I have mentioned before we are sleeping on the couch still while work gets done upstairs. (side note: G finished sealing the floors last night so we can get back to bed sleeping like normal people tonight yay)   Once all the lights were out, G fell asleep in 7 seconds and I lay awake listening to some serious scurrying activities.  Gross.  From the sounds of things they were less Fievel-esque and more like an ROUS:

[caption id="attachment_989" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Rodent of Unusual Size anyone?[/caption]

It makes me MUCH happier to picture their demise when I think of them looking like this. Although it made it harder for me to fall asleep thinking about these guys running around.

 

Purple Teeth and no more Closet

Saturday we went down to Niagara to celebrate some 30th birthdays.  Excellent time!  The only downside to visiting many wineries in one afternoon is that it is hard to stay awake past supper.

[caption id="attachment_978" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Slighting boozy smiles with Ashley on the bus[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_979" align="aligncenter" width="388"] My prince Charming and his wine filled glass slipper[/caption]

We went to 6 wineries and had yummy tastings at each one.  G and I bought a few bottles to put in our wine cellar/basement...we laugh because we always have lofty plans of having a bit of a collection, but then the wine mood hits and we break into our stash and that is the end of that.  We managed to rally and make it out for supper, but by the time the gang was heading out to the bar we were both so full of food ready for bed. The Walsh's are a fan of sleep!  Sunday morning we had breakfast with the gang and headed back home to do some work on the house.

Kevin had stayed over on Saturday and finished laying the flooring down in our bedroom.  One step closer to a finished space!  We had also discussed making the linen closet a bit smaller to allow for a bigger nook in our walk in closet.  So we came home to:

[caption id="attachment_980" align="aligncenter" width="388"] a wee doorway for small dogs and house elves to enter our closet[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_981" align="aligncenter" width="388"] G demonstrating the door way[/caption]

Kevin had started cutting it out so he could put flooring all the way through. Glorious, Glorious flooring! Last night G cut out the rest of the wall.  We will be moving the wall back a foot, and then I think building some sort of shelving in the closet for...you guessed it! More storage!  We also spent some quality time at Rona trying to pick out a colour for our bedroom. Originally the plan was white, but then we noticed that there are approximately 200 different shades of white (a less exciting version of 50 shades of Grey perhaps?) The choice ended up being "Risotto" which is a lightly more cream/taupe colour.  As of late we have been pretty pumped with our spur of the moment paint choices so I am hoping that this also works out so well.  Garret has one of his flex days today so he is at home working today...very excited to see what I get to come home to! I love having such a handy hubby. (*side note, first time I have said hubby HA)

One Month Down

And we are:

watching Justified and Hell on Wheels

renovating The entire upstairs of our house

eating a lot of slow cooker meals! (it's fall)

collecting wedding photos from friends and family

celebrating birthdays, holidays (Halloween weeeee)

sleeping on the couch (until renos are done)

living with Kevin while he helps snazz up our house--very interesting to have a roomie and parent living with us for a while!

changing  my last name....taking more time than I thought (answering to said last name is definitely going to take more time!)

cleaning dust off every surface in our home due to the sawing and drilling and sanding

calling each other husband and wife because we are nerds like that and we can.

travelling to Niagara to do wine tours for a friend's birthday

planning our belated Halloween party and the next reno projects to take us through the winter

Renovators or Hoarders?

This past weekend all of my upstairs dreams started coming true! Kevin came on Friday and he and G just super duper busted a move on getting stuff done!  His plan of attack was to fully finish one room at a time (flooring, painting, redoing trim etc) so when we were finished we would have a completed upper floor.  This is a great plan because we were able to stop moving some of the stuff from the second floor to the main floor, so we could maintain some living space for the weekend.  They started with the guest room.  I arrived home from work on Friday to hear a magical conversation---"where shall we put the closet"?  As in, they were building a closet. *heavenly chorus of angels singing here*  So the plan evolved from "let's put down the flooring" to "let's totally finish the upstairs".This is something that I thought we would be working on over the winter, but thanks to two very dedicated hard working Walsh men...it looks like it is going to just take a little over a week!  Adding the closet meant that it took a little bit longer than they originally thought to do the spare room, but having a gorgeous built in closet/more storage upstairs really is oh so worth it. Garret put the finishing touches on the room last night (sealing the floor, painting the trim and one more coat of paint on the walls)  and today Kevin is finishing off the inside of the closet.  The satisfaction will be short lived I am sure as now everything from our bedroom has to get moved into the spare room as they start construction on our room this afternoon!  The added bonus is that we get to have more couch sleepovers and watch TV while we fall asleep.  Still novel and fun..let's see how much longer we enjoy it.

[caption id="attachment_965" align="aligncenter" width="388"] We are trying out for an episode of "Hoarders: The Dining Room edition"[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_966" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Partly done floors and no closet[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_969" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Kevin starting the closet framing[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_970" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Shop Vac'ing off all the dust and wood[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_972" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Our slightly skewed iPhone representation of our most amazing gorgeous spare room[/caption]

G has been really good about taking pictures through the process and with the iPhone panorama ap he was able to get a pretty good view of the whole room. Once we get our furniture back in here it I will post another picture.  We got some gorgeous bedding as a wedding gift and it is going to look gorgeous in here with the new paint (and snazzy floor)

*ed note:  I just was rereading as I posted and noticed I said "gorgeous" about 35 times in this post. Cant help it it's how I feel!

Thank Yous

I ordered our Thank you cards today from Shutterfly.  I am super duper excited for them to come.  I originally wanted to wait for our professional pictures to come back but I also don't want to be writing Thank you cards at the same time as Christmas cards, so I just used some of the best ones from friends and family and got it going. I find Shutterfly really user friendly and it only took me about 10 mins to choose and create what I think is the perfect card for us!  Now onwards to write out about 70 of them. 

Nerd Alert

I have been a bit of a scrapbooking/paper crafting/photo album making fan for many years now. I LOVE having albums to flip through to remember trips and events. I find that too often these days most people's photos just live online.  While I love being able to look at photos on facebook and on our computer, there is nothing like flipping through piles of photos or albums and reminiscing.  The downside of the scrapbook route is that it takes me ages to finally have a complete album. (Or to set time aside to sit down and do it)  In the interest of getting to enjoy our wedding and honeymoon photos sooner than later I decided to get a book printed of all our photos.  I usually procrastinate with this stuff, but I am pleased to say that last night I uploaded and created a book from Blurb that outlines our whole honeymoon.  I can still scrapbook photos later, but in the meantime, by Nov 1st we will have a cool little book in our hot little hands to share. Very very excited to get this in the mail!

Planning the next step

While Garret is worrying about how our old uneven floor is going to cause problems for installing the new floor....I am already starting to think about what we can do next.  As I have complained about countless times before, we have no storage space in our house.  In fact we have a really weird teensy walk in closet in our room and a linen closet in the hall way and that is it.  Storage space is scarce n our parts and we have been trying to think of some creative solutions that also look nice.  My mum came across the below two images which I think would be perfect in some combination in our bedroom

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Snazzy and would match our existing Ikea bedframe[/caption]

sourced from here

And this one which I also really like:

[caption id="attachment_954" align="aligncenter" width="388"] And this I really like because we could display things (nicely and neatly) on the shelves and have other stuff like jewellery, socks, various other needing storage items in the drawers.[/caption]

Sourced from here.

The tricky part with our bedroom is:

1) Our bedroom is pretty small so the shelving on either side wouldn't be able to be too wide

2) The ceiling in our bedroom is slanted (there is no attic over our bedroom so the ceiling sort of follows the pitch of the roof)  Therefore we don't have a ton of height to work with.

So I think we will end up having to fiddle with a few things to get it to work.  G wants to build something himself, but I am trying to convince him that we should start with an Ikea shell and go from there.  There are just so many projects that require our attention around the house that the ones where we can cheat and get it done in an afternoon? I'm all for those.  Plus I have heard that building Ikea furniture together is a really good marital test so hey why not?!

Weekend Travels

Both of G's sweet Grandmas live in nursing homes and were unable to come to our wedding.  We had decided a few months ago that we would dress in our wedding finery and go visit them so they could still see us all dolled up. This past weekend was Grandma Boyce's turn so we headed up to North Bay Friday night and on Saturday we went over with Charlene and her cousin for a visit.  I think that Grandma really enjoyed seeing us dressed up and it was a bit hit for some of the other people in the home as well.

[caption id="attachment_945" align="aligncenter" width="388"] She signed our Guest Book[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_946" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Posed for some pictures with the happy couple[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_947" align="aligncenter" width="388"] I love how this one turned out![/caption]

She noted "Garret you forgot to shave for your wedding". When he asked if she liked it she was very honest and said "yes....and no" We had a good chuckle with her about that.

On our way home we kept up our Walsh ritual of hitting up Weber's.  Honestly we could have just had breakfast and G will insist we stop!  We took a photo because I think this will be our last visit before they close for the season.  (Nerd Alert:  I think that I could make an entire scrapbook just of the Weber's photos we take every year...scary)

[caption id="attachment_948" align="aligncenter" width="388"] First official Walsh family visit[/caption]

An additional highlight this weekend was while we were hanging out on Sunday night our wedding photographer sent us a few photos!  He is still processing and editing them, but he knew how excited I was so he emailed us a little preview.  I CANNOT wait to see the rest.  We were quite fortunate to have a lot of people taking photos that day so we get to have several different views on all the events.  Sigh....I can't believe it was nearly a month ago!

[caption id="attachment_949" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Rocking Rain boots and Umbrella's--best way to combat wedding day rain![/caption]

 

[caption id="attachment_950" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Nearly 5 years later, reliving our first date[/caption]

So all in all it was a lovely, busy, family and friend filled weekend!

Stuffed Pasta Shells

I have wanted to try a recipe like this for ages..in fact I bought shells months ago to make something similar and never got around to it. I am putting it on here so I will feel obligated to try it and let you know if it is any good or not.  I found the recipe here.  As I mentioned yesterday, my father in law is coming to stay for a few days so I need some yummy options for him...he gets suspicious when I try to feed him too much quinoa

It gets worse before it gets better

At least this is what I keep telling myself. (and getting Garret to reassure me with)  Part of our newlywed motivational push had to do with getting stuff done around the house.  We are pretty rejuvenated; riding on the post wedding/honeymoon high, so we have started really  moving forward with all things homey.  Garret fixed the ceiling and finished taping/drywalling/sanding the area in the living room (yay) and we also finally chose and brought home hardwood flooring for upstairs. My father in law is coming over later this week and our project for the rest of the week and weekend is getting our floor installed and finished.  For those of you who haven't been to casa de Walsh, the upstairs is pretty tiny.  A small hallway, two smallish bedrooms and the only closet in the house.  The plus side is that we don't have a lot of space we need to put flooring in, but the down side is we have no shuffle room to put our stuff as we do the floors. So the downstairs of our house looks like the upstairs exploded all over it.  Last night while I made some accidently incredibly spicy soup for dinner, G ripped out a weird shelving unit that the former owners had built into the wall. That has been on the to-do list for over a year, and while it didn't really take up too much space in the hall way, it really looks nice to have it gone.

Tonight we are going to move our dressers, bedside tables etc. downstairs creating a sort of furnishings gauntlet one must walk through to get from the front door to the kitchen. (If you make it in one piece your reward is dinner!) It will be so worthwhile in the end, but thus far has only created frustration as it has lead Garret to once more notice what a book hoarder he married.(He usually doesn't notice the stacks I have on the floor on my side of our bed)  Wish us luck as we embark on this task because neither of us tends to function well when our house/life is really chaotic so this could be an interesting weekend!

A totally un-house related post

One of my oldest and dearest friends has been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for the past three or so years.  She, much like myself and many of my other girlfriends, just assumed that when she and her husband were ready to start their family it would just happen.  Unfortunately due to several issues it turned out that "just happening" was not going to happen for them.  The past few months have been a lot of back and forth with  tests, needles, hormones, waiting, more tests, finding a better doctor, more needles and  more waiting.  The past few weeks she has been giving herself needles to get ready for the procedure that happened over the weekend.  Yesterday she went through her IVF procedure and is now deemed "pregnant until proven otherwise"  I have every extremity crossed (not just my fingers), and am sending prayers and positive energy out into the universe that this works for them.  She has always been one of the most supportive, positive and encouraging people I know, and watching her go through this has been awful.  There is nothing I can say or do that can really help, and I am sure that some of my well meaning comments over the past few years really haven't helped. (and likely have been more insensitive than I knew at the time).  Not having gone through this myself, and not really knowing other people going through this right now, it has been so hard to know what to say.  And when you are broken hearted hearing someone try to cheer you up with cheesy platitudes probably is really annoying.

It likely sounds weird to say that someone deserves a baby, but this friend does.  So anyone that reads this today please send a thought or a prayer out there because this just has to work.  Her belief in the magic of Christmas and her general happy spirit have been so crushed lately and this is the only thing that can bring them back.

Fall To-Dos

It seems that my little house blog took a serious turn for wedding rambling for a while there...now that that is over let me enthral you with our upcoming home reno plans:

Since we took such a time out on the house to focus on summer plans, wedding planning and general non house related life stuff, our home to do plans over the next few months are extensive!  We are both big socializers and seem to always have weekend plans, so we decided to make more time during the week to at least push things forward a little. We can easily allot a few hours after work to painting and other house fixing related tasks. We are also going to try to not book both weekend days with plans for a while, so we have some more time to try to accomplish things.  The past year and a bit in the house has taught us one lesson: everything takes twice as long as you think it will!

We finished our dining room a few months ago (except for the lighting) and we take so much satisfaction out of how nice that room looks.  I want that feeling everywhere else in our home.  So....this weekend we are planning to finish painting the living room ceiling and the walls where we removed the crown moulding (Garret has been skim coating and sanding this week so we should be good to go)  He is DYING to start  the brickwork on the one wall, so that might get kicked off as well.  Once the living room is done we are going to (and not necessarily in this order):

1. Put the trim up on the other side of the door in the downstairs washroom

2. Backsplash in the kitchen. We have been putting WAY too much thought into it, we just need to pick something and go with it.

3. Fix the hole in the ceiling in the kitchen that was cut to change out the wiring.  (it is so small that we keep forgetting it's there, but it would be nice to have that DONE)

4. Paint the staircase and railing.  The top banister requires some serious sanding though, it would appear the previous owner had a beaver who cut his baby teeth on the fop railing.

5. Put a runner down the stairs

6. New light fixture and fix ceiling in entrance hall (maybe this is two separate items?!)

7. Finish painting our room and guest room--we have colours chosen already we just need to get at it

8. Install the new hardwood flooring we bought upstairs (I will be sucking up to my Father in Law tonight to see when he can come help! )

9. Install three new doors upstairs (two bedrooms and the bathroom)  The existing doors are AWFUL.  The guest bedroom door gets stuck all the time, the gap in the bathroom door would be perfect for a peeping tom, and our bedroom door doesn't even close!

There are a billion and one other items on our list, but I feel like this is hefty enough to keep us going for the fall/winter.  I also need to throw in: organize basement and build closet type fake built ins around our bed, but don't let me get ahead of myself! One of my girlfriends might be coming to live with us for a few weeks in October so I feel like getting the guest room sorted out might be the top of our priority list.. I will keep you posted on how things go.

Marital Advising

I have only been back to work for 4 hours and already I have been receiving marital advice out the wazoo.  I found this article on a blog I was reading on my lunch break and I really love the thoughts as the author reflects on 15 years of marriage. I know that different things work for different people, but I like feeling that our marriage is something we need to feed and take care of for it to be successful. I like being a team of 2.   We have been team Shwalsh for a while now, but as we move forward as Team Walsh I want to give our marriage the best chance of survival possible.  Is it weird that while nothing has really changed (except for my last name) in the past few weeks, I am really starting to think differently about things?

Back to Reality

The past two and a half weeks have flown by. Our wedding was everything we could have wanted and more...and it was probably the fastest day in either of our lives. We had a magical surprise honeymoon and at my mum's suggestion took off a few extra days this week just to get our heads out of the clouds. I will do a wedding a honeymoon rundown later this week with a few of the roughly 2 million photos that were taken. The day we got back from our honeymoon our beautiful nephew was born. He was due the day before the wedding but just really wanted to hang in there so we didn't miss anything. Im going to Ok it with my brother first and then will be posting some pictures.

We are definitely still basking in post wedding bliss! G went back to work this morning and I'm home trying to transition our home from summer to fall (I seem to have a ton of dresses but no pants...I recall putting them somewhere in our basement in the spring--the hunt continues) It feels so foreign to be apart today...we have been together everyday for the past while that I find myself lonely today. I thought that I was ready for some time to myself but I think that I just want ONE more day before things go back and our life moves on. Wedded Walsh's our "real" life now begins.