Shannon's Room

I finally finished painting Shannon's room and putting up the princess stickers. I must say, it is a little girl's dream room.
Before:After:The curtains, tent, and bedspread were all gifts, so I really didn't even spend that much money. I bought the stickers and the night light (it's the pink carriage thing on top of the armoire) at amazon.com. Pretty fun!

Windows and Floors

Admittedly, the window pictures don't do justice to the actual improvement, but you get the point. We had 5 windows replaced and they look so much better! This first one is our front window. We replaced it because it was one of those storm windows from the 1970s that is terribly inefficient. Also, the thought of removing the huge storm window on the outside in order to clean it was very scary!

Before:After: The kitchen was one of the worst windows. We got cold just walking by it and it fogged up all the time.

Before:
After:

The window in the den had a crack all the way across the right pane and a hole from a BB gun on the outside of the left pane.

Before: After:

The window in Shannon's room is one of 6 windows of the same type. They are wooden, double hung, and I believe original to the house (built in 1955). Hers was missing the pane on the outside and was painted shut.

Before:
After:

Our bedroom was missing the bottom pane on the inside and the outside pane rattled whenever we walked into the room. It was also very difficult to open.

Before:

After: There were 4 tiles on our kitchen floor that weren't attached to anything. The grout was long gone, so they moved around all over the place. Here is what it looked like before:You can kind of see pine needles and other garbage in the cracks where the grout should have been. I lifted those 4 tiles and cleaned the floor, then ended up removing 5 more tiles around them that were pretty loose. Here is what that looked like:
I spent 3 hours scraping the old cement off of the floor and trying to get it as smooth as I could. I had the dust all over me when I read the instructions on the new bag of cement that said it causes cancer. Awesome. I put 5 screws into the subfloor where it was uneven, and got it pretty flat. The rest was easy. Here is the finished product: Whoever put down the tile floor in the first place didn't do a very good job and they obviously didn't use spacers, so I did the best I could, but they are still a little crooked. Nothing we can do about that unless we take up the whole floor (which, eventually, is probably going to happen--I don't love tile!) Now I need to scrub the grout around it and get it all sealed so that I won't have to scrub it anymore!

Christmas 2009

We had a great Christmas this year. We decided to stay in our own house (since we have one now!) and just enjoy our little family. It was the tradition in my family to put on a little play for our parents every Christmas Eve. I practiced a song with Shannon, but of course she didn't want to do it. This is about all we got out of her for her first Christmas program:


We got up at around 8:00 Christmas morning (I know! The kids actually slept in!) and here is what we found:


I must have run out of memory or something, because this is all I got of the girls opening presents:

Zoo Lights

I didn't realize that I was so behind on posting, but I am! Back on the 18th of December we were able to go with a whole bunch of family members to the Hogle Zoo for their annual zoo lights. This is only the 3rd or 4th time they have done this, and it is so fun! It is cold, of course, but if you bundle up and take some hot chocolate it is a really fun night.

(We couldn't resist the Red Robin sign)