Dec. 18-26, 2010

Even though we were away from home, we couldn't help but build another house in Missouri!

Mike and Grace gluing together the walls

Grace and Sophie making Jolly Rancher windows

Mike's window!

Mmmm, pretty/glowy/tasty windows.

Starburst chimney bricks and Cinnamon Toast Crunch roof shingles.

Tada! Can we live in this house instead?

Nov. 27-Dec. 11, 2010

We've had a lot of big news and big events in the last couple of weekends, so we've been laying low to prepare ourselves for December 17th, the day we start our 3,000 mile roundtrip to Missouri. We will be visiting my family to celebrate my 25th birthday, the announcement of Baby P (official ETA now July 22, 2010!) and Christmas. Fingers crossed we don't run into any big storms along the way!

Nov. 20-21, 2010

Our wedding was truly the best day of our lives! Although the amount and intensity of our projects at home have decreased since summer ended, we have not treated ourselves to a special night/day/minute since 2009 (every spare nickel and dime from 2010 was saved for a downpayment on our house.) Being able to spend two days completely alone together in a cutesy town and cutesy bed and breakfast was probably the most romantic thing we have done in our three years of being together.


Mike and I drove up to North Conway, NH and stayed at The 1785 Inn, where we also had our ceremony. Our room was cute and cozy, the food at the restaurant was EXCEPTIONAL, and the staff was extremely friendly. Here's a couple of photos from our weekend:

A chilly 34 degrees on Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 3:45pm

Michael reading the vows he wrote that morning.

Reading the vows I wrote that morning.

I get a ring!

Mike gets a ring!

It's officially official!

Our first photo as husband and wife (and technically, our first family photo!)

Once the clouds cleared behind us, you could see the summit of Mount Washington.

The 1785 lounge where we had celebratory wedding drinks (a martini for Mike and the best hot choocolate I've ever had in my liiiiiiiiiife!)

This cute little room is where we nursed our food coma after an AMAZING dinner.

Mike and I doing a crossword puzzle the morning after our wedding (already trying to reach that "old married couple" status in under 24 hours!)

A super cute coffee shop full of art in North Conway

We can't wait to go back next year and do it all over again on our first anniversary!

Nov. 13-14, 2010

The bathroom is finished! Well, phase 1 of 50 is finished. Yesterday morning I spackled the walls with the only tool I had available:

Do I have to pay a co-pay for this use?

Thankfully I wasn't doing some sort of "super pro" spackling job in the bathroom.  I mean, I wanted to, but in turn that would have made every other area of the wall look even dumpier than the holes and cracks I was trying to cover up. Not worth going all OCD on walls that need to come down sooner versus later.

So here's the mis-tint paint I purchased a couple of weekends ago.  Note that even though this is a temporary fix, I still had to figure out a color that looked somewhat okay with those snappy yellow and brown tiles, yellow sink, yellow tub, and yellow toilet (barf barf barf!) So with those restrictions, light beige seemed to be the winner.

What says "high class" better than a white lid on a yellow toilet?

In other news, today Mike and I found out that someone else will be joining us at our wedding in the mountains next weekend. Although we didn't exactly send out a formal invitation to Baby Peterson, we certainly are thrilled and equally surprised with his/her RSVP! It looks like my help in our house projects will come to a screeching halt and our priorities will be shifting to prepare for our new arrival in July 2011.

Nov. 6-7, 2010

No projects this weekend; I went to my friend Tania's hometown of Armonk, NY for a fun night of singing, dancing, and a very fun game of Balderdash with her family and friends from home.


But you know what's even better than that? Mike proposing to me this past Tuesday. YEP! He totally and completely surprised me, and it was in a very "Michael" time/place/way of doing things, which made it even better. We plan on getting married, just the two of us, in the mountains before Thanksgiving - I can't wait!

October 30-31, 2010

Happy Halloween from Nails and Whales!

This year marked the first Halloween in our new home, ending my seven-year apartment living streak, and even longer for Mike. We were a touch nervous when about five different neighbors introduced themselves in July with something along the lines of, "Hi new neighbor! We are really happy you moved here! Let us know if you need anything at all....OH! And be prepared for Halloween. We bought 9 bags of candy last year and ran out."

I instantly visualized a swarm of children it pint-size costumes parading down our street, and a rainbow of candy streaming from my bowl into their cute little pumpkin-shaped candy buckets.

Not so much.

Fast forward to last Sunday. You know that feeling you got when you hosted your first party? You told everyone to come at 7:00... it's 7:02 and your are nervously fluffing the chip bowl and incessantly checking your phone to see if anyone's tried to get in touch with you? That's what we looked like. 

All in all, we probably got about 30-40 trick or treaters, which sounds like a decent amount. HOWEVER, I know it's only because our neighbors have a nice, big, new house (you know know, the house where you parents said, "I know we don't know them, but I bet they give out full size candy bars! Go on up and ring the doorbell!")  The part that made me sad is when I watched at least 15-20 kids standing on the street, hesitating to knock on our door, deciding it wasn't worth the candy and running down the street into the night. 

You know that feeling you get the first time you go on a date and he doesn't call you afterwards? It was like that, except for the questions we were asking ourselves were more along the lines of:

"Do you think our house ACTUALLY looks scary?"

"What if the person who lived here before us gave the kids crappy candy?"

"What if the people who lived here before us were really mean and people don't know what they look like and just head about them and think we are them?" 

"Do people think we're just a new set of creepster renters?" 

I don't know the answer to these questions. I'm sure a few of my thoughts were a little over-exaggerated. I'm sure most of of the parents were just being smart parents and knocking on random doors.  But it still made my heart hurt a little.

I guess next fall we should steal someone's kid for an afternoon before Halloween and introduce ourselves on the playground.

In other more house-related news, I couldn't stand the wallpaper in the bathroom any longer and I saw a little corner of it curling up. I knew from previous de-wallpaper experiences that this could be a horrendous and time-consuming task and prepared for the worst.

Before: our glorious plaid and seashell wallpaper and border combo (not to mention, the only and *extremely* convenient outlet in our bathroom.)

What happened next was surprising and not surprising at the same time. If you have ever adhered something to a wall, whether it be wallpaper or paint, you should always WASH YOUR WALLS so that things can/will actually stick to it. But as with any DIY project that has been done in this house before we purchased it, it looks like people actually rubbed dirt all over the walls before putting this stuff up.

30 seconds worth of work.

It took about 10 minutes to take down all of the wallpaper without using any tools. I can't believe we lived with with this stuff hanging up for 123 days before realizing how quickly we could take it down. 

We took a little trip to Lowe's (surprise!) and I bought a gallon of mis-tinted beige painted for $5. If you've never explored the mis-tint section at your local hardware store you're in for a real treat! Mis-tints are great foror projects that don't need a specific color of paint (i.e. a bathroom that you want to remodel as soon as possible) and are happy with some sort of general color, it is by far the most frugal way to get perfectly good paint.  

My aunt Diane was the first to introduce me to this little hidden gem when she needed four gallons of pink paint for her daughter's playroom.  They didn't care about the *specific* color of pink, so every time she went to Lowe's she would pick up any mis-tints that were in her "pink" range, and ended up spending $20 to paint a room instead of $80. If you want to mix different mis-tints together, just make sure it has the same finish and you aren't mixing a gallon of glossy with eggshell together.

I'm excited to finish the bathroom project in the following weekends!

October 16-17, 23-24, 2010

Things have been fairly quiet around here the past two weekends. And cold. Very cold.

Did you know that having holes in your house doesn't help it stay warm? Did you know that people shove insulation up in the ceiling to hide the fact that there's missing floorboards? And did you know that if you do not set up your gutters correctly (and keep it that way for 2039589 years) it will rot *really* important pieces of wood and turn it into a pile of dust?

That's what we've been learning about while preparing the basement for winter. Well, to be fair, Mike has been the one down there the majority of the time by himself, to save me from discovering creepy crawly things in the basement (what a saint!) Now our basement is a disaster again, but I'm hoping to get things back in order next weekend. Or the weekend after that. Or three years from now.

We also covered the old windows in the office, guest bedroom, and kitchen with one of those plastic kits. It was a night and day difference! It really helped decrease the draft and house also stopped "whistling," which I never really noticed until the sound was gone. After the windows were sealed, we turned on the heat.

We tried to think of it as a contest - you know, to make it... fun - to see how long we could go without heat. It wasn't too terribly bad at first. But when we were drinking hot chocolate, wearing three layers of clothing, clutching onto the dogs for additional warmth, and were STILL cold, we realized it was time to surrender to the oil tank.

I'm pretty warm-blooded and I think Mike was born in a volcano, so we agreed on 66F. I'm sure that seems chilly to most, but we get a fair amount of sunlight in every room of the house during the day. We also thought our dads (and dads around the world) would be pretty proud of us if we kept it down that low.

Welp, if I talked any longer about insulating a house you would probably fall asleep at your computer. So I'll stop here.  Until next time, dear readers!

October 9-11, 2010

This weekend we traveled down to Connecticut for a pig roast benefit hosted by some of Mike's friends and family.  Everyone had a good time, and the pig was delicious (Slick and Ted can verify this if you would like a second opinion!)  Here's a few photos from the roast:

Mike's favorites: beer and fire!

Mike's brother Dave, and friend, Frank, serving the pig.

The smartest dogs hang out under the table.

We came back to Hull Sunday evening, and spent our day off (oh yeah, thanks Columbus) at Lowe's playing the "OH MY GOD HOW ARE WE GOING TO KEEP THIS OLD CRAPPILY-INSULATED HOUSE WARM THIS WINTER?!!?!" game.  It was lots of fun.  And by fun, I mean I wanted to murder someone.  But after spending 2.5 hours at a home improvement store, I now know that "pennies" means the letter "d" when referring to nails.  I'm sure knowing this will save my life someday. Nonetheless, I'm really happy that we have a lot of supplies to help keep us warm.

Well, this entry was short and sweet, but I'm sure that next weekend's "Operation: Insulation" will be full crammed full of awesome stories.

October 2-3, 2010

Mike and I enjoyed an *almost* task-free weekend (I got a "The Inside of a Toilet Tank 101" class on Sunday.)

We made our way to Hanover to exchange our papasan frame at Pier One. It seems like our frame was a turd and broke in two places in one month, which upset us.  However, after calling Pier One and explaining the situation to them, they told us to come in and exchange it for a brand new one, no questions asked or receipts needed.  We are quite pleased with their customer service!

We also went to the Derby Street Shoppes and were pleasantly surprised by the number of stores all smooshed into one area (and only a 20 minute drive from our house, hooray!) When we bought our home this summer, we knew little (if anything) about the towns around Hull; it's nice to know that we don't have to travel all the way to Boston to seek out civilization.

We also stopped at a few yard sales and I found this book for 25 cents, and it did a great job of exciting me, the "never-had-a-garden-in-my-life-but-have-always-wanted-one-and-can-now-have-one-but-don't-know-the-first-thing-about-gardening" gardener. I spent my Sunday morning at the dining room table designing a garden for our backyard, while Mike was at the other end of the table working on sketches for a chair he wants so build.  We haven't been able to have a "creative" morning and months, so it was a treat.

Lastly, we didn't lift a finger in the yard this weekend, but the grass seed we planted a few weeks ago has been working hard and growing a fine new tuft of grass in the old firepit area.  We used Scotts Turf Builder Sun and Shade Mix and threw it down in the middle of a light rain a few weeks ago, covered it with grass clippings..... and, uhm, never ever watered it. Whoops. And then it was really sunny for about a week straight and still never watered it. Double whoops.  But this stuff is amazing and pulled through!  We will be sure to use it again next year when we till and level the yard.

Yay for neglected grass seed taking care of itself!

September 24-26, 2010

This week was absolutely tiring, but worth every minute! Mike and I had been prepping every night after work for our housewarming party on the 24th. We wanted to make everything ourselves (well, sans the cheese plate and keg) and treat our friends and family to a night in Hull, with a nod to this week's newest arrival and my favorite season, fall! 

Our list of homemade goodies included:

1) Salsa and fresh tortilla chips straight out of the deep fryer

2) Hummus + veggies

3) Butternut squash soup

4) Hamburgers/portobello burgers

5) Apple crisp 

Of course, I was too busy bouncing around the house to remember to take photos of anything that night, d'oh! If anyone reading this has photos from that night, please let me know! 

Thank you to everyone who came out! We hope you enjoyed yourselves and will come back to visit us soon.

We had some friends and family stay with us for the entire weekend, and it was a great time! We enjoyed a lovely sunset together Saturday evening. We've already decided that next weekend will be all about relaxing.  I can hardly wait :) 

Those two little specs by the water = Allison and Mike's brother, Dave

 

September 18-19, 2010

This is the last weekend before our housewarming party, and we had one last major yardwork project to complete: moving all of the rocks that we had collected from the backyard and dump them into the front flower beds. UGH. Not the way I wanted to spend me weekend, but I also never want to touch one of those stupid rocks ever again! However, it does make me happy to know that we were able to reuse all of the rock instead of paying for someone to remove it. It also makes me happy to know that the "deweeding flowerbed project" is finally completed (at least, I hope it is.) Here's a quick rundown of what we've done to try and kill the monster weeds in the flower beds:

1) Start of project - Chop weeds flush to ground (removing 5+ feet tall vegetation)
2) Two weeks later - Chop weeds flush to ground (removing 2.5 feet tall vegetation)
3) A couple of weeks later - Dig up root system to weeds (back to 1-2 feet tall vegetation) and remove 8-10 inches of soil from flowerbeds (soil goes into the backyard to fill firepit hole)
4) This week - Fill both flowerbeds in with approx. 1500 lbs of rock from the backyard, divided

So anyway, we did it. The rock is moved.  Neither of us took photos of it because, well, it would have been pictures of us holding rocks and you can probably imagine that on your own.  

We also tried to remove the thorn bush that is starting to regrow at the front corner of our house (the same one that we removed in July.)  First, Mike tried a shovel. Then a pick axe. Then swearing at it. I tried shaking my fist at it. We finally gave up and have concluded that we will probably have to tie this thing up to a truck and pull it out.  However, there's a good chance that the thorn bush is cozied up with our house's foundation, and pulling it out might take our house with it.  Looks like I'm stuck with trimming it back for now.

I'll end this entry with one of the only photos we took this weekend. We had a lovely Sunday morning on the beach with the dogs.  The weather has been funky lately with fall approaching, and we aren't sure how many more warm days we have left.  We were happy that this one landed on the weekend for us to enjoy.

Nantasket Beach morning walk, 9.19.10

September 11-12, 2010

We are having a housewarming party in a few weeks, so a lot of our time was spent planning our menu, buying supplies, and prioritizing our household to-do list before the 24th. But of course, a decent amount of yardwork is a part of that list. Will it ever end?

First things first, we finished two of our ongoing projects: putting the wooden fence back in place and filling out "firepit." The fence was a lot easier task than Mike and I had imagined; in fact, it was even easier than taking the fence apart and took a little under an hour to complete.

The fence on it's way back up and me tearing ugly wire off the stairs.

We shoveled out the rest of the dirt from the front flower beds out into the firepit and leveled it - we will be putting down some seed during the week when we are expecting rain.  It is so weird/wonderful to not see an ugly gaping hole in the middle of our yard now!

Tada! Newly-filled hole with the firepit from our neighbors.

That's it for this week! Fingers crossed that we'll have new grass photos in a couple of weeks!

September 3-6, 2010

So, we had plans to go to Connecticut this weekend to help Dave finish remodeling his basement. And you know what happens when we make plans to go somewhere? Hurricanes call the media and get everyone all hyped up about how big and ferocious they are, and cause everyone to cancel their weekend plans. And then that hurricane ends up being a big wuss. On one hand we have the thought of, "Yay hurricane! Thanks for not blowing our house down!" But on the other hand, we have "... but couldn't you have at LEAST blew the crappy siding off of our house so insurance would pay for something new and pretty?" Can't win them all.

So we suddenly had three whole days to work on the house with no real plan. So we made one. And everyone knows all good plans start with food:

Mike prepping the beef bourguinon

Saturday morning we woke up bright and early to see if anything cool washed up on the beach from the storm.  No hidden treasure was found, but we did enjoy the waves!

After our morning at the beach, we finished removing the ugly chain link fence in the back yard.  We are SO excited so see that fence rolled up and stacked into a neat little pile, waiting for the metal removal people to come pick it up!  We were also able to repair our wooden fence by replacing some missing boards.  

After we temporarily removed our wooden fence, we could see the lovely weeds/trees that had been growing between the fence for a couple of years.

Note: when you throw a can in your backyard, IT DOESN'T JUST MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR. $20 says this can is older than me.

Right now the wooden fence pieces are just leaning against the post and will tackle putting them back in the posts next weekend.

We also tackled the front yard weed catastrophe this weekend.  For the second time.  And that's not cool.  So we pulled them out by the roots (I'm sure you can imagine that I went a little OCD on this part) and Mike and I dug up all the soil and took it out of the flower beds, which started yet ANOTHER project: the "fill up that lame-excuse-for-a-firepit-hole-in-the-yard" project. We are excited to see the hole slowly disappear; however, Ted is pretty sad that he no longer has a hole full weird things to smell.

Ted protecting his favorite smelling spot

Ted's arch nemesis: The Super Wagon.

However, Mike and I made our first trip ever to Building 19, which is like an Ocean State Job Lot on crack.  Amongst the piles of prison shoes we found a large area rug for the dogs to create a pretty sweet "dog play area" down in the basement. We cut our old foam queen size mattress into thirds and covered up one of them with a blanket to make a gigantic dog bed. We also sandwiched their crate between two stacks of Rubbermaid containers so that it would stay dim (dachshund's favorite lighting.)   I think they will like this better than that old hole.

Yes, prison shoes.

Dog palace!

That pretty much wraps up our weekend - looking forward to finishing our fence project next week!

August 28-29, 2010

This weekend we finished a HUUUUGE ongoing project: the basement is completely organized and spider-free! (RIP 5,000,000 spiders we sucked up in the vacuum.) We bought spray that *allegedly* keeps spiders away. We are leery of such miraculous claims, but will hope for the best.

We also gave our windows some TLC by scraping off the excess white paint (did someone just throw the bucket of paint at the window and call it a day?) and we hung up blinds in the office and guest bedroom. Now that we live at the ground level and not on the 2nd, 6th, or 16th floor of a building, we've come to realize the importance of window coverings. It's also wildly important to have window coverings when your neighbors actually know you and have teenage sons. Just a heads up.

We started a new large project: removing 80 feet of useless chain link fence from our property. Not only was it hideous, but it also made it impossible to maintain the side entrance to the house and was enabling the poison ivy to creep its way up our stairs.

What do you need to remove a metal fence?

1) Pliers

2) Hands

3) A saw with a metal-cutting blade

That's pretty much it! There was no real need for us to dig up the concrete holding the poles, so we dug down to the concrete, cut the poles, and filled it back up with dirt. We we still have about half the fence to remove next weekend, but we are really happy with our progress so far.

Before and after:

Hopefully next weekend we can say goodbye to the rest of that fence!

August 21-22, 2010

This weekend was great. Mike's brother, Dave, came up to help us do some electrical work, but that never happened. Dave made something much more helpful - a workbench in the basement!

All of the weird stuff we had been finding hidden throughout the basement finally proved helpful. All the lumber and pegboard for the workbench was made out of stuff already in the basement. We paid a total of $11 for this setup:

Now all of Mike's tools are on the workbench and not strewn about on the basement floor, yaaaaay! I am also forever in debt to David for making my downstairs chore, laundry, much more practical. He made me a snazzy little shelf and hung an old closet rod by the washer and dryer so that I could actually wash, dry, and fold clothes all in ONE place. Life's simple pleasures...

We felt pretty accomplished for the weekend and headed to the beach to enjoy Francesca's last days with us before flying back to Italy. We went to the beach to fly his kiteboarding trainer kite, and it was a lot of fun. Mike made an amazing dinner Saturday night, and we enjoyed the cool summer night together (note: someday we will have lawn furniture... until then, the backyard stairs will have to do!)

August 14-15, 2010

We went away for the weekend to Connecticut to visit Mike's grandparents. We also had a special guest, my friend Francesca, who is visiting us from Italy and will be staying with us for 10 days. We are excited to have her as our guest... but even more excited when she caught her very first fish on a rod and reel:

I caught a little bass too:

We were happy to get another break away from the house, but we are excited for next weekend when Mike's brother, Dave, comes to give us a hand with some of our bigger projects!

August 7-8, 2010

This weekend was less about work, and more about play. Our family friend's children, Jack and Elizabeth, came home with us on the boat Friday night and had lots of fun running around on the beach Saturday morning with the dogs.

Jack and Elizabeth's parents came down later in the morning and we had a great time relaxing on the beach with them. But of course, work had to be done! Mike and I said goodbye to our guests in the afternoon, and we had a marathon weeding session in the backyard. These things are MONSTERS! I have never seen a weed root this big in my entire life:

We pulled close to 300 of these out of our backyard (it's only about 35'x4o'.) We are hoping that the grass will ACTUALLY have a chance to grow now.

Sunday was a productive day! This weekend's "Weird Thing Found in The Basement" were two old oars covered in nails, and an old fireman's tool that they use to poke through floors of burning buildings. They were shoved up in the rafters and hanging by little bits of string. Go figure.

We also ordered a double papasan today - yay! Our dining room/great room/whatever you want to call it was in desperate need of a piece of furniture that looked "beachy." Hopefully it holds up to two adults and two dogs (which, by the way, were in heaven the moment the papasan arrived.)

Tada:

July 31-August 1, 2010

This weekend we had a guest! Kelsey took the boat home with us Friday night and she helped us pick weeds in the front yard (and yes, there's still much, much more to pick) and we enjoyed an afternoon at the beach together.

We spent the rest of our weekend in the coolest part of the house - the basement. We bought two more shelving units to create more storage area, and also grabbed more giant Rubbermaid storage containers. Mike jokes that we will have 50,000 Rubbermaid containers someday... he's probably right. I love those things.

While working in the basement, we saw light. The bad kind. The light that says "Look, you have a crack in your exterior walls and there's nothing stopping bugs, rain, and snow from getting into your basement!" We discussed some options (spray foam the entire basement? Patch the visible holes with concrete and get an energy audit?) to solve this dilemma, but thankfully it's summer and we can take some time to think things over before we make a decision.

On a happier note, Mike found a huge oyster shell on our Sunday morning walk. It's on our mantle now with all of our other beach finds.

Oh! and I got frustrated that I couldn't find a compost bin (well, that's not true. There are plenty of them online. But they were expensive AND I would have had to wait for it to be delivered.) So I went online and found this article on about.com and made my own!

I never knew how fun it was to use a drill bit. It got kind of addicting. Hopefully we will have some great compost for our garden next spring!