After returning from a week in NYC for work, I came home to find our house seriously transformed. Craig was an absolute superstar while I was gone. The biggest highlight? I opened the front door and a rush of heat came over me - yes, heat! We now have heat in the entire house. On top of the we have the new front door (hardware and all) installed and outlets throughout the main floor. To top it all off, the house is actually clean, even the bathroom. I'm not sure if Craig skipped work a couple days or what but I couldn't be happier.

Forward Thinking

As a motivating effort, we've hung photos of finished rooms/facets of rooms throughout the house which are inspiring our renovations. This makes it easier for us to see an eventual end and for our friends to see that we do actually have an end goal in mind. Here are a couple highlights:

The staircase:


The inspiration shot came from O magazine I believe. These built-ins are going to be awesome and really show off those carpentry skills that Craig's been honing over the years. This one came from Better Homes & Gardens (thanks for the subscription Mom, it's really not filled with all old lady stuff).

The main room:


Craig is installing special backing and conduits to eventually hang a flat screen with all wires hidden behind the wall. I really like the silhouette pictures too. The wall color is probably darker then what we're going to go for but you get the overall idea.

The bathroom:



In our downstairs bathroom, the sink is set back further then the toilet. Similar to the magazine shot (BH&G again), we're toying with the idea of extending the recessed wall to make it even with the toilet wall and then cutting out the 'built-in' shelves on both sides of the sink.

The end is in sight! Even if we sill need a telescope to see it...

Craig's Very Own Laser Level

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Taken in the Home Depot parking lot. We weren't allowed to leave until Craig opened the box and played for 5 minutes. Have you ever seen someone so excited over a level? It's the little things that count in life...

House Update 1.26.08

Sorry for the slow posts lately. Despite that, Craig has been working pretty much every day, continuing to drywall. Hopefully, this video will give you an idea of where we stand. Excuse the bad lighting :)

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays and best wishes for 2008 to all you faithful TMPBallard readers out there!

This was quite an eventful holiday season this year in addition to just the house projects. I spent an early Christmas in Toledo as well as celebrated Ray's 61st by picking out and decorating the Christmas tree with the whole gang. The eventful weekend also included a trek to Bryan, Ohio that involved detours, heated seats (except for Lynsey's, he he) and using OnStar for the first time. Oh, and Mom and Peter sharing a bottle of wine while Lyns, Dad and I decorated the tree.


It was wonderful to see everybody and I had a really great time!

Over the Christmas holiday, Craig and I joined the Williams clan south of the border in Cancun.


It was a great week of laying in the sun, Chunky (or in Katie's case Funky) Monkeys all around, scuba diving, karaoke and lots of guacamole. Very relaxing and an all-around super getaway. Other highlights included the announcement of Baby Williams coming in July (for Chris and Katie, mind you) and Maria joining us all the way from Sardinia, Italy. Salute!



More pics

I think the Karaoke part is best shown rather then explained. If there's a stage, a mic, and beer involved, you can bet the house that two of the Williams boys will take advantage of all three. While Craig had the bar rocking to Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," Nathan had at least one lady singing along (and swaying) to David Bowie's "Space Oddity." These videos are dark, but hopefully you can experience the thrill all the same :)





Now it's back to work as usual. More house updates coming soon. After all, that is what this blog is supposed to be about, right?

Long overdue update

Craig's been working super hard and I've finally posted some pictures to prove it. We've had a lot of calls over the past few weeks checking to make sure we survived all the storms out here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, we've survived nearly unscathed. Luckily, most of the locations of the holes in our roof correspond to holes in our floor so the water flowed right through :)

Heat is still an issue for the house as a whole. An issue in that we don't have any except in the new guest bedroom where we essentially live. Venturing down to the bathroom in the morning entails bundling up and seeing your breath while brushing your teeth. We haven't been cooking much (without a working stove top or oven it's kinda hard) but I did happen to pick up the olive oil yesterday to find it frozen over...


The big highlight is our guest bedroom. Not quite adequately named yet, (we're not expecting guests anytime soon...) this room is actually livable and absolutely lovely. The walls are up, drywalled, painted and Craig even installed the closet so I can safely keep my clothes (more or less) out of the dust storm.

What we've been doing since our last post...

Yes, we've been slacking again when it comes to the blog. But, we've been keeping busy. For instance, it was Halloween recently so we had to dedicate time to making and, of course, showing off our costumes.

That's our friend Chris in the gold, playing Wii tennis v. He-man himself.


And there's me with my co-workers at our work party.
(Frontline Photography)

The past two weekends, I've been training for my SCUBA diving certification (awesome birthday present from Craig). Here are some pics from our dive site yesterday:

(That's a baby seal napping on the beach)

So, now back to the house. The project recently has been framing in the second bedroom, laundry room and closets upstairs. We're hoping to be able to start the dry wall in the bedroom next weekend and then soon we'll have an actual room that's walled off from the rest of the house and totally livable (heater installed and all).