Sailing Baby Blue

After tons of planning and hard work we have finally made it to the end of the first phase in our big scheme, and from here there's no turning back. Jon quit his job at the end of March to finish up our house projects and my last day of work was yesterday. Today we accepted an offer on our house. If all goes well we will be closing on May 22nd, and will promptly take off across the country with only what will fit inside (and on top of) our little Subaru. We are feeling so lucky that everything has fallen into place. Our timing in getting the house ready perfectly coincided with the housing market boom in Denver. The sale of the house will provide us with the funding we need to make our trip happen. I think what we've learned looking back on our attempts to fund our adventure, is that we couldn't have done it any other way. One of the biggest contributing factors to paying down our debt was having only one car for the last 4+ years. Which means that Jon has ridden his bi...

Little did I know, the first time we remodeled our kitchen was not going to be the last. Before our wedding in 2010, we bought new appliances, moved some doorways, and upgraded our counter top and flooring, so I thought our kitchen had successfully been updated (with the exception of that lime green paint). But after much debate and resistance on my part, we decided that we weren't done. If we wanted to get the maximum payoff from selling our house, we would need to put in new cabinets. Also, we weren't happy with the tile floor as the grout was continually cracking because the floor moves so much, and ripping out the cabinets would also mean we would need a new counter top. So, after my last ditch attempt to keep our costs low by only replacing the cabinet doors turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, we were off to Ikea for new cabinets. Jon took another week off of work and with his brother's help they also tackled some of the other little projects aro...

We left our staircase out of the basement remodeling project last year while we tried to figure out exactly how to approach the repair. All the steps were different heights and the carpet was pretty nasty. So, Jon took part of his week long vacation to rip them out and build a new staircase. Noticing a pattern here?   As always, this project took a little longer than the few days we had set aside. It's also not quite finished yet as we need to redo the entire back entrance / mudroom when we upgrade the kitchen (again). But here is how it looks today.  

I paid off my student loan today! Jon paid his off earlier this summer and we are now officially debt free. All it took was selling my motorcycle...and Jon's motorcycle before that, and countless other things that at the time seemed difficult to part with but I've since forgotten about. If everything goes according to plan we won't be needing any of it soon anyway.

Our new basement is finally complete. It took about five months but we substantially increased our square footage and added a third bedroom and second bathroom. We also added more functional storage, including the absolutely essential wine rack. The next photo is meant more to show the floor than to give you a peek at our new toilet. The wood-look ceramic tile on the bathroom floor is one of my favorite features.

We just returned from a vacation to San Francisco and our latest renovation is now under way. The view from our sunset sail to Alcatraz. Jon took an additional week off from work to start on our basement remodel. Though our basement was finished when Jon bought the house, we needed to add an egress window to make the bedroom legal and we decided to add a second bathroom in addition to the laundry room (which is becoming a laundry closet). As usual, I don't have any before pictures, so in-progress photos will have to do.  After cutting a hole in our bedroom wall, the new window is in and getting close to being finished.    This is the old laundry room which will soon be our new bathroom. Our cave-like hallway that leads from the stairs to the bedroom. ...and proof that I do my part of the dirty work. Or at least proof that I wear this mask sometimes.

We finished our bathroom remodel at about the same time as our Thanksgiving dinner was ready. It was a little bit stressful cooking a huge meal while construction was going on and company was due over within the hour. The only before photos I could find are these: Then these are the next shots, right in the middle of demo:  It was an interesting week or so, being intermittently without a toilet. Here you can see we've made a little bit of progress:  Our bathroom expanded into our office. Along with all of the tools in the house. Sometime around 1:30am on a Thursday night while we tried to finish grouting our new shower tile, I started crying. But I kept working anyway. Even Penny fell victim to the construction chaos this time. As always it was well worth it, and looks ten times better than it did when we started. But since there is no evidence to offer of what it looked like before, you'll just have to take my word for it. ...