Incarcerated Santa

Fire Fire Fire!

Jere and I brilliantly decided to make a fire in his fireplace. A nice romantic idea whilst Christy was out grocery shopping. Fabulous idea right? Wrong.

The logs we used were old, rotten, and water-logged (pun). So in order to speed things up we brought out the blow torch. Fabulous idea right? Right!


Ok, I cheated and took the logs out after a while, and replaced it with a nice dry 2x10. That Flamed up like Jere on a Friday night!

Student con job

We, meaning Christy, managed to con 7 students to do 'community service' at some of our houses. We bribed them with 2 day old free donuts and nasty $5 Little Skeezers pizza to come rake leaves at Fuller, Lafayette, and Jere's house.
It worked great!
Actually it was a lot of work, but was made all worthwhile when we headed to the free dump and passed Gay Street. Then turned, phew, onto Straight Street. One of the kids asked where Bi Street was.

Busy + no internet = no blog

Well it has been a while since we've updated our blog. I don't really have much of an excuse except we just moved and didn't have internet for two weeks. I know, I know, I should have used my work computer but I was too busy playing bookworm and shopping online to do that!
We moved on my birfday weekend so needless to say I didn't have much of one. Its ok, I don't really relish turning 30.
Christy and I have been busy with skool lately, getting settled into our new home, and starving ourselves. Yup, because we've become morbidly obese we're back on the South Beach diet. I lost 10.6 lbs in a week, and Christy lost about 5. So she's down to 208! Whoo hoo, I can almost wrap my arms around her when I give her a hug. I'm so proud.
She'd kill me if was true...I can just feel her rolling her eyes as she reads this.

Well, gotta go post some sweet pics.

The boys are out tonight!

I just learned how to put videos on, and am very excited. So excited in fact, that I put my entire collection on. All two. This is a video shot last summer of Jere and I stamping the ceiling in his house. I'm sorry to disappoint, but that hot man in the cutoff shirt is taken. The good news is, the other one is very single. Talented too, watch him really work that pole!
Sorry, you'll have to watch it with your head cocked to the side, I don't know how to fix it. Any comments on that would be welcomed.

New stuff

I wanted to show our viewers at home the new landscaping. Just put it in, and now we're moving out! Oh well. Interestingly enough, came home the other day to find 3 new trees had magically sprung from the ground. Weird...actually we think the original owners of subdivision came by and planted them all. The only problem we have with this is they didn't plant them on the parkway, they planted them in our yard!






Our house, complete with new landscaping additions.



This is my "Mose run", taken by expert cinematographer, Jeremy "I love raves!" Malin.

Offer

On Tuesday of this week we recieved an offer on our house...and accepted! We're planning on closing in early November. We have a home inspection next week and providing that all goes well we should be good to go.
We plan to take the loser-route and move in with a family member- Jeremy- for a while, save some money and either buy or build after that.
Christy and I were very surprised but thankful. We thought we'd never sell.

Told you Kate

Well Kate, I'm hooked...at least for tonight. Blogging is kind of fun, I feel like I can really creatively express myself, even though I have not an ounce of creative or artistic ability.
My life lately: here's the short of it...
last weekend went to NY city, met Dave and Mini there, saw lots of fun stuff, namely Elmo at a 6th Avenue Street fair. Ate Chicken on a stick, thought for sure I'd be sick, was pleasantly surprised not to be.

This weekend Zach Malin married his longtime sweetheart Jessica. It was a purty wedding in Grand Haven, on lake Mich. Weddings are cool and all, but there is something completely exhaustive about constantly eating and making quiet chitchat. It's almost as bad as shopping with Christy.

We're Back!

At the prompting of my dear sis, I'll begin to update our blog again. I'm still a little hesitant to blog about my life, since I don't want to really be lumped into that group of 30-something losers who are still living in their mom's basement, photo shopping the latest Sara Palin picture. But I digress.
On with my day...
woke up, finished up adding Sara Palin's face to a gun-toting, bikini clad, trailer park model.
Emailed completed pic. to Keith Olberman at MSNBC
Turned on MSNBC to see my fine work.
got dressed, took shower, left for work.
taught kids about the Vedic Age and the difference between Brahman and Brahmin. Also discussed the dependent and independent variables in a psych. experiment.
Chilled in the copy room with some of my homie-teachers, trying to figure out what was going on in the K-8 meeting. Had a couple laughs, made fun of the asst. principal and then went to the bank.
Then to menards, can you believe that they don't have hose sprayers! me neither.
Then to aldi where we sorted through their fine, but limited, selection of produce.
Home, where I tore it up on the grill, and produced a feast of Italian sausage for my adoring wife (not a metaphor, besides I'm not even Italian).
I worked on my BSF lesson tonight, and have spent that last 45 minutes trying to figure out my gmail account name and password. I asked my adoring wife, and naturally she figured it out in 10 seconds. Now who's adoring who?
So here I am blogging about my lame day, just to appease my very pregnant sister.
Mind that.
Peace out, Rascal.

Fast Forward

We had grass done the summer of 2007. It only took three tries to get it to look nice. Alex and I did the landscaping in the fall of 2007.

The Floors

The bathroom and laundry rooms got tile. We did hardwoods in the living room, dining room and kitchen. Tommy did a great job on the flooring. It looks so nice!

Approval!

This is Alex and Tommy with the approval stickers for our inspections!

Wow! A lot has happened since Alex last updated. I went away last week and came back to a real house. The drywall was done last week. Alex and Tom finished as much siding as they could and also built the deck. The rest of the siding can't be done until the driveway and porch are poured. We are waiting for our sidewalk to be surveyed so that the driveway can be done.
We got our last big delivery from Home Depot. It's so exciting to see everything finally come together.
Tom, Alex and I painted all day Friday. We should finish painting on Monday and then Tommy will start to work on the floor Tuesday. We are putting hardwoods in most of the house. Alex will continue to work on the electric.
School starts in three weeks. We probably won't be all moved in but hope to have the big things done so we can work on getting some things to the new house before we go back to work.
Things have been going smoothly and we hope the next three weeks go the same way. I'm very excited to get our things moved in.

Getting closer...

Well we're getting closer to being finished. Finally all inspections are done and we were approved on all of them. The electrical inspector only found a couple minor things wrong, so I was happy about that. Tommy, Christy, and I started to work on the insulation today, we should be done by tomorrow thankfully. All of the windows and exterior doors are in, and the house is almost half sided. The drywall arrives Thursday, and the hangers will start Friday hopefully. I decided to contract out all of the drywall, and as it turns out we're still within the bounds of our budget. Amazing! I don't know if we'll be done by the time school starts, but we'll be close! I'll try to post some pictures soon. Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the Summer!

Happy 4th!

We've made some progress on the house. Most of the plumbing HVAC, and electrical are done. We should be ready for some inspections this week. The fireplace is in, the stairs down to the basement are done and we should be ready to insulate soon. We took most of last week off for the Fourth of July and it was very nice. We went to Charlevoix and spent some time cleaning up the beach house and hanging out with family. We celebrated our 2nd year anniversary in Petoskey and had dinner in Charlevoix. Summer is almost half over for us, which is very sad. Hope everyone is doing well, we'll update with some pictures later.

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I last posted. We've been working pretty hard and finally have the roof sheeted and part of it shingled. The plumber is almost done, and I am almost done installing the meter socket for the electrical service. I'm going to start pulling wire soon, most of the boxes are where they're suppose to be, and Home depot has delivered most of the stuff we need to complete our project. I'll post some more pics in a bit. Thanks to everyone who has helped out, especially to Christy and Zachi! You guys have been awsome!

Roof

We managed to borrow a skytrak from the builders down the street. Man, that was a blessing, it only cost me 20 bucks and saved us a whole day of humping 3 pallets of 90lb. bundles of shingles to the top of the roof.



Christy was so pumped about the skytrak she even let loose a boohyah! (ok fine, she didn't, that was me)




Sheeting the roof went pretty smoothly, except for the fact that we had to build the valley trusses. That took a couple days, to build and sheet them. A little longer than I expected.

trusses

We set the trusses last week, on Tuesday the 13th. It was a pretty intense day. The crane came early, and Zach, Christy, Tommy, and I were all scrambling to get ready. The garage header wasn't up yet, so we had to get that done quickly. Getting started on the first gable end was rough, because it was set 2 inches off, so we had to redo it. Once we got started though, things went more smoothly, and 3 and a half hours later the trusses were up.

Interior/exterior walls

The Black Balla watches over the site with menacing authority!



We finished up most of the walls last week Monday (June 12), and started sheeting the gabled ends, building the rakes, and putting the tyvec on.