Drum Roll Please....

After many many MANY weeks of anticipation, our Bathroom tile and floor are FINALLY done. Here is the story in a nutshell...or rather a hand full of nutshells...

Saturday, Bob and Maida came over and helped us put in our tile around the bathtub, we got about 3/4 of the way done and realized we were 4 pieces short. 4! well I called the company we ordered our tile from and they told us that in order for us to get those 4 pieces it would cost us about 40 bucks for the FULL box and then 35 for the shipping. GOOD CRAP is right! that is like what, 18 bucks a tile?...NO THANK YOU. So we thought we would call around to see if others had it and just finish the tile and see if we could make it work.
Monday night they came back and we finished the wall, and realized we are only 1 and a half short...so thats a little bit better, AND the company was able to give us there display piece, so now we just need to find a half, and we are hoping one of the other companies around here will have a display piece we can buy from them.

So after they finished the tile, Kory and I decided we would start the Grout, that way it would be done in time for the floors in the morning. We were up until 4 am scrubbing that awful stuff off our walls! WHAT A NIGHTMARE! It definitely made me glad we ordered linoleum for the floor.

So we got about 3 hours of sleep because I had to teach swimming lessons, and Kory still had to put the sub floor in before 1pm so we could get the floors in the next day.

Well turns out I also didn't order enough Linoleum. My dad said, that next time we need to have a professional do the ordering... But thankfully my dad is a master at laying linoleum and did a great job with the seams and matching the pattern.

Then for the part I am The MOST excited about. We finally put in our brand new toilet. I know you are all thinking of all the things to be excited about? Well, until you live with a broken toilet for 7 months, you cannot possibly understand what I am feeling. After Kory installed it I probably flushed it 10 times just to see the bowl empty (something our last toilet ONLY did for Kory, and gave me a severe complex)

Anyway, that is where we are at now, we will be getting our vanity in sometime soon.
I took some pictures last night so you can all see the progress we made

Before
After

Pioneer Day Weekend

We didn't really celebrate pioneer day on Thursday because we both worked that day, and on Friday. But I did go camping on Friday night to Saturday morning with my family and had a blast! Here are some of the pictures from the trip...

We also started to tile our bathroom this weekend! It will be finished tomorrow night (except we are 4 pieces short! 4, which wont be here until who knows when...) I don't want to post pictures yet until it is all finished sorry, you will just have to wait...

On to the pictures...

On our way to camping, the Hil's kids were SOOOO excited!

Five minutes on the road, I turned around and this is what I saw...

Nicolas was the last to conk out, you can see him here is eyes are half glazed, he was fighting it..

AislynnMaddy

About half way up the drive, hil's car overheated due to the air conditioning, so we pulled over for a minute and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the clouds.

Just for funThen we saw this bear!

Not really, it was just a bull, but he huffed his nose at us like he was going to charge us...

When we got there, we went straight to the lake, where the kids swam, ate and fed cheetos to a family of ducks

Maddy with her cheeto face

Believe it or not, Jacob shared his cheeto with the ducks! I know his belly says otherwise...

And I held Baby Hinkley, he is at that fun stage where he laughs and coos at everything. Its not the best picture, but I think its funny

After the lake we came back to my parents camp site, and set up our tents, had dinner, and sat around the CAMP FIRE!

My mom, sisters and the kids all hanging out by the fire.

Since everyone had a baby in there arms, I made the smores for everyone. Aislynn got the graham crackers and chocolate ready. Jacob did some karateHe was really just showing me his hand for some reason.
Hilary and Nicolas enjoying the campfire
My dad and mom
Maddy and Jacob in front of our tentAnd then Nicolas
The trees which I couldn't get enough of, they were so beautiful!

In the morning I was telling Hilary I had a hard time sleeping for the most part because I was worried about bears, and Maddy looked at me and said very reassuring, like a mother to a scared daughter.

"Amy, there are not bears camping, just cows!"

And then when Nicolas woke up he sat up and looked around the tent and said
"We are outside? We sleeped outside!"

Then on our way home Maddy started to panic and said very frantically as she tried to describe her first mosquito bite "My foot is tickling all by myself!"

I had a lot of fun, and I was very grateful that my parents invited me.

It's a Girl!

I just wanted to give a shout out to our sister Kassie, who just found out she is having a BABY GIRL! We are both thrilled for her and super excited to have another niece! And she will be one mighty cute punk rock niece for sure! With a little bit of cowgirl in her thanks to her daddy!

And this an important point to this, as I did not do this to announce the gender of Rainey's girl, I need to add that I am equally ecstatic for her and her BABY GIRL. But the point to this blog is more to point out the fact that for the first time EVER I was wrong about one of my nieces or nephews gender. I have always guessed right, and I was pretty sure she was going to have a Boy, even though I wanted her to have a girl so so bad, mainly because I love the name she picked out, and I am just a fan of girl babies more, I still thought she was having a boy. So, I admit I was wrong, and I no longer have a perfect score. Oh well, I must admit this was definitely something worth being wrong about. :)

Hip hip hooray! Look out world here comes double trouble,

Sydney Joy Anderson and Story Jane Miles!

Getting ready to Tile

Tomorrow our tile comes! I am so excited I can't wait really. We got everything done in our bathroom on Saturday to get ready for the tile. We even worked on our kitchen a little, and I measured and cut MY first piece of drywall, with of course Kory by my side coaching me the whole way. It did make me appreciate all his hard work on our house. Because as much as I want to believe in the fact that TV tells the truth always, I must admit that what you see on TV for the most part is fiction... Before we bought our house, I used to spend most of my free time glued to the TV watching show like Flip that house, and Trading spaces, and just day dreaming about how it would be to work on our house. But believe you me, no more! Working on a house is HARD work, it's time consuming, messy, dusty, straining physically, financially, and emotionally. But it is also one of the most rewarding things to see ALL your hard work FINALLY paying off, to look back and say, WE DID THAT!

Brownies and Ice cream any one?

Tuesday was my official first enrichment activity, and it turned out GREAT! We made brownies in a box oven, and ice cream in zip lock bags! I was really nervous about it, but it all went well!

We made the brownies with this lovely box oven!

The ice cream to go on top! Made with milk sugar and vanilla, and only took 5 minutes!

Northpark 3rd ward sisters enjoying the fruits of our labor!

One of the things we just started in enrichment to encourage people to arrive on time, is the EARLY BIRD JAR. Those who come to enrichment on time get to place their name in the jar to win a prize that goes along with the theme. I made that jar, using yet another can of peanut butter. They have come in so handy.

I made 3 of these "Smores Packs" as the prize. (totally makes you want to come to enrichment huh?)

Idaho

Kory had to go to Idaho Falls on Sunday night and I decided to go with him, because I have family up there.

I am not going to give you exact details of the trip, because that would be for the most part boring. But some things did happen that I deem post worthy.

The first:

I highly recommend staying in the Idaho Falls Holiday Inn Express. Kory has been trying to tell me how great they are for months now, but never having stayed in one I didn't believe it. And after my last two stays in Hotels (see Any of my posts from Wyoming), I had started to believe that staying in a Hotel was not as relaxing to me as it used to be. Well, the Idaho falls hotel was FABULOUS! Maybe it was because Kory is a priority member now, but we were treated like royalty! And it's not that they did anything out of the normal, it was just the things the didn't do. Like they didn't come knock on my door at eight, nine, ten... you get the idea. And when I called back not once but three times to get the internet to work, they were all smiles. I felt welcomed the whole time. It was GREAT!

Our room

The second:

God hears and answers prayers.

So while spending the day with my cousin, we had errands to run. One of those was me picking up my aunts car, so I could meet my cousin at the car repair shop to pick her and her kids up.
For some reason I was really nervous about this, so when I got behind the wheel, I said a quick prayer that nothing would happen to this car.

We ran all our errands, and went back to my aunts house to return the car. Mind you this was chaos, as we had a car full of groceries, and tired, hungry worn out kids. Well as my cousin was going inside, I offered to drive the car into the garage. Being cautious I inched forward into the garage. Thats when I heard this

"AMY AMY STOP!" My cousin yelled from the door. I slammed on my breaks thinking I was about to hit a kid or a cat. When I see nothing, I look back and see one of the doors was left open by the one of her kids, and I am inches away from taking the door off!

So you are probably like so what? Well, here is where it all gets strange, or rather my prayer was answered. At the time when the door was about to get ripped off, my cousin was supposed to be in the house. However the key that is ALWAYS by the door to the house was gone, preventing my cousin from going inside. Making it so she turned around to go look for the key at the exact moment to see and scream for me to stop.

But it doesn't stop there. My aunt and uncle are on a service mission for the LDS church back east helping out with the pageants and such this summer, and at the exact moment that I was pulling into the garage, my aunt had this sick feeling in her stomach and felt prompted to call my cousin to make sure everything was ok.

Right after Julie yelled at me to stop, her cell phone started to ring.

So after just being relieved that my cousin turned around in time to see. We began to look for the key to the house in the car, because that was the only logical place. After searching both cars up and down, I said another prayer that we would find out where the keys were. Almost instantly, I got a prompting to look at my aunts car keys.

I looked down and saw a key that said "house" so, duh right? I went to try to see if that key would fit, and it did, and sure enough the keys to the house were sitting on the counter.

Well, I assumed that my cousin had gone in earlier and placed the keys on the counter and then locked the door with the car key set. That was the conclusion we came to.

Later, we found out that while we were out running errands, the neighbor had this feeling that he needed to go get their mail right then. When he got there he saw the car was gone, and being a cop he took the precaution and put the house key inside the house and locked the door with his own set! And that is how the key ended up inside.

I would say it was only a coincidence, but I know that it was the spirit. How grateful I am to my Heavenly Father for hearing and answering my prayers!

From the mouth of my nephew Andy...

"WHAT A MESS!"


This is what our bathroom looked like on Monday.

6:30 pm Monday night

We tore out the sink, the other two remaining bathroom walls, and took out the window. Seems easy enough right? Well all was going great until I got back from home depot with the cap to close off our old sink, and guess what? It was the WRONG size! And what time is it 9:05 too late to go back and get the right one. Our only option was to shut off the water, and go to bed. We decided we would just live without a toilet and running water for the night.

The pipe with the wrong cap....

Our corroding shower heads that caused all the swelling and warping of the shower in the first place. And our tub filed FULL of all sorts of good stuff!
Our shower head

Tuesday night

Kory's dad comes over and helped us close off all our pipes and install our new shower! When we turn the water back on, we realize that the shower is leaking. Water is again turned off and we go yet another day without water. (we could turn it on for a minute to flush the toilet and wash our hands or fill up our drinking water, so the situation had improved)

Wednesday Day

Kory's dad came and fixed the leak in a flash! And the water is back on! Yeah! Also, we finally found a tile we could both agree on to go on the tub!

Wednesday Night

I am sent to Home depot again to pick up supplies, only to be totally bothered by the sales people there. Everytime, and I mean EVERYTIME I go there, they have to know exactly what it is that I am doing with the parts that I buy, and then try to tell me that I need something different. I get so frustrated because all I wanted to know was where there window sill was. Instead I got told, "We no longer sell window sills" so when I asked ok where are your 1x8's instead of telling me where they are they say "Well what are you using it for?" and I say for a window sill, then they say "Well I would use this kind of board and you don't need a board that big blah blah blah....." and I mean I am just like, first of all, I am just the runner, and all I know is exactly what Kory told me to get. PERIOD. And they don't do it to Kory when he goes, only me. IT MAKES ME SOOO MAD. And it's every department, lumbar, plumbing, electrical. It's so frustrating!

So from the above story, we can't find what we want at home depot, and so we BOTH go to Lowes (we also found out they are open an hour later in case anyone needs something at 9:05pm) we found this information VERY useful.

We don't find anything here either, but Kory gets an idea of what he needs for tomorrow. It's too late to do anything else so we go home and eat a very late dinner and go to bed

Thursday Night

Kory gets all the supplies he needs while I enjoy my dance class.

Friday day

I prime and paint our window sill so Kory can put it in on Saturday morning.

Saturday

Kory put in the window sill, the window, the insulation and put up the drywall! Its green because it is a special kind for bathrooms to help resist mold and water damage...in case you were wondering.

Kory Putting the window sill in (notice the enormous hole in our bathroom we have had ALL week , and our air conditioner was running like CRAZY)
The new window and insulation
Caulked the window and put up the drywall...

So after a very long and draining week, we are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel! We found out our tile wont come in until next Monday, we are hoping by some freak incident it will show up sooner so we can get this bathroom finished.