New Floors are In!

The floors are installed! We had to estimate where the base cabinets will go, but since they're on feet we wanted the floors to extend to most of the way around the walls. It's a night and day difference over what we had before!

Our new(er) pantry space with a complete floor! I think I'm more excited about this space than anything else!

Next up - electrical tonight, framing the doorway to the pantry and patching plaster. Oh yeah, and we also need to take the sofit down. We're hoping to be able to work on the walls on Thursday and Friday, so we can hang cabinets this weekend!

Demolition Pictures

As promised, here is the before picture of our kitchen (which is really a "during" picture, as the stove and fridge are out of the room, and the floor has been torn up.

Pantry in the hallway. The pantry space had been added in the past, but the doorway was only 11 inches wide! We are opening the wall and changing the layout of the space to be much more effective.

Me scraping wallpaper glue off the walls. We discovered after removing the first cabinet that the gray paint on the walls was actually covering a layer of wallpaper below. We're taking that all off, patching rough spots in the plaster, and will then prep the walls for paint in a few days.

Bottom cabinets totally removed! There are some fairly large gaps in where the subfloor doesn't meet the walls, so we will be filling all of those spaces in. Hopefully we'll fix that mouse problem once and for all! (wishful thinking, I know!)

Our new kitchen in the back of the car. I actually had to remove about 6 boxes to be able to take this picture. All of the kitchen cabinets, light fixtures, drawer pulls, faucet, even the kitchen sink are inside!

A little backwards, but this is our kitchen floor during demo. The white with black was peel and stick vinyl tiles, on top of a cardboard layer, on top of those lovely red and brown clay tiles. You're seeing the tar residue on top of the subfloor, which was all that was left from the tiles.

And the Remodel is ON!

Joe and I spent a few days, after learning that our floors sloped too much to lay the laminate we wanted, deciding how we wanted to proceed. We figured we had two options - not worry about the slope, lay some cheap vinyl flooring and get on with our lives, or fix the problem, get the floors we wanted and be happy with the kitchen. I went home for Christmas thinking we'd take a few days and make our final decision. Well, my grandmother gave my sisters and me each a wonderful gift from her personal savings that allowed us some breathing room, and gave us the boost in the budget we needed! We had seen IKEA kitchen cabinets in our few trips to that fantastic store, and knew they'd fit into our budget. After playing with their kitchen designer software, we realized new cabinets were in fact affordable. Unfortunately, the closest IKEA to us is in Chicago, so we never get the chance to go.

Since we were in St. Louis for Christmas, we decided that on Friday after Christmas, Joe and I would get up early, make the 4 1/2 hr trek up to Chicago, and go shop for our new kitchen! We arrived Friday at noon, and spent the next 5 hours shopping, evaluating, checking out and loading all of the boxes for the kitchen into my dad's Denali. IKEA is able to keep costs low by selling stock cabinets that are unassembled, so we were able to buy an entire kitchen full of cabinets for about half as much as the next cheapest estimate we got, and had them with us the same day! We had to spend about half an hour just loading the car, figuring out the best way to get the two and a half carts of boxes to fit just right, but we managed with a little room left to spare!

The weather prevented us from heading back Friday night like we wanted, so we got up Saturday and headed for St. Louis. After a great party Saturday night celebrating Ashley and Mikael's engagement, Joe and I headed for KC bright and early Sunday morning. We spent Sunday taking out the dishwasher, sink, disposal and base cabinets. In the process we discovered that the previous owner had painted two coats of paint over wallpaper that was still on the walls, so I worked on tearing all of the paper off. I still have a while to go, but we're getting closer! We also started expanding the doorway to the small pantry off the kitchen, so that we can open it up and make it fully functional.

Today the flooring guys are here, fixing the slope in the floor that started this whole mess. Joe, a friend and I are going to work tonight on patching the plaster, stripping the rest of the wallpaper and getting the walls ready to paint and assembling cabinets. We're trying to document the whole process, so my next post will have a bunch of pictures that will have to be our "before", even though the floors and appliances were already gone!

Another adventure in our old home

Joe and I decided it was time to replace our failing oven a few weeks ago. We went to the store, finally picked out a new range, ended up also getting a new dishwasher, as that was old and breaking too. Well, our kitchen floor was old peel and stick vinyl tiles that had become discolored, cracked and pulling up. We thought, if we're putting new appliances in, that would be the perfect time to redo the floors!

B/c we really don't like the white to off-white/yellow the current floor has become, and since it shows dirt like crazy, we opted for a dark slate look laminate. The sales person was concerned about the few tiles that were peeling up, and asked if we could pull them up to see the condition of the subfloor. Off came the peel and stick, to reveal a cardboard layer underneath. Thinking there's no way we have cardboard for a subfloor, we kept going, this time uncovering red and brown clay tiles! Below that we hit the first layer of subfloor.

The gray tiles are the laminate that we chose to lay in the kitchen. That plan has run haywire, though, once we discovered that the house has settled and the kitchen floor slopes too much, according to the floor install guy, so we had to halt the new floor process. And now the floor is completely stripped down to the subfloor, and the appliances are all sitting in the dining room... We're going to try to figure out what we are going to do next, b/c our options are to tear out and fix the slope by replacing the subfloor, or pick a different type of flooring that will conform to the slope of the floor and deal with this old house quirk. We're still deciding what to do. Another floor guy is coming tomorrow to give us their estimate and opinion on what our options are.

Peanut Butter Cookies

So if for nothing else, I suppose I can use this blog to list recipes I make and give reviews of what Joe and I (and in some cases, the dogs) thought about each. Last night I made Joe's favorite peanut butter cookies, which honestly is the recipe off the back of the Jif peanut butter jar. They never fail to please!

Irresistible Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

•	3/4 cup Jif® Creamy Peanut Butter
•	1/2 stick Crisco® All-Vegetable Shortening Sticks
OR	1/2 cup Crisco® All-Vegetable Shortening
•	1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
•	3 tablespoons milk
•	1 tablespoon vanilla extract
•	1 large egg
•	1 3/4 cups Pillsbury BEST® All Purpose Flour
•	3/4 teaspoon baking soda
•	3/4 teaspoon salt 1 bag of Hershey kisses (enough for 1 per cookie)

Directions:

1.	HEAT oven to 375°F. Combine peanut butter, shortening, brown sugar, milk and vanilla in large bowl. Beat at medium speed of electric mixer until well blended. Add egg. Beat just until blended.
2.	COMBINE flour, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture at low speed. Mix just until blended. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls 2-inches apart onto greased baking sheet. Optional: sprinkle cookies with white sugar.
3.	BAKE one baking sheet at a time 7 to 8 minutes, or until set and just beginning to brown. Set a Hershey kiss on each cookie as soon as they come out of the oven and while they're starting to cool. Cool 2 minutes on baking sheet. Remove cookies to cooling racks to cool completely. Watch them disappear!

Yield: 3 dozen cookies

Late Pictures from Thanksgiving

Better late than never, right? We spent Thanksgiving in Detroit with Joe's dad and his family and had a wonderful time. It was very laid back, but gave us plenty of time to catch up and enjoy each other's company. We went a little crazy in trying to spoil James... I guess that's first kid syndrome - Joe and I both know how frustrating the next kid in the family can be when you're trying to keep the spotlight all to yourself! :) We also got to meet the newest members of the family, Ruth and Ethan, who are as adorable as you can imagine. These pictures don't do these babies justice!!

Joe showing James how his new Pez dispenser works. It didn't take too long for James to figure that one out!

We also got James some play dough with different moulding accessories, based on Dan and Lisa's recommendations. Man, was it a hit! After exhausting Grandma Dianne, I took over to the play dough games, which ultimately kept him entertained for quite a while!

Linda with Ethan, and Lisa with Ruth. Aren't they so cute??

Joe with our stack of gifts for the kids. Don't worry, not all of those gifts were for James. But most were...Ethan was really getting into the picture taking session. He was incredibly alert and more than willing to throw out a few cute poses. Not bad for a 6 week old!

I hope we're able to see everyone again soon, as it seems like we missed out on a lot of James' getting older over then last two and a half years. They just grow too quickly!

Pumpkin Cookies

I discovered this recipe last fall and added some elements from my favorite pumpkin bread recipe. After a few batches of Joe's dutiful reviews, I have perfected what he calls "the crack cookies" - they're incredibly addicting, and you can't stop at just one...or two...or three...

I'll admit, I am a baker who takes liberties with adding and deleting ingredients, so this is as close as I can get to writing the recipe down. I always sample as I go along to make sure everything looks/smells right, and with this recipe, when in doubt add more spice!

1 cup shortening
2 cups white sugar
1 can pumpkin puree (approximately 2 cups)
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 tsp cinnamon*
1 tsp nutmeg*
1 tsp allspice*
1 tsp ground cloves*
1 bag white chocolate chips, but could also use butterscotch chips

* I also play around with these proportions until I can smell and taste the spice in the batter

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease cookie sheets, or line with parchment paper.
2. In a medium bowl, cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the pumpkin and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder and spices; stir slowly into creamed mixture. Then mix in white chocolate chips.

At this point you could just drop teaspoonfuls of the dough mixture onto the cookie sheets and bake. Our favorite method is to turn this into a pumpkin snickerdoodle of sorts, and roll the indivdual cookie dough balls in a cinnamon/sugar mixture, coat the ball entirely, and then place on the cookie sheets.

3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. Allow cookies to cool for 1 minute on cookie sheet before transferring to a wire rack.

I'll say this will make approximately 45-50 cookies, but if I make them with Joe in the house, I never get a final count.... he sneaks them off the wire racks as fast as I pull them out of the oven!

Cleaning House

I finally got around to switching my winter and summer clothes a few weeks ago. I knew I needed to do it, but the weather here wasn't that bad, so I didn't have a true incentive to do it. When I started, however, I realized that I would need to go through my drawers and shelves in the closet and figure out what I wanted to keep out through winter, and what I'd put away. As I started going through clothes, I decided to evaluate when I had last worn each item, whether it fit right, or if I was hanging on to things that were cluttering up my wardrobe. After about 15 minutes, I realized that it was time for me to truly evaluate my entire wardrobe, item by item. It seems that I've been going through the motions since I graduated from my college days... if something fit, I might as well keep it. You never know when something will come back in style, if it isn't in style any more! Well, I faced the facts, and began purging. Piece by piece, I faced the fact that no, I did not need that shirt that I hadn't worn in 4 years, nor did I need every workout top and sports bra I've had since 2002. The pile of clothes to give away kept growing and growing, to the point that the pile toppled over and it was time to start the second pile! After a few hours, I made it through every single item of clothing, from shirts and pants, to skirts and shoes. And when I was all said and done, I not only managed to fill 5 boxes with items I no longer wore, but also eliminated the need to "swap" summer and winter clothes! They all fit in my drawer and closet. (And yes, Joe still has his whole side of the closet and his share of shelf space!)
I'm amazed at how much I was able to get rid of, that had been simply taking up space and cluttering my life. And the best part? I can give a whole lot of good clothing to people who may actually wear and need it, and I'm left with the items that make me feel and look my best! It's a win-win situation in my book. :)