Success!

The delay in posting this week has been due to one thing, and that's a successful boat show! My gut feeling was spot on - we met all of my sales goals for kayaks, and did sell a few sailboats, including one of the bigger boats! The stack of pending sales contracts on my desk is quite large, so trying to sort through that has taken a while. That, and the fact that while we were moving out of the show, we decided to completely remodel my store. Top to bottom, every fixture moved, along with everything on those shelves! Now, almost one week later, and things are almost entirely put back together.

In other news, the lawsuit is officially over. What a relief! Now we are able to close on the refinance of our home on Wednesday and check that off the list. As I know I've mentioned before, we're going to be able to use the new equity in the house to go from 2 loans, one being an ARM that resets in 3 1/2 years, to 1 fixed rate loan with a lower interest rate. We'll be saving a few hundred dollars each month, which is a welcome change.

Oh, and although today is the last day of February, we managed to have a snow storm come through and drop more snow than we've received all year on us! So far we've got about 4 inches, and it's still falling. It hasn't snowed enough this year (in my opinion, so I can't wait to go home after work and play with the pups, then relax on the couch watching movies or something. It's been almost 3 weeks since I've had a weekend off, and I'm definitely ready!

Last Round of Boat Shows

This is the height of boat show season for us. For us midwesterners, they typically start right after the New Year, and run until about the beginning of March, just in time to salivate for another month and change before it's warm enough to be on the water. Being in the boating industry means that for the last 8 weeks, our jobs are all about creating incentives to buy, laying out floor space, cleaning boats, moving in to shows, frantically setting up, long hours on our feet talking to potential customers for 12 hours or more a day, tearing everything down in one 8 hour time period, and getting ready for the next show. I've been to 4 shows so far this season, each lasting 3-5 days a piece. This weekend is the last of the shows - I can't wait for it all to be over for another year!

We decided to go big at this last Kansas City store, and practically emptied my store of its inventory to set up in our 5,000 square foot show space. It's a good thing store traffic is still slow, as I have had next to nothing to show customers this week! We started setting up for this particular show last Tuesday, and the show opened for last Friday-Sunday. I got to work at the store, catching up, this week, and tomorrow starts the last weekend. We had some really good traffic last weekend, with a few customers expressing very promising interest. I'm cautiously optimistic that we may sell a big boat or two at the show this weekend, or in the week immediately following the close of the show.

In other news, it looks like the lawsuit we have been involved in for the last year and a half is going to be settled in the next week.

Things are really starting to come together! I'd love to say we can relax and de-stress, but Joe's busier than ever for business this Spring, and I'll be the same in another couple of weeks. Hopefully things will continue to work out for us this year, despite all of the economic doom and gloom out there :)

Meet the newest member of our family...

While many of our friends and extended family continue to add babies to their families, our family has continued to stretch also. Only we seem to always add four-legged babies, in the form of puppies! Not to be left out, my sister, Ashley, and her fiance Mikael decided to take the plunge this weekend and brought home this sweet little girl...

Isn't she absolutely adorable??? They think her name will be Lily, and she's a 4 month old black lab mix. And when awake, she's a ball of fire! She's had fun getting to meet her cousins down the street this weekend. Molly's really taken to having a new friend to gnaw on, and the verdict's still out if Lucy will be friendly or old and grumpy. Oh, how this brings back memories of when Molly was a little 6 month old puppy! It's so funny to watch Molly and Lily play. Molly definitely likes to be in control, but so does Lily!



I've uploaded a video clip which is really funny, of the two of them playing. Molly likes to knock her down, but Lily will roll over and come back up with her jaws snapping and ready to pounce! What's really going to be funny is how their role will change once Lily grows into her skin - if her paws are any indication, she has the potential to be a big dog!

Holy Cow!

There is so much gloom and doom in the news these days, that Joe and I were nervous about our ability to get our house refinanced. When we bought it in the fall of 2007, we were one of the last people to take advantage of a 100% loan, as we knew our house would need some improvements and wanted to save as much cash as possible for them. Well, in the process we ended up with 75%/25% loans, at just under 7% (the going rate at the time). W

Over the past year, the values of the homes in our neighborhood have fallen about 4%. We've spent a good deal of money over the past year and a half, replacing the roof, new landscaping, new paint, new windows, new lighting, new screened porch and now a brand new kitchen. We were hoping that a gamble in putting money into the house would increase our equity, over pouring more money into mortgage payments. So Monday, we continued the refi process, now that the kitchen is finished. The appraiser came out, and in half an hour was done. I've been even more nervous to find out the results. I've been reassuring myself that even if we don't see a good return on our money for the kitchen, we're so much happier and down the road when the market picks back up, it'll be worth it.

Well, this morning, I got the email from the bank, telling us that the appraisal came in much higher than we expected! We've added $30,000 in value to the home since we bought it in Sep. 2007, and only put about $12,000 of cash into the house. We are so incredibly excited that in this bad housing market, so far we've made some positive changes! Now we're rushing to put the rest of the paperwork in place so we can refi at about 5% and use the equity as our down payment. Hooray! Fingers crossed now that everything with the refi goes smoothly at this point.

Clean House Again!

We are in the process of refinancing the house, and used the appraiser's visit as our deadline for getting the house finished. This weekend we spent a while cleaning and organizing, and we have our home back, finally! So here are the long awaited pictures of the (almost completely) finished kitchen! Above, the inside of the finished pantry. You have no idea how much I love this new space! It's so much more usable now, and the best part is below!


The new pantry door Joe installed -we can close the pantry, hiding the stuff inside and keeping the dogs out of the food bin and the trash can! Off to the left, you can see our new key ring holder. Hopefully we'll actually use it and stop losing our keys!

The hallway and landing to the garage and basement. We still need to decide what we're going to do with the hardwood floor landing, as it desperately needs to be refinished or replaced. It's definitely seen better days!
This picture shows the inside cabinet lighting and the under cabinet lighting. It shows off much better at night, but I thought I'd get some pictures posted regardless. We still have to finish the outlet, as the face plate isn't totally finished.
Notice we finally installed the drawer knobs and pulls! It only took a couple of weeks and some trusted friends' advice before we finally pulled the trigger and bought a different set than we originally ordered. Now we'll just have to figure out how to either send them back to IKEA or sell them online, so we're not out all that money.
Toe kicks and baseboards have all been installed. One air register left, and we can call this kitchen done! I'd still like to find window treatments (and we need to get rid of the old screen door, which is what you see in the window over the kitchen sink), but I'm ok with the way it is for now.
We ran out of door knobs, so we'll get the rest up and installed tonight, since it won't take long at all.
And the rest of the house is put together again, finally! To prove I didn't post old pictures of the dining room, you can see the new kitchen through the doorway. :)
Ahhh.... So nice! We think we officially killed our vacuum cleaner, even after Joe took it all apart last night and cleaned every piece. So we might have to go buy a new one to finish all of the cleaning, but for now, I'm satisfied!

Spring Cleaning

Spring came a little early to the Jeppson house yesterday. We finally(!) were able to move the refrigerator back into the kitchen, but to do so, the doors had to come off and the contents emptied. Well, since we don't typically spend much time looking into an empty fridge, we hadn't really paid attention to how badly it needed to be cleaned. So while Joe was getting ready for work, I spent about an hour cleaning the whole thing, inside and out. We still have some scuff marks to get off the outside, but man, it almost looks new again.... at least on the inside!

This past weekend I was in Chicago for work, and secretly hoped that when I got home Joe would have the whole room completely finished. That didn't exactly happen. He did finish the entire pantry space, doors and all, which looks amazing! So yesterday I spent the day painting trim, doorways, and the doors to the pantry and garage. I still have the windows and door to the backyard to do, so at least another few hours of painting left.

When Joe got home, we started to install the under cabinet lighting. With the first section installed and on, we were pretty motivated to keep working and get the rest done. Except for forgetting to buy another extension cord for the lights on the other side of the room! Oh well. Now we have to wait for that to arrive before we can finish installing the rest of the lights, in case their position needs to change. We were then going to start on finishing the cabinet trim that hides the under cabinet lighting, only to discover we'll need to make some detailed cuts, best performed on a table saw. Which we don't own. Hmm.

Stumped again, we started to pull out the drawer pulls and handles, as that's really the last of the projects before we're totally done. Joe found a local place that apparently has thousands of pulls, and wants us to go there first to be sure we want to use the ones we already bought. So right now we're planning on visiting that store tomorrow night after Joe gets off work.

One of these days, EVERY last project will be finished, and we'll be able to say the room is done. Hopefully that'll be in another day or two. We'll see!