The Yellow Basement of DOOM

Well, our basement got painted, but it didn't turn out quite the way we had planned. The big room was painted the yellow color we had picked out, and looks very nice.

However, instead of matching the beige color already in the hallway, they painted it...yellow!

Ummm, yeah...
And instead of painting the two bedrooms and the storage room the color we had picked out, they painted them...YELLOW! AHHHHHHHH!!!!

Sadie Gets Into the Holiday Spirit...

Let it Snow!

(Although preferably not on the streets, sidewalks and driveways)
Nora got to wear her snowsuit for the first time when we went to the neighborhood Christmas get-together. Here she is before we left:
Here she is after we got back:

Out of the woodworks

We're very happy with the progress that has been made with the basement this last week. The mudder finished all his work a few days ago and they also finished the texturing on the walls and the ceiling. It looks very good downstairs. Yesterday they were working on the baseboards and windows. They put in 3 of the 4 doors we are adding and made the shelves for the closest in each bedroom. All of it looks really good I think. The above picture is reverse of what I usually take. I'm facing towards the direction where I am usually standing.

Mud Mud Mud

As you can see, we are still working on the drywall, specifically the muding and taping aspect. They did some nice work on the corners to give them the smooth corner type thing. Bad news is that we're told the new finish date is 2nd week in January, what a bummer.

Nora's 6 Month/Holiday Pictures

My Mom and I took Nora to Cottonwood Mall last week to get her 6 month pictures taken. She wasn't in a very good mood, and I was worried that the pictures weren't going to turn out very well, but I was pleasantly surprised with what they got:





This picture more accurately depicts her mood that day:

Nora Meets Santa

This was Nora's first experience meeting Santa. He was at the Mom and Me scrapbook store. It was a little hard to get her to smile because she was so fascinated with looking at all the new things and people around her, but she did give us some cute ones.

Our Thanksgiving Holiday

For Thanksgiving this year we flew down with the Johns family to visit Karin, Ricky, Andrew, John and Ben in Arizona. We left SLC on November 21, and returned home on the 26. We celebrated two birthdays there - Bethany's (on the 22) and John's (on the 23). Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful. It was so nice for me to actually be able to eat it this year! After dinner we went to go see the movie 'Flushed Away'. Who knew that singing slugs could be so entertaining? On Saturday John had a Ninja themed birthday, which was awesome. It was really fun to see Reece do his board-breaking moves. We went to dinner at the best restaurant in the whole world - The Cheesecake Factory. Yummmm! We flew home on Sunday, which was a pretty crazy day at the airport, but since we got there very early, it went pretty smoothly (except for the fact that the Wendy's there was out of Frosties). It was a really fun trip and we enjoyed spending time with the Burtons, and seeing their new house!

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

Nora eating pears!

The drywall is up!

Woot, finally we have the drywall all up. They came yesterday and finished most of the work then finished the rest of it today. There was a slight mystery that occured yesterday while they were working on the drywall. Our kitchen sink water line runs right next to the heating vent that appears in the above picture. Around noon yesterday all of the hot water stopped working on that line. We went down and checked to see if the drywallers turned off the hot water to that area for some reason, but we didn't find anything. I got home from work today and tested the water, it was fine. We still have no idea why it wasn't working.

Around 5:00 I got a knock on the door. It was the tape and mudder. I think he did everything he could until the light ran out around 6:00. So far I'm very satisfied with the drywall job. The speaker wires are there somewhere I am assured over and over again by our contractor. I'm just hoping they actually do turn up when they finish the eletrical.

Let the games begin!

Wow... it really looks different with the drywall separating the storage room from the other bedrooms. They finished ~40% of the drywall while we were on our trip to Pheonix. That has an interesting story in and of itself... So we had to have the drywallers come and work on it Wednesday afternoon while we were on vacation. We got a call around noon from ADT saying that our basement smoke detector had gone off. They sent out a fireman and we got in touch with our contractor. Turns out cutting the drywall for the arch set off the smoke detector. The fireman turned off the alarm and everyone went on their way. Though it had us worried for a little while :(.

We were happy to see the results when we returned home Sunday evening. They had drywalled most of the southern part of the basement. The storage room was completely done and the ceiling and outerwall of the bedrooms were completed. The main room didn't seem to be touched (Much to my glee, seeing how they still haven't put in the speaker cables yet...). Hopefully they will continue working on the drywall for the rest of this week. It is really coming along nicely now.

The neverending basement

Well, still not too much to say about our basement this last week. I showed up on Tuesday after work to a huge truck in the front of our house. They just wanted to verify with me that they could take off the basement window in order to get the sheetrock in. They had a huge crane on the truck that picked up the drywall and moved it over the house to the side yard. I was imaging 500+ pounds of drywall breaking off the crane going right through our living room. Luckily everything went fine. As you can see, all the drywall is safely in the basement now.

We got a call from Mike saying that the City were being bums and the soonest that they could do our 4 point inspection was Nov 29th :(. The project was suppose to be done Nov 25th. So I guess we'll have to wait a little longer until we have it all done. I'm hoping that it will all be done a couple of weeks into Dec. They still need to finish a few more things before they put up the drywall (Surround sound rough-ins and a couple other things). I hate construction :(.

Jenny Joins the Quarter-of-a-Century Club

Yes, that's right. Jenny turned 25 on Nov. 10. To celebrate the day, Bethany and Kate took her to lunch at the Spaghetti Factory, and to get a pedicure. Also, there was a stop at the mall photobooth:
Then Mike took her to dinner at P.F. Changs. Mmmmmmm.
On Sunday, Nov. 12 we had a birthday dinner at Mom and Dad's house. Nora was pretty intrigued by the cake and the candles! The dinner was delicious, and we had lots of fun.

2 Weeks to go

So the company that we contracted to finish our basement has a total of 2 weeks to finish our basement, at least that's what they told us when they started. And once again, nothing was really done to the basement this week. Well, I can't say that nothing was done, they did come and clean it out entirely. All the scraps and extra insulation was hauled out on Thursday this last week. I'm hoping that means that they'll be moving to the next step of drywalling soon. However... they still haven't finished doing a couple of things that need to happen before the drywall goes up (put in the rough in for the surround sound and put in a conduit to the room's ceiling for a future projector). Ah well, I guess we shouldn't stress too much about it. I just wish they would call us back about our concerns.

Hey Aunt B and Uncle Reece...

Mmmmmm

Nora had her first taste of solid food today. She gave rice cereal a try, and I think she enjoyed it. She was very excited! I think for her first time eating from a spoon she did very well.

Saturday Night

We went to Man of Lamancha on Saturday night with Jenny's family. Becky was nice enough to babysit Nora. It was a really good production. Sancho was the best.

Happy Halloween!

We are a little late in posting this, but Happy Halloween. As you can see in the picture, Nora, Sadie and Jenny were cats this year. We got a lot of trick-or-treaters that came to our house, and it was fun to see all of their costumes.

Basement Update

Yeah... you may be wondering where the picture is this week of the basement. If you scroll a few posts down you can see it, yeah, they didn't do anything this week. We're getting a little nervous because they are supposed to be completely done by the day before Thanksgiving, which is only a few weeks away. They still need to finish up the little remaining electrical work that has to be done, dry wall, finish insulating, install all the kitchen stuff, flooring, put the doors in. I guess it's not that much work left, but we'd feel much better if they had worked on it this week.

Blue Man Group

On Tuesday, October 30, we went to go see the Blue Man Group at the Delta Center. The show was part of their "How to be a Mega Star, 2.0" tour. It was a pretty funny production. We went with Dad, Mom, Beth, Reece and Kate.

And there was light

We finally had our doors demoed and new ones framed, woo hoo! The electrician came back and finished the rest of the eletrical work (well, most of it) and even had some of the lights working. A few more things need to get done and we can get the drywall done.

A Tale of Two Kitties

Lucky Nora has two costumes for Halloween this year. Mommy bought the orange kitty one. Grammy and Aunt Karin saw the black one on sale, so they bought it. It looked pretty big, and we thought it might fit her when she was older, but we tried it on for kicks and it fits right now! She looks pretty darn cute in both of them!



Here is Sadie checking out the imposter...

The next step

We decided to paint all our basement walls pink... heh, just kidding. They put up the insulation today for most of the basement... The still haven't knocked out our existing doors to move and replace them (hopefully they will do that sometime this week). I was happy to discover the insulators did not cover the walls that still needed to be demoed.

Pumpkin Carving Party

Today we decided to have a pumpkin carving party with Bethany, Reece and Kate.

Here we are picking out our pumpkins on a cold, rainy Tuesday evening.

We ordered pizza, watched Hoodwinked, and then got to the main event - carving the pumpkins. Kate carved a cat, Reece did a crazy pig face, Beth did a haunted house, Jenny did a cat face, and Mike did an owl.