Trick or Treat....

We had a busy weekend mostly filled with fun activities, but we managed to fit in a little bit of house work too.

On Saturday we went to our nephew Daniel's first birthday party, which also happened to be a costume party. Its hard to believe he's already 1! He is getting bigger and bigger and walking around on his own now, it's fun seeing him grow. We had a great time celebrating this milestone!

The birthday boy dressed as Charlie Brown!

Cindy and Jim aka Sarah and Todd Palin

Mary and Matt aka Matt from 1996 and Michael Phelps

The Peanuts crew :)

Time for cake!

On Sunday we went over to Matt and Mary's for a pumpkin carving/football watching party. It was a beautiful fall day and we got to enjoy watching the Redskins outdoors on their deck.

Brothers watching the game

The outdoor set up

Pumpkin carving at halftime

Jim starts to carve our first pumpkin

Success!

We even got to vote for our favorite pumpkins and the winners got prizes :)

Chip had to come see the scary cat pumpkin

And here's what our pumpkins look like all lit up...

It wasn't all fun and games though. We worked some more on the kitchen and finally have the first coat of blue paint on! It's a pretty exciting step. Just one more coat and we can finally start installing the cabinets :) I think we're starting with installing our giant pantry since its currently taking up the most space! And I'm guessing we'll be placing our order for our appliances soon too. YAY...I can't wait to have a kitchen again!!! I also worked on organizing a little more, I'm trying to maximize the space of our tiny closets...although its a slow going process.

Here are some pictures of the kitchen and the painting process...As you can see, we didn't paint the entire room blue. Just the parts that will be exposed and not what's going to be behind the cabinets and appliances.

Paint!

Jim and I have both been a little under the weather this week and so we haven't been as productive as we wanted to be, but we seem to be starting to feel better just in time for the weekend.

We finished the drywall last weekend and started painting in the kitchen. The primer is on and we're almost ready for the color and then the cabinets! We have some fun activities to attend this weekend, but hope to fit in some work too.

Here's what the kitchen looks like now:




That's it for now! I hope I'll have a lot more to report back after the weekend :)

Indian Summer

Time flies when you're having fun! Another week has gone by and we have a lot to show for it. We are enjoying this beautiful weather and taking advantage of it to work on some of our outdoor projects too.

I started my week with a visit with the Hudocks who were in town from Washington state (soon to be moving to Germany!) It was great to see Amber, Patrick and their adorable son Brennan, he's so big!

Cindy and Brennan (look at the hair...so cute!)

Cindy, Cristina, Brennan, Amber and Ellen (college roomies + a baby)

The Hudock Family

For the rest of the week and we focused a lot on the kitchen and trying to get closer to getting our cabinets in. Jim finished all the electrical, so we have functioning lights and outlets now (a big accomplishment!)

Jim added new breakers for the new electrical in the kitchen and wanted documentation of the hard work ;)

Our new lights (and we are finally able to plug our little fridge back into the wall instead of using an extension cord)

We have all the drywall up in the kitchen now too. Woohoo! It's pretty exciting. We are almost done with all the mudding and taping of the drywall as well...which means we are pretty close to painting and installing cabinets.

The final pieces of drywall are up!

Jim is happy to be mudding

Just a little more finish work before we can paint

While Jim did some of the finishing touches on the drywall (which I am not so good at) I worked on cleaning up the old front porch area and starting to remove some of the posts. We got most of them out along with other random debris that happened to be under or around the porch.

Lots o' rubble!

We had a whole bunch of helpers on Monday (thanks again to Jim's parents and Andy we got a ton accomplished) Jim's mom helped me with some gardening/landscaping in front and back and Jim's dad helped him with mudding and taping the drywall. I also started with cleaning off the siding in preparation to paint it soon and Andy helped me out with that.

Here I am starting to spray down the siding

Here's what the front of the house looks like right now. We removed the shutters (which we'll probably replace) to clean it off and we've cleared out most of the front porch posts and extra dirt. The next step is painting! And we'll probably do some more landscaping in the spring.

We had some other little helpers with us on Monday too that kept us very entertained.

Our nephew Daniel showed off how he can walk pretty fast with his buggy. And he took quite a nap in his stroller after a walk around the block with Nana.

Buster had fun running around our backyard on Monday too :)

Chip still thinks he's a dog and in addition to playing fetch, he wanted to check out Buster's bone. We had to remind him that he's a cat and cats don't chew on bones.

Jim got tickets for Monday night's hockey game from his work and we took his parents along with us. We had a fun night, with great seats on center ice... really close to the bench, Jim's mom got on the jumbotron, I got a free t-shirt, and the Caps won 5-1 for a great game! Here are some of the highlights...

Action Packed

We've been keeping ourselves pretty busy these days (which is also my excuse for not updating in awhile) but I am going to do my best to bring you up to speed on what we've been doing!

Last weekend, we headed to upstate New York to go to a wedding. We saw a new part of the country that neither of us has ever been to and it was pretty to see the trees starting to change color up there already. Mike, the groom, is Jim's coworker and hockey teammate, so we had a great time hanging out with some of those friends and it was a very nice wedding!

The crew from Virginia at the wedding with the bride and groom

Jim gives the wedding two thumbs up

This past week was probably one of the craziest weeks I've had at work. I've never seen so many phone calls, emails, etc come in to the point that our entire staff dropped everything to pitch in. It wiped us all out and needless to say, I am so glad that a bill was passed and now Congress is in recess and we can truly countdown to Nov. 5 (yes, that's the day AFTER election day!) The highlight of the week was when my friends and old coworkers Anne and Torrey came in to visit and introduce us to their adorable baby boy, James! He is too cute and it was great meeting him.

James Babson visits DC!

On Thursday we celebrated Jim's birthday with a dinner out and some cake and ice cream too. It was nice to relax and eat a nice meal! He's also glad that he's as old as me again ;)

Whoa, that's a lot of candles!

This weekend we were super productive. Thanks a BUNCH to help from my dad and Jim's parents, we made a LOT of progress!!

We did all the electrical wiring in the kitchen...

And installed and wired the recessed lighting...

Chip really wanted to help out with both of those projects. First, he helped Jim read up on wiring...
Then, he tried to get some of the recessed light housings out of the box...

We also put in a bunch of insulation and since there wasn't any there before, this is a big improvement :)
This is the most exciting part...DRYWALL!!! We have the whole ceiling covered and about half of the room done too. It's really starting to come together!



Another big project we worked on was taking down the extraneous parts of our front porch. After we started to demo, we realized how poorly constructed they were (cinder blocks and rotting wood).

And here's the end result (well until we get it cleaned up a bit more and maybe do a little landscaping too!)
We celebrated Jim's birthday again on Saturday night with more of his family and his mom's famous dream pie. Our nephew Daniel was there too and hammed it up for the crowd :)