House Project 2: Painting

So the first project we had once we made it inside the house (apart from cleaning the place up - it was ridiculously dirty, including dead bugs everywhere and tons of construction-related dirt) was to tear down the totally awesome pineapple print wallpaper and apply a beautiful new coat of paint!

Here's what the kitchen looked like after taking the wallpaper down. This took quite some time, since it took us about 3 hours to figure out the actual technique and were hacking away at taking down little square inches of paper for about a third of the wall space. Then we discovered how it was really supposed to be done, and finished in about another 45 minutes. Yeah, that was exciting.

I absolutely love to faux paint, so we decided to try a new technique - venitian plaster. This requires a flat wall without texture, and since we had kinda torn up the drywall anyway in taking down the wallpaper, we needed to replaster everything.

This was sooo messy! Especially the sanding part. You can't really tell in this picture, but my hair was almost completely white!

Anthony picked out the color, and I was a little worried at first. I thought it was too dark.

This was also a very tedious process. You have to apply everything by hand with a small trowel. With the color and thickness of the paint, I felt like I was wiping brownie batter on my walls. It didn't taste nearly as good though.

My dad helped a ton in the painting process. He had never done any faux painting before, but he's a perfectionist like me, so I trusted his abilities :). I really wouldn't have been able to finish it all without him.

After the first coat, we were still a little worried about how it would look after we were done. It was so uneven and splotchy! I didn't want to say anything, but after it was all done, we both admitted we were quite worried throughout the entire second coat.

Here's a detailed shot of the walls after the first coat. You can really see the texture, but you can tell that its just not super pretty!

After it was done, I LOVED it! My walls look like someone smoothed some creamy milk chocolate on them! I can still just look at them and stare for hours and hours! I'm so happy with how it turned out. I could tell my dad really liked it too.

I love faux painting!!!

A Very Merry Maurffin Christmas

Since our new house wasn't ready yet for decorating for Christmas and our old house was in the process of being packed up, our very good friends Jonathan and Bekah were kind enough to let us celebrate Christmas with them. We spent Christmas Eve at their house and all of us opened presents together on Christmas morning. (FYI: Mauro + Griffin = Maurffin...or it could be Griffo...)

This is Bekah's beautiful Christmas tree. My camera battery was packed somewhere, so I only had my cell phone to take pictures with, hence the fact that I'm missing half of the tree (the zoom feature isn't all that fantastic). Bekah even let me help decorate the tree since I was so sad I didn't have one to decorate.

Zilli got in on some Christmas action...isn't she so pretty? This shot took like 15 tries because she wasn't too pleased with a bow being stuck on her head, and it just didn't stick all that well anyway, LOL!

Here is Bekah and Jonathan!

And they wanted to make sure we had something under the tree, so they bought us some new weapons to use against eachother when we argue - Nerf guns!

Jonathan was getting very tired from unwrapping gifts. All the paper around him is from ONE present from his sister-in-law!

Zilli really wanted to participate, so after unwrapping everything, we decided to wrap her up. So pretty! She puts up with so much crap from us - I love this dog!

House Project 1: Shopping

So of course, after finding out that our offer was accepted on the house, we instantly had to go to work buying everything that we needed to fix it up. We set our budget, and I itemized every single thing we would need for the house - things like the appliances, countertops, cabinets, sink, garbage disposal, ceiling fan, dining room light, entry light, blinds, curtains, paint, tools, etc. I had never really thought about how much goes into a kitchen before this (since everywhere else I've gone has already had a kitchen in place), so this was a big learning experience for me.

It was fun, too, of course! I think my favorite part was picking out the granite. When we bought our other house, the event of picking the granite consisted of the salesman giving us a card with about 10 different 2-inch squares of granite on it as samples that we could choose from. Custom granite is much different. We went into the warehouse and, after putting on our hard hats, were greeted with a selection about like this:

I didn't even know where to start! They were all so beautiful! Granite absolutely amazes me. Seeing all of the slabs, there are so many different variations! Plus, granite by itself is so ugly! If you look at the backs of the pieces, they are dull and boring. It is only after the polishing that you get those beautiful colors. And, in case you were wondering, granite varies enormously in cost, depending on where it comes from, the colors that are in it, and other factors. Some pieces are only $4 a square foot, whereas others can be over $30 a square foot. (Our first choice, of course, ended up being about $26 a square foot, so we had to pick another...)

Our granite looks a little bit like this:

We are so excited to get our new kitchen started!

The Best Christmas Present EVER

Finally, after several months (and multiple offers placed) we found our house! We actually weren't completely sure on the house, because of the amount of work that it needed, but it was priced accordingly and still way under market value and was in the exact neighborhood that we wanted to live in. Plus, despite the work that we would have to put into the house, it had plenty of other upgrades that we love, like 9 ft ceilings and 8 ft doors, full built-in surround sound throughout the entire house, an amazing floor plan, giant laundry room, travertine floors, crown molding in some rooms, beautiful carpet, etc.

Most of the work had to be done in the kitchen. What we found out was that the house was a former model home, but the builder had walked on the property and foreclosed on everything. That's all we know for sure, but we've speculated that since the subcontractors weren't being paid, they decided to come in and take their work back. So everything that could go...went! This means they took the appliances, cabinets, countertops, shutters, etc. The only thing left were the place settings from the table (with the plates still all glued together from the set-up). Then they broke a window to make it look like someone tried to break in - the only problem is that they broke the window out instead of in. So much for smart criminals.

Anyway, fortunately for us, they didn't do as much damage as some of the foreclosed homes we've seen where people take the light fixtures, door hardware, doors themselves, carpet, etc. They managed to leave several curtains up, all of the ceiling fans with the exception of one, and left all of the speakers and cables in place.

Well, here are the pictures of the kitchen from when we first purchased the home:


And this is our original concept design of how we wanted the kitchen to eventually look:





Stay tuned for updates as we progress through the remodel! Merry Christmas to US!

A Year in Review

Unfortunately, I haven't been very good about keeping up with this blog. Life has just been so busy! So, to catch everyone up, I'll review the entire year, month by month! Enjoy!

JANUARY

We started the year out visiting the Mauro Clan up in Portland! We had a fantastic time visiting everyone and playing with fireworks (not illegal there like in AZ!).

We also were able to visit our favorite restaurant:

Here they have the most AMAZING (and ridiculously ginormous) pancakes:

The Mauro family has been coming here for generations! Whenever we come here, we practically take up the whole place. Here is everyone that came this time:

The whole trip was a lot of fun, and spent time playing with Andre's new Wii (we brought our DDR mat with us! We're such dorks!) and also just taking some random pictures!

After coming home, it was right to work! Working for Conn-Selmer, I had the biggest event of the year - the Namm Show - one of the largest trade shows in the entire world!

Since the show was held in Anaheim, which was my territory, I had the pleasure of organizing a good portion of the show. I spent 12 hours per day making sure everything went well in the booth, while meeting with dozens of customers, and then each evening was filled with dinners and performances. After the 5 day long event, I was exhausted!

Anthony also came for the weekend, and gave me a great deal of support.

FEBRUARY

Apparently, this was a very boring month, because I have no pictures and can't remember a single thing that we did other than work. :)

MARCH

In March, life picked up again. First of all, it marked the milestone of our greatest obsession yet: Twilight. Anthony actually read the books first, and I resisted, but then after hearing how much he liked them (and he doesn't even like to read!) and hearing from just about everyone else I knew how great the books were, I decided to give them a shot - and then finished them all in a matter of days!

Anthony had some time off, so he came out to California again with me, and we decided to have some fun together. We thought about going to Midieval Times (it had been several years since either of us had been there) but while researching the times and prices, I came across this other dinner show about Pirates! It was so much fun!

Here is us with our Pirate, Jack!

Here's a picture from the show:

Anthony even got a chance to participate - he was brought up on state as a captive and got a chance to show off his amazing acting skills.

Check out this sexy Pirate!

We also decided to venture down to the Santa Monica Pier for lunch in between a few of my dealer visits. I had never been before, and we weren't exactly dressed for the beach, but we had a great time.

I'm always amazed at how much bigger his feet are than mine! I mean, my big toe is about the size of his pinky toe!