1st day of school :)

We started school a little bit late this year (the public schools started on August 21st) due to the move, but we don't usually take days off for Holiday's, at least not as many as the public schools do, so I'm sure we'll finish on schedule.

We decided to go with K12 this year, I needed something cheap, planned and assistance as needed, K12 fits the bill. These are two pictures of all the books we received yesterday, we have two more boxes coming next week with at least 3 more books in them. I missed the shot of "my" books, behind the box by M's feet...



You will have to trust me when I say that I was overwhelmed with all of the materials, Holy Cow!



But we jumped in today and it went rather well :) I can see that it will be challenging with three different grade levels, but I think we'll figure it out soon. I am loving that we are doing all the same things public school kids are doing but in the level that the kids are on. M is doing mostly 3rd grade work, though he's in 2nd grade and LittleMan is doing 1st grade math, though he's in Kindergarten. L is on level, doing 5th grade work, but they gave me lots of idea's on how to challenge her in the Language Arts department since she is above grade level in several areas.

And to think, just yesterday I was feeling fairly settled with the living room, we get 9 boxes of things and wham-o the room is a disaster once again :P.

Before and after :)

I had hoped to be farther along in some of my "surprise" projects, but such is life. I'll show you pictures anyway, because it still looks good :).

Before of the fireplace....


During...

And after...




I absolutely love the fireplace, it is my favorite part of my house by far! My dad is a tile setter and tiled this for me the weekend he and my mom came up to help us move. My mom painted the door thing for me and I love it too!

And now on to my entryway and hallway, it's still a work in progress, but I'm getting there!

Before...
And during....



I already started sanding it at this point, so the floor looks pretty beat up, but it's in great shape and will look fabulous once it's finished, if it gets finished ;).

I'm still unpacking, organizing, sorting and all of that fun stuff, hopefully some day I'll feel settled, we'll see how long that takes, lol.

Utah SEO.

What wouldn't I do for my hunny? ;).

Hubby Goes Utah SEO for Free Lunch

If you haven’t heard, my husband has been trying to rank on Google for Utah SEO. He has until the end of this month to land in the #1 spot for the term. If he makes it, he gets a free lunch… and he loves free lunch!

It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, but at this point he is getting desperate, and so has been trying to grab some last minute links to his site to improve its ranking.

If you’re willing to help out, create some links to his blog (http://stuthewise.wordpress.com) using the link text of Utah SEO. After the end of the month, you can take the links back down.

Since the first week of this month, he’s gone from not ranking at all to #92, and all the way up to #55. Looks like the free lunch is a lost cause, but he’s a never retreat, never surrender kind of guy. And me posting this on my blog helps fill in the gap of me having to find my camera, take pictures of my "surprise" and write a post. I'll get to it soon, I promise!

A surprise!

You will have to be patient and wait for it, but we made a few changes on our list of remodels for our home. It's hard not to tackle new projects when you have great minds gathered together with no TV, lol. My parents and my sister and brother-in-law have been staying at the new place the last two nights, so we discussed future plans and most of them were met with "let's do that today" or "tomorrow we can do ...."

I will post pictures of the changes soon. I'm sure some will be surprised that we tackled the projects right now. I know I have been thinking "but we move tomorrow, should we really be doing this now?" hehe.

And thanks to everyone for the support and enthusiasm, I appreciate it very much :)

The rest of the house.

The boys room, I like the contrast of the two colors, two walls are the blue color and two are the beige color.


We let the boys put their hand prints in their closet and left the closet the rooms original blue color. I also put the date we put their hand prints in their, so we can see how they grow :).

This is my bedroom, the color is a bit more green than it looks in the pic, I really like it. It's calming to me, I will probably go with some "beach" theme in here, not overboard, but just a little something so it looks like this color was intentional and not the $5 mistint paint, hehe.

The Laundry room and 1/2 bath, I wanted something bright for this area, it's strangely close to the same color as my bedroom, lol.
And here is L's room, she wanted tons of color so we compromised and made a bouncing ball theme, the circles travel up and down the walls around the room. She loves it, as do I.
We also let L do as she wished with her closet, she also added the date she painted her room too.
A better view of the "balls"

I didn't add a picture of the full bath because it's small and really hard to take a picture of, it's a sage green in there, it will look perfect with the shower curtain I made.

A few pictures.

I just realized that I only took pictures of two rooms, doh! So I guess tomorrow when I go pick up the Rug Doctor, I'll take some more pics :).

First up is the living room with the old paint on the right-side wall and my older sister on the right (though we are currently the same age, ha) and my "little" cousin, that is 6 inches taller than me, on the left. They are painting over the dirty, icky fireplace brick. The "brown" is really a purple color, but it's ok, it's better than before.




Now you can see the room with the walls painted "Ivory" and "cloves" I love. Love. The orange color, though it does have a tiny bit of brown in it that isn't showing up in the pics, it's more "pumpkin pie" than "orange" as it looks here.

Next is the kitchen, which we did nothing to, except make a big fat mess in :)



Here is my sister cleaning up after herself, which was hard to do with all those paint supplies and snacks around.
And the last view of the kitchen, the paint really is yellow, it doesn't fade to white, not sure why it looks like it does. And I'm pretty sure I'll be removing those sunflowers, just a bit too many flowers for my tastes.

I only added the kitchen pictures because I forgot to put them up on my post with all the house pics and it's the only other room I took pictures of, lol.

Oh and I found another picture of the living room, this view is from the other end with my back against the fireplace. I'm trying to show that the front door is now "redbrick" which is actually almost the exact "orange" of the fireplace wall, lol. I apparently can only pick a few random shades of certain colors as you'll see when I post more pics later. (We were going to get a new door right away, but after sanding it and painting it, we'll probably wait a bit, it looks pretty good now).

We are officialy homeowners :)

Last friday at 3:oo p.m., we got the call that the house was officially ours :). After dancing around for a minute, my sister and I jumped in her car and took off over there to get working on the paining. We planned on painting 6 rooms in the house in two-three days, yikes. (pictures to come soon). We arrive and the homeowner is still there packing and moving, sigh. But two rooms were empty so we decided to take those two over and maybe that would put a fire under his butt and get him moving, totally worked too ;).

He did say that we didn't put the dishwasher in the contract so he planned on taking it, but the contract did have a a/c unit in it and he didn't have one, it was a family members, so if we wanted to keep the dishwasher we needed to say never mind to the a/c unit. We happily agreed since we are lucky enough to get my sisters a/c until instead, ha. I didn't feel like arguing with him, I just wanted him out of my house. He then asked if we wanted to keep the carpet or if we planned on replacing it. I said that we will replace it eventually but not now and he said "okay, I guess it can stay" um, who are you? weirdo.

We painted and painted and painted our little hearts out and it is now complete. A few minor touch ups and a little finishing then I wont have to paint for quite awhile :). We already started moving too, though we don't plan on bringing the furniture over until Saturday when we have a uHaul and some helpers.

As you can imagine, I have a very busy week ahead of me, but I'll post some pictures as soon as I can. This week also starts the kids online school, which I need to finish choosing the curriculum for and I'm still working part-time from home, so we'll see how often I get on here :).

Shameless post :)

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me :)

I think this year I'll be getting the most spoiled for my birthday, lol. I get a new house, my mom and my sister will be coming up to help me paint (Sabra, you are more than welcome to join us ;) ) and I'm getting over the flu I've had the last couple of days, woot!

Less than a week until closing, let's hope the money transfers quickly so we can get the keys the next day and start painting and painting!!