Now We're Cooking With, uh, Microwaves

When we bought the house, it had all new appliances... except the microwave. Who replaces all their appliances, but not the decrepit old microwave that not only is ugly, old and broken, but now doesn't match anything else in the kitchen? Here is a pic of the microwave that came with the house:


Lucky for us, we have great friends who are receptive to our wants and needs. Enter Chad Hauer, who isn't only our Real Estate agent, but is also one of my best friends; not to mention a gentleman and scholar. He recently remodeled the kitchen in his house and upgraded to a fancy-schmancy microwave, so he sold me the almost new microwave that came with his house for a song.

"Great," I thought, "I'll just swap this new microwave out with the old one after work one night, it will be a breeze!" Or so I thought. The next two hours of my life can be summed up with one question:

WHO THE HELL LAG BOLTS A MICROWAVE TO THE WALL!?!?

After all was said and done, the new microwave is now perched in its new home, reheating leftovers. And NOT lag bolted to the wall.

Oh, the joys of home ownership...

It's Starting to Look Like a House Again

The weekend after Thanksgiving was a very productive weekend. My Dad came over and stayed with us for a few days and we went to town on the house and made some serious progress.

We started out Friday by doing the last bits of demolition that needed to be done, like removing the ceiling.

Once this was done, we got to work framing up the new walk-in closet and moving the doorway and closet for the other bedroom.

Grandpa Don came and supervised us on Friday.


On Saturday, we finished up the framing and then started on the electrical. Since we are changing the floorplan around quite a bit, pretty much needed to rewire the entire back half of the house. Also, while we were at it, we added some additional outdoor lighting, since there wasn't very much of it.



Sarah inspecting our work.


Thanks for the help Dad!


On Monday, I took the day off work to do the sheetrocking.


After this weekend, I'm quite confident that I did not miss my calling in life by not being a sheetrocker (or in construction).

Sheetrocking certainly is NOT as easy as it looks. You'd think that cutting a bunch of squares and rectangles out and screwing them to the wall would be fairly easy...

This last weekend, we started mudding and taping the sheetrock, so I'll save the pictures of the completed sheetrock for next time.