Our Home

Smoke off Prep

I’m pretty sure these days I meet myself coming and going. I try not to but dang. Anyway, last week I mentioned something about a BBQ/Smoked meats thing. Well here are the details… FINALLY! 

So we started hanging out with our dive friends in 2013 when we met them. It wasn’t an immediate BAM, we’re friends, but pretty darn close. So throughout the last couple of years, hubby and Jared have been smoking different types of meats for different events. Events include just a night in with friends to dive club meetings to events for the Red Coaters at Chiefs Stadium. The big leagues… in our books anyway.

They have been honing in on our their meat preparations. Wow, that sounds weird. ha! Anyway, last fall they went to Kansas City to a Chiefs game and actually cooked for 60+ Red Coaters and family. Then the leftover meats, they tried passing out to passer byes. A lot of people around our hangouts really like their brisket and pulled pork and chicken, etc, so they told them they needed to start entering contests. (more…)

Mother Nature is Off Her Meds

I swear! So you know there’s also a Meme going around facebook that says something to the affect, Mother Nature is having a fight, storms out of the room, and then storms back in “And One More Thing.” Yeah, I believe that meme is true on so many levels.

The stupid ground hog (I know, don’t pick on the ground hog) predicted an early spring. It’s a known fact though that he’s only right 40% of the time when he predicts that… just saying.

The night that I went up to paint my bathroom, I hopped out of the truck, not like I was jumping out on dry pavement or anything… I actually hopped out slowly because it was icy out and bam, my butt hit the ground, my right arm slammed into the door, and my left arm caught me with the help of my running board on my truck.

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Remodeling Journal: The Vanity

So… here’s a little back information for you about me and Vanities because I’m sure you wondered… My whole life I’ve never had a vanity with drawers. There, I said it.

Growing up at my parent’s house and now back there again, my bathroom sink doesn’t have drawers. I do remember when my parents were building the house I asked for vanity sink drawers, but it didn’t happen.

Moving on to the dorms at school… The sink was sort of free-standing in a way. It just hooked to the wall. It wasn’t completely down. Plus the one in our room I had to share with a roommate. It was the kitchen sink as well as the bathroom sink. It also had… you guessed… NO drawers.

We had community bathrooms in the dorm I lived in. They didn’t have drawers either. I was like vanity drawer deprived.

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Remodeling Journal: Demo Part 2

It just so happened there was an auction for home remodeling the Saturday after we bought our house. How convenient. It also happened to be one of the coldest days of the year thus far, other than when we had snow back in November.

The girls went with us. Poor them! We finally sent them out to the truck with the keys and my phone (Tbug had hers) for entertainment. It wasn’t going fast and boy was it cold. I think Cold is an understatement at this point. Holy cow!

They had cabinets, flooring, wood, paneling, sinks, fans, you name it… We walked away with the tile for the backsplash of my kitchen, which apparently at this point I can’t find a picture of. I didn’t have my phone (read above paragraph) and hubby never sent me the pictures I took :).

We called it quits long before the auction was over. It started at either 9 or 10. We left at 1. It was cold and boring, and the things we wanted still hadn’t sold. I talked to a couple who went to these often and they said that one of the previous auctions lasted until after 7pm the last time.

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Remodeling Journal: Demo Day, Part 1

I’ve been back and forth and back and forth again. Do I want to post all while this is happening or not? So many questions. I finally decided I’d love to have a journal of it all and why not post it here. So we’re going backward, back to November 29, 2018, to be exact. That’s the date that we closed on our house.

Hubby and I may have been a little excited to sign on the house if you can imagine. We got to the place early and there is a coffee shop around the corner so I convinced him to get coffee. A morning coffee date :). He also sent our realtor a message asking if she’d like coffee. She said she was good. Can’t say we didn’t try.

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The House

I’ve been back and forth on do I share these before pictures now or wait until I have finished pictures of each room. Now or wait? Hmm… now or wait? I couldn’t decide. Finally, I decided… I guess now. A lot of people have been asking me what the house looks/looked like. Let’s just do this thing.

Here is where I also state that the house was described in terrible terms to us. If you look at these pictures, the house really isn’t “terrible.” We are remodeling it. In fact, as you saw the other day I had a kitchen/bathroom combo. Luckily, that has gone away. There is now a dividing wall again. We even have a bathroom floor!! There’s no plumbing so don’t plan on using the bathroom or kitchen for that matter any time soon.

My bathroom vanity is now in along with the sink. I have a bathroom mirror. We know what potty (yuck I hate that word… haha) we are going to get, but we haven’t yet. Our bathroom won’t have a bathtub, just a shower but we know what we want.

Kitchen appliances have been ordered as well as kitchen cabinets. So we’re making progress. Oh… my bathroom faucet should be in any day. The shower um… spout (word??) is in. So we’re making progress.

So without further ado, here are the before pictures I actually took before we even signed for the house. They had accepted our offer at this point, but we hadn’t signed. Our realtor came out and let us in so I could get some measurements and I went ahead and took pictures too while I was at it. This was the Monday before Thanksgiving.

Bedroom 1 (only because it’s the first one I’m showing you :))

So here’s the good thing about this bedroom… our plans are to repaint the walls, tear up the flooring, new lighting/fan, get rid of the window AC unit, and do something about the trim. Oh and curtains or something for window covering. Otherwise, it’s not in terrible shape.

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Holiday Home Tour… Wait, What??

Everyone is all talking about Christmas and Holiday Home Tours and I’m over here like wait, WHAT?!?! I want to do that. Oh, wait… I can’t. Why? Well, look above. Do you know what you’re looking at? If not, I’ll tell you… It’s my open concept bathroom/Kitchen. Why put a wall between when you can make them one and take a shower while stirring something on the stove, right?

I’m kidding… sort of… I’ll explain. Right here on the left side of the wall (look for the shovel leaning up against the wall on the right side…) you really are looking into the kitchen and bathroom. And there really is no wall separating the two. They always say be prepared if you plan on doing something like this because you don’t know what you’re going to find. Well, what we found was there was a leak for what appeared to be YEARS in the bathroom where the bathtub/shower combo was and the floor was rotted. In fact, the wall behind where the window is was rotted all the way through and you can actually see the back side of the siding through the house. That’s not normal. Nope, not normal at all. (more…)

Getting to This Point

Thursday morning… November 29, 2018, a day I never figured would happen. It was an uphill struggle the whole way. I had a meltdown a few times along the way. We all did. It was frustrating as hell (pardon my language). If you’ve ever thought about buying a foreclosure house, my thought is… DON’T. Okay, maybe that’s being a bit melodramatic.

I was told if it was worth it, keep fighting. There were days I questioned my sanity and wondered why I thought it was worth it.

With all the buy/flip shows on HGTV and DIY Network, everyone seems to want to buy houses and flip them these days. That wasn’t our goal… for the most part anyway.

Remember back to September 2016, we sold our house. In fact, we moved out on our Anniversary weekend. That weekend felt like a slap in my face. These last few years haven’t gone anything like I thought they would. I can guarantee they aren’t anything like 25-year-old Nicole thought they’d be. Maybe that’s the fun in life… maybe not. I’m not really sure. But… needless to say, we sold our house and moved back in with my parents. That was just supposed to be a stepping stone to the next thing. (more…)

Christmas Tree 2018 (And a Surprise)

Finally, the tree went up at our house over the weekend. I’ve been pretty much chomping at the bit (horse term) to get that tree up. I would like to say it went up without any hitches, but it didn’t… NOT. AT. ALL. In fact, I think the term hitches is a nice way of saying how things went on Saturday when we put the tree up. Sad day! Part of me wants to jot those memories down and part of me wants to forget it ever happened. No use in dwelling on the past, right? Let’s just say, Christmas is my favorite holiday (followed so close by Thanksgiving and all of the rest of the holidays) and I used the phrase, I Hate Christmas. Sadly, I try to teach Abug not to say hate. It’s something I try to instill in Abug, don’t hate. Yet I was so frustrated I kept saying HATE. Hypocrite! (that was directed at me, not you :))

The Tree

A few years ago we bought this tree at Lowe’s on sale after Christmas. Best purchase we’ve ever made when it comes to Christmas trees. It goes together so nicely and yeah, I love this tree. Plus, I’m a white light girl and hubby is a colored light guy… This tree flashes back and forth between white lights and colored lights. Best of both worlds!

My friend Harriett told me I needed to make a tree skirt for my tree, but it was too late to start it when she suggested that… so next year. I’m holding you to that Harriett! So Abug decided she was going to put the tree skirt on the tree… (more…)

Let’s Dish

Also known as… Let’s Chat :).

The picture above showed up in my Facebook newsfeed this morning. Now it wasn’t a still photo, it was a video, but it wouldn’t let me add the video, so you get a screenshot.

Those words, “Never stop trusting God and His plans.” Wow, they ring soooooooo true right now. Since December there has been a lot of ifs, ands, or buts in my future and it’s really been stressing me out. I’ve mentioned it a few times but said how much of a hypocrite I am because I wasn’t ready to talk but was asking for prayers. That’s the thing that annoys me the most when people do that. Yet, here I was, doing just that. Shame on me.

But one aspect that I’ve been dealing with, I’m finally ready to talk about. I told you I would and I’m going to try and do this as openly but as honestly as I can without whatever. I’m not really sure, I don’t want it to sound like I’m petty and childish or something. But… Here we go. Bear with me! I’ll give you some back details too. It’ll help fill in some of the dots missing.

Backstory

When my parents bought the property they (we) live on, we became really good friends with the neighbors. At that time, we lived in a rental house just on the west side of the property. That house shouldn’t have had tenants living in it 20+ years ago, yet we did and more people have since then. Another story for another day.

Around 2009 he was losing the house to the bank. At that time, my dad told me I should have bought it. They wanted something like $67K for it. I was afraid then, being a single girl, that I couldn’t make the payments. The guy I was dating wasn’t close to even proposing to me and I wasn’t about to live with him, unwed. So I had no one to help with the bills. Needless to say, someone else bought it. Looking back, I should have bought it, but with what I made at the time, I couldn’t do it and didn’t want to get myself into a bind.

Jump forward a few years

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