House

Week in Pictures

by Jessica on April 27, 2013

in Crossfit, House, Weekend

We’ve had a pretty good week so far, but are thrilled the weekend has arrived again. My camera was acting funny, affecting my posts this week, but I think I have it figured out, save for a few images in this post. Fingers crossed!

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Lost of yard work this week — well, whatever we could get done between the rain showers. We’ve gotten so much rain lately. The back yard is a marsh.

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I did manage to trim some of the hedges, but then I found a birds nest, so I didn’t trim almost 1/2 of them because I didn’t want to get too close.

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Unfortunately, one of the neighborhood cats got into it the next day. It smashed one of the eggs, and I found the other and scooped it into a shoebox. It’s sitting under warming lights in the guest room. Neil said it’s probably dead, but I guess we’ll see what happens. What can I say, I’m a bleeding heart.

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We hauled away tons of brush. I can not believe how much easier it is to to physical labor compared to just last fall. I was literally hurling large bushes onto the trailer. So awesome! Hopefully the yard will dry soon, we have some big plans for it this year.

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Made our first batch of sun tea.

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Neil got a new mower, which as you can see he’s extremely excited about.

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We also got some barbecuing in. I’m so glad it’s getting warm again. I love grilling enough food to get us to the middle of the week. It makes nights so much easier, especially while I’m shadowing our spring CrossFit On-ramp class (squee!)

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We tried a new marinade for veggies. Looks kind of creepy, but it tastes amazing. I’ll throw it in a post this week so I don’t crowd this one. Amazing flavor and a great way to make cauliflower (that’s what we had in the fridge) a little more exciting.

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Also had some ciders…

Mid-week, we got some goodies from Amazon…

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Including Kelly Starrett’s new book, Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance. It is an amazing resource, not only for CrossFitters, but anyone who is exceptionally active and looking to take care of themselves. I wholeheartedly believe this would be a much better asset for new CrossFit coaches than the materials they hand out for the seminar. I’m slowly starting to build a library of resources for not only my own benefit, but my athletes and you guys as well. Next month I hope to pick up Brian Mackenzie’s book, Power Speed ENDURANCE.

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Neil also made an amazing Szechuan Pork Stir Fry. So colorful and so so spicy. Neil loves his food to taste like hot.

Now back to our weekend!

{ 2 comments }

Painted

by Jessica on February 5, 2013

in DIY, House, Kitchen, Weekend

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Ta-da! Kitchen painted! Doesn’t it look so much better!? If you’re just catching up, we did a little bit of impromptu renovating 2 weekends ago, so this weekend was the clean-up and prettify of the mess we made. We completely painted the kitchen, the pantry and the hallway (since it directly conjoins wall-wise.

Here are a few before pictures. I failed to take any right before we started painting, it was too chaotic with pets and open cans of paint. Take my word for it that it was ugly, dingy, and poorly masked with flesh-colored “neutral” paint…

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I’d actually been hoarding the paint I wanted to use for over a year. I’m always perusing the markdown paints at Lowes, colors that someone just thought were wrong or decided not to use (I used to work there, I know), and when I stumbled on this soft grey, I knew it’d be perfect to temporarily improve the state of the kitchen while we save for a full remodel.

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We painted the doors with chalkboard paint. Yep, I totally got sucked into Pinterest one night and decided it would add some fun to the kitchen. Obviously it’s just boring black while it sets. Kind of elegant no?

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Our little Boston key rack, still the only thing we’ve hung to date…

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In the late afternoon with the sun shining in…

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The dark hallway. I probably shouldn’t have taken these at sunset, the light was just all over the place.

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The rest of the kitchen, unchanged but better for our efforts. It feels worlds different from when we first moved in!

So there you have it. It’s not perfect, but I’m so happy with it. Happy to have a color I love and one less room that is flesh-colored. Grateful for a big airy kitchen that is starting to feel more like “us.” We’ve still got a long way to go, but you eventually learn to enjoy every step of the process.

{ 6 comments }

Impromptu Frenzy

by Jessica on January 29, 2013

in Crossfit, DIY, House, Weekend

Another mostly working weekend that was roughly 85% unexciting. We have several projects all nearing completion at the same time and so my head has been completely consumed with my checklists, code checks and last-minute details. It’s not exactly exciting blog fodder.

To be fair, we did a few cool things. We did a ridiculous Hero WOD on Saturday that we’re still swollen up from, but so proud of ourselves for surviving. We also attended the first meeting of the CrossFit competition team and weightlifting club our coach is starting (I’m joining — Neil was there for support). We also had a date night at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. But for the most part — we worked, a lot.

We were both a little bummed by Sunday night. The past few weekends feel like they have completely passed us by, and aside from work, we haven’t done a lot else. We’ve both been a little itchy to do a house project, or leave town — SOMETHING.

So while I settled into a little housecleaning to break up the monotony, Neil got a little crazy. I was vacuuming when he asked me to come to the kitchen to help him take some “trash out”

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No more pantry shelves!? To be fair, they’ve been bugging us for a while. They’re completely useless. They are weak, and you can’t open them without knocking into the pantry doors. Plus they are discolored and disgusting. The whole pantry is — a complete eyesore. It’s our goal to get rid of the whole pantry with our remodel (that we’re saving for, along with many other things), but for the time being, Neil apparently saw fit to rip them out.

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This simple act turned the whole evening around. We descended into a frenzy of random house projects – addressing annoying things in our house that we’ve apparently been bearing in silence…

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Bought a new door and hardware for both kitchen doors…
Because the door going to the garage is old and disgusting and the non-locking gold hardware is on our last nerve.

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Removed all the phone jacks… Because we will never have a land line, and off-white and flesh-colored outlets are the suck. Subsequently, we were able to remove wires outside of the house as well.

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Moving the last of our furniture from the garage and relocating all my cookbooks out of the buffet in the dining room… Because our formal dishes and silver have been sitting in boxes for four years. My great-grandmother would be rolling over in her grave.

It was a nice little spurt, and it was just what we needed.

Obviously though, this means we have tons of work to do this coming weekend. We’re going to patch, repair and repaint the pantry, its doors and the entire kitchen. Which then means we have to repaint the hallway as well. We also have to call a handyman to come size the door (because nothing in this godforsaken house is standard-sized) because we don’t have the tools. We also have to paint the door.

It’s exciting though. Good to feel the momentum of things actually getting done around here. I really need to stop working so much. Haha, who am I kidding.

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Ice Ice Baby

January 14, 2013
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Another nice low-key weekend at home. An ice storm kind of derailed our plans to head out-of-town for some shopping, but we made the best of it and decided to get some projects done around the house. So very adult of us right? Replaced the timing mechanism in this clock Neil made in junior high. [...]

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Random Thursday

January 10, 2013
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This week has been killer. If there was any question, the holidays are DEFINITELY over, and it’s back to work big time for both of us. I woke up yesterday thinking it was Thursday! Anyhow, here are some of the random things going on around here… Our old ’80s humidifier finally kicked the bucket this [...]

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Random Thursday

November 8, 2012
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I liked writing the last Random Thursday so much that I thought I’d do it again. There always seem to be little things going on around here throughout the week that are fun to share, but aren’t deserving of a whole separate post. These are those things. We bought a bowl for our vegetables. I [...]

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Weekend R&R

October 15, 2012
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We have officially come down with our first colds of the season. Such a bummer. We spent part of Saturday outside at a very blustery tailgate for the Mizzou vs. Alabama game, and woke up on Sunday not feeling so hot. Needless to say, it was a mostly uneventful weekend — which was fine, because [...]

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