You remember when I was concerned that Heather was too excited about how easy the vinyl wall decals were to put up?
My fears turned out to be well founded:
The picture only shows the half of it… but I think we have finally run out of wall space 🙂
In other news, all the items in the garage are finally painted meaning there is a chance we will be able to put cars in there soon! (crazy thought I know)
-Jordan
My last post may have implied that we were taking a break from working on the new place.
While I took a week off from posting about it, we were still working. I guess you could say we are in the final phases of the project though.
We spent the past weekend decorating. My role in that consists almost entirely of hanging pictures.
A few notes from that:
First off, it seems like I have heard some disparaging remarks about people who use levels while hanging pictures as being OCD and whatnot. I can’t say as I care though, because without a level it just ends up being my eye against Heather’s and we never know if the picture is straight. Beyond that, we have a distressingly large number of items with two hooks on the back, so without a level it’s almost impossible to place the second hook in the right spot.
Second note, we picked up a rather large mirror in the craigslist campaign. I was really stressed going into the weekend with how I was going to rig some sort of board to span between two studs in order to get enough of an anchor to support this rather heavy mirror. But then I went to the hardware store, and found out that they have all kinds of options for dealing with heavy items hanging on the wall. We went with this guy, and it was about 20 times easier than the plan I had been rolling around in my head.
The other project of note was the wall decals. Heather picked a few of these up online, but we didn’t really know how to put one up. As with about everything these days, youtube was a great place to start.
The video was a far better guide than the somewhat confusing directions that came with our sticker. Speaking of the sticker, it was a bigger project than I was expecting when Heather said “hey, I got this picture to hang over our bed”
The picture shows Heather half way through the last phase of installing the first sticker, but the catch is that her plan involved two stickers. It may be worth noting that, although this was a challenging and stressful task, we worked as a great team during the installation! Perhaps all these challenging move-related tasks are paying off 🙂
The finished product looks really good:
The only problem is, now we have a new found confidence in our ability to install vinyl wall decals, and I thin Heather may have her eye on a few more blank wall spaces.
-Jordan
We take a break from news about moving into the condo to present this public service announcement:
Magnets are really cool!
After having seen the video above, some friends and I started talking about buying supplies to try this ourselves… and found out that there are people selling kits, and that they are kind of pricy: Teacher Source
It’s amazing enough I am still tempted. It may be that I would eventually tire of watching the magnet try and hover, but there is really only one way to find out. 🙂
-Jordan
Actually… it isn’t that bad, after a ‘down’ weekend Heather and I are starting to feel like attacking the unfinished tasks again.
Let me catch you up on the past few weeks.
Two weekends ago, we were living in an apartment, and Saturday morning, the view was this:
As some short update posts already gave away, we had plenty of help and got things moved fairly quickly. What took more effort was unpacking and finding a home for everything that was in a box. We powered through that as fast as we could so that our house would be ready for company. Quite a bit of company as it turns out.
On the following Thursday, my grandparents stopped through on their way out to a wedding. That was the first night that we hadn’t both worked until midnight on something, but we still managed to sneak in a few minutes putting our house together. On Friday, Heather’s parents came into town, and they brought our favorite(only) nephew Holden.
He got the deluxe tour:
We took Holden and his grandparents down to the farmers market, and then later he did some fabric shopping with Heather and Pam. We quickly discovered that although the main area in our house was mostly put together, it wasn’t what you would call kid-proof. He kept us on our toes.
That crew headed home Saturday evening, leaving Heather and I a few hours to pull a few things together and grab some much needed sleep. Sunday morning, my parents, sister and brother came into town, just in time for church. We had some really ambitious plans to take them out to see the bike bridge I did a post on a while back. The triple digit heat index, combined with the fact that they had spent a considerable amount of time walking the previous day at the Omaha zoo put a pretty solid kabosh on that idea.
It turned out that a nap and breaking out our new copy of Ticket To Ride was about the perfect use for the Sunday afternoon. I can’t remember if I mentioned Ticket to ride when recapping our visit to DJ’s house out in Colorado, but it has quickly become Heather’s favorite game.
On Monday, Heather and I both worked, leaving the rest of my family free to head down to Pella for some touristing. They came back with some amazing pastries so I have to assume the trip was a wild success. That evening, Heather and I met up with them and headed just outside of Des Moines to where an annual balloon festival is held.
The weather was not ideal for hot air balloons, and we didn’t get to see the kind of numbers featured in the postcards I have seen of the event. That being said, it was really cool. I really don’t understand how they pilot the balloons, except to say they appeared to have more control than I would have expected.
After the balloons, we stopped and got pizza. This is noteworthy only because the local Cub Scout pack was busing tables as a fundraiser. It wasn’t the best table service we have ever had, but it was some of the best mealtime entertainment we have had… perhaps ever.
My family headed home the next day, leaving Heather and I finally home with no impending dates on the calendar. We haven’t been as productive this week as the past few. Today we finally got back into painting and may have a dresser ready to instal soon.
In hindsight, I don’t know if we would have really planned the past few weeks differently, as there were events outside our control driving each visit. All the same, I know we would have been better hosts had there been a few weeks between each event listed above.
On the other hand, we have proven that we can comfortably host three to four guests, and are always happy to have people visit!
… Just give us a week to wrap up this furniture painting 🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 