Initials, Part One

Posted on by Jordan

Every time I think the baby’s room is done, Heather reminds me of something else we had talked about doing…

Case in point, the unadorned wall over by the changing table. Heather was saving that space for the baby’s initials!

Technically I suppose this should be part two, as initial one won’t be revealed here for quite some time…

 

Anyway, after an extensive font search, and then some tracing (did you know that the easiest way to print an image across multiple pages is Microsoft Paint!?) We had some letters on plywood ready to cut out.

This wound up being the first time I have used my jigsaw, despite having been really excited to get it and try it out. The initial project I had in mind is still waiting for me to resolve some of the planning gaps. The letter cut out nicely, and Heather was happy with the results.

She had tried to describe her plans for the letters a few times and I just couldn’t envision what she had in mind. A few hours after I handed it off to her, and it was much easier to see the plan.

For obvious reasons we won’t be showing any pictures of the first initial for another eight weeks, but the baby’s room is one step closer to being completely ready!

-Jordan

 

Weekend Plus One

Posted on by Jordan

What did we do over this past weekend?

Well, I moved furniture! Remember all that craigslisting I mentioned? It has paid off!

The down side to paying off is that it means I had to haul the things that sold out, and the things we bought back up.

On the bright side, we aren’t repainting this stuff, so it still isn’t taking up as much time as last years campaign 🙂

And then there was Independence day; a Wednesday this year so it wasn’t an obvious choice to extend into ether weekend. So what did we do?

Painting!

That is the before picture, and what you can’t really see is the places where the vinyl wall decals lifted the paint off the wall. Given the size of the damaged areas, it made sense to paint the entire wall.

This meant I got to buy a paint tray and full-sized roller! (ahh the simple joys in life)

The end result was perfect in the sense that you cannot tell that it was ever done. 🙂

Sorry, the photography isn’t the best, and I have been trying to include Heather or myself in the blog pictures more… maybe the next iteration of the room will lend itself to an action shot!

 

-Jordan

 

Still Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

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

Decorations

Posted on by 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

Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

Heather claims that we are *done* decorating the apartment now. That statement comes with the implicit disclaimer that once she gets wedding pictures ordered, we will get to take down all the frames on the walls and load them with new pictures.

Not to say that I dislike the decorations we have, or even minded putting them all up, I just didn’t realize we needed so many.

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That’s me, hanging one of a number of stars we just recently added to the walls in our bedroom. The decorations look good now, and will look great once we have pictures of people we actually know in the frames! 🙂

As of this past weekend, I finally found a home for every last wedding present. The weekend before that, I spent a fair amount of time hiding cables and computers. Before I got married I honestly couldn’t think of a reason you wouldn’t want over-sized computer cases, and who cares what color they are, as long as they have good airflow and the internal layout is easy to work with. As it turns out, huge blue glowing PC towers are offensive to the apartment decor. Also, the idea of CAT-5 cable running to all corners of the apartment was a tough sell, I did manage to hide it pretty well. Maybe Heather is just graciously ignoring it…. I wont ask 🙂

I am still trying to track down a replacement TV connector for an NVIDIA 7800, and our media center will be hooked up and running on the TV. Heather has the decorations looking amazing, sans pictures, and we don’t have huge piles of sutff in the corners! It seems like we should have people over to visit just to see how nice it is now, but a two bedroom apartment can get pretty crowded… So I won’t invite everyone over at once 🙂

-Jordan

Other Projects

Posted on by Jordan

While I have been messing with computers, Heather has been decorating… A lot. Our apartment is really feeling like a home now. One of the really cool things she has done was to find a way to display some of the cards we got from the wedding.

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Using the same glue that was used for the pictures decorating tables at the reception, Heather covered the top of her desk with portions of cards. The resulting surface was anything but smooth however, so we purchased a slab of plate glass to cover the desktop with. it looks really good.

The other major project Heather has been working on is a huge collection of pictures from the wedding. That is basically done, and was previewed at the KC reception over the weekend. It now falls to me to get those lined up to go onto DVD’s and up on the website, but that should go quickly as soon as I find time 🙂

-Jordan

Its Midnight, Three Days Before The Wedding…

Posted on by Jordan

And what are we doing!!?

(Alert readers will no doubt notice this is posted after the fact, however the pictures were taken late at night last night)

Well, we aren’t wrapping gifts! Those are done! See:

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We finished wrapping gifts but Heather is still hard at work on the centerpiece construction:

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Because I am not writing this in real time, I can go ahead and tell you that we stuck it out and finished this project. Heather was back to Blair shortly before 1:00AM, just another short night in a rather long string of short nights.

This is, I am sure, the last post I will make here before the wedding… its still a ways off, but I think the excitement of it finally being here is going to carry Heather and I the rest of the way, despite our sleep deprived state.

Hope to see you all soon! 🙂

-Jordan

P.S. Almost forgot to mention, but as you can’t really see in the pictures, the apartment is very clean. Practically every goal we had for Wednesday night got completed!

Holiday Activities!

Posted on by Jordan

Last night, Heather and I went to visit some friends, and decorate cookies. Its possibly the first ‘second annual’ thing Heather and I have ever done together.

I don’t know the exact date, but mid December last year, Heather invited me to her apartment and we decorated cookies with her roommates. It seems so long ago, I can’t quite believe only a year ago Heather and I were just getting to know one another.

Getting back to more recent events, we had a really enjoyable time doing cookies! Its always a joy to interact with a couple who really love one another. I am withholding names because I don’t know that everyone wants their name plastered on our website… The downside to interacting with a happily married couple is that they cannot help but remind us of the fact that we are not yet married. I wouldn’t say we were jealous, but it certainly made it seem harder to send Heather packing off to Blair at the end of the night.

Also, it is a week until Christmas! I don’t quite know how that happened, but perhaps I have been fixated on another fast approaching date…. Whatever the case, I realize I have to find time to actually wrap the pile of gifts I have managed to acquire, and run down a few more things before Wednesday. (and not necessarily in that order!)

-Jordan

The Only Thing Missing…

Posted on by Jordan

I know I talked about decorating the apartment last week, but I wanted to post a picture of our little tree, and a few words. First the picture:

The tree is about three feet tall, nothing too exciting really.

It does however, represent the first time in the eight years I have lived away from my parents house that there have been Christmas decorations in my apartment. I cannot tell you how much it starts to make the apartment feel really home-ish, and warmer somehow. At the same time, it only makes me wish Heather and I were married more. The (our) apartment is really starting to feel like home, and yet Heather isn’t here.

yes, it is very possible there will be 46 more days of “oh woes me” posts like today, sorry 🙂 It’s our blog, and Heather and I are really feeling sort of like little kids waiting for Santa… Not really sure we can survive the anticipation much longer, and sure we will explode if we aren’t careful.

Hopefully Christmas provides some distraction 🙂

-Jordan

Christmas Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late in coming, but if you wondered what Heather and I did over the Thanksgiving holiday, the answer was “decorate for Christmas!”

(there is also the detail of Heather having to work Friday to earn an extra day off so we can actually go on a honeymoon, but we don’t talk about work here…)

On Thanksgiving day, we had a nice meal with just Heather’s parents and sister in Blair. Then that evening, more of the Gutschow family came out to the farm, and it was decided that the tree needed unpacked and setup. With a lot of people that job went remarkably fast. Without Gigi there, decorating kind of had to stop once the tree was out because nobody really knew where the rest of the decorations were, or how they should go if we found them.

Friday I was able to go to the Nebraska vs. Colorado game with Jim. The initial plan was for Heather to pick me up in Lincoln after the game, and we would proceed to Kearney to meet up with some of my family for some more Thanksgiving. Heather got off work earlier than expected, and I told her to just head out. My thinking was that the game would be mostly decided by the start of the fourth quarter. If you saw the game, you know that didn’t turn out to be the case… Anyway, I had a lot of fun at the game. I really love going to games at Memorial Stadium. I do feel pretty dumb for missing the end of that game, but hindsight is 20-20 I guess.

Saturday we helped unpack and assemble the Marlatt decorations, a rather large project. Fortunately there were a lot of cousins around to help out. The continued trend from Blair was that my grandparents weren’t home ether, leaving us to kind of guess sometimes on how decorations should go. I think we got most of it handled pretty well.

Sunday, after church we decided we hadn’t had enough decorating and headed to Target to get a few things for the apartment. They had a little three-foot tree and some properly sized decorations for fairly cheap, so now my(our) apartment has a little holiday feel to it. The only really sad thing about having decorations at my home is that Heather doesn’t live there yet. It makes things feel really “home-ish” but its still just me living there… I shouldn’t complain too much though, I get to see Heather quite a bit 🙂

-Jordan