Pictures of My Grown Up Life

Happy 090909, friends!

Remember yesterday when I talked about being a grown up? I thought I’d show you a few pictures of my grown up life.

First, here are the photos of our bathroom that I’ve owed you for quite some time. In case you forgot, our bathroom looked like this on September 12, 2008.

That’s mold. Ike hit our neighborhood pretty hard. A tree in our backyard fell on our neighbor’s garage and on the way down, a branch punctured our bathroom ceiling, resulting in mold. And this.

So we gutted our bathroom. We played around with the idea of redoing it ourselves since we’re poor. But after about 7 months and no bathroom, we decided to hire someone. We patched up the skylight because we thought it was quite ugly. We tore out the furdowns above the vanity and above the shower to open up the teeny room a bit. This is what we’ve got now.

This is the view from our bedroom. It’s a very tiny bathroom. Just a toilet, standing shower, and sink. And here is the view from the toilet.

So there you go. You waited all that time for those pictures and I’m sure you’re underwhelmed. I make no apologies.

I’m not posting photos of our painted bedroom just yet because we just bought some curtains. Once we hang those, I’ll take some photos and show you how pretty my tissue papered walls look.

Want more pictures of my adult life? This is what we did on Saturday.

Those are our disgusting wood panel walls. Actually, that is one of the built in bookshelves. The walls are real wood and are actually pretty rough so they don’t need to be sanded. But the area behind the shelves and the area around the bay window are super glossy and fake. We sanded them down so that I could prime and paint this weekend. I like how Stephen’s arm is blurry from the vibrations of the sander. That black stick looking thing is the vacuum hose. I was waving it in the air while he sanded so we could try to capture some of the dust. I’d like to think that it helped, even though our house was COVERED in tiny dust particles.

And here is a picture of me taking a sanding break to put Molly in her game day clothes and force her to take a picture with me.

It should be noted that I’m wearing a homemade shirt that says “My Buddy Has Sweet Skills.” Lyndsey and I made those shirts in college. We were in an organization called Diamonds. Long story but we did stuff for the University of Texas baseball program. We were all assigned “buddies” on the team. Our job was to be their #1 fan. I could write an entire post about my mixed feelings on that subject, but I won’t. I’ll just say that my Sweet Skills t-shirt is about 40,000 times cooler than my buddy that year. Although it did speak the truth, my buddy did have sweet skills.

Please also take a look behind me. That is our monstrous fireplace. That is one of the things about our house that I actually love. You just don’t find those in new homes. You’ll see more photos of the living room next week after I paint it.

I hope you enjoyed the quick peek into my life. I’ll leave you with one more photo of how my life is so adult.

Sometimes my husband chases geese.

101 Progress Update

Is it just me or did this work week have a few extra days in it? I can’t believe that it is just now Friday. I have a fun weekend ahead of me, which I will tell you all about next week. For now, it’s accountability time.

I probably won’t do this every Friday, I really can’t see myself being that productive. But every now and then, I will take a break from my ridiculous blog stories and review my progress of my 101 in 1001. At any time, you can click on the little tab at the top to see my progress, but this is a time for me to discuss it.

1. Start a new blog feature. That would be this. Okay, so maybe this was a cop out. But I wasn’t quite sure how quickly I’d get going on this list, and I have this unexplainable urge to cross things off to-do lists. So really, this item was mostly for my mental health.

19. Save $10 for each completed item. I have opened an ING account and titled it “101 in 1001” so that I can quickly transfer $10 each time I cross something off. Does anyone else use ING? I love it. We use it for a lot of things. We have a CD with them and since we have an account set up, we can open new accounts any time. So we have one called “Car Fund”… we have one for untouchable savings… we have this one… etc. They are great. You can name them so it keeps all of your mental accounting straight. The best part? They are all interest bearing. I considered keeping an envelope of tens hidden some place but that’s just dumb. Why do that if I could earn a bit of interested? Granted our economy is in the crapper so I’ll just get a few cents each month… but that’s a few cents I didn’t have before!

24. Blog about my progress. This isn’t actually completed. This will be on-going. I’m aware that some of you may skip these posts because you really aren’t interested in this endeavour but I’m writing them anyways. To make it up to you, I’ll always end with a story, joke, picture, or something else non-101-related. Deal?

35. Start a prayer journal. Started this yesterday. I got a nice journal as a wedding gift but have yet to use it. I usually just use spirals for my Bible Study notes. Journals are too pretty to write in. But I felt that this was a good cause. So I wrote out the 101 goals in the front of the book. I’m now going to use this journal for prayer, to jot down Scripture that is jumping out at me, and to record a few thoughts throughout this process. I spent my lunchbreak in the parking lot at Sonic yesterday and wrote my first entry. This may be the most rewarding goal.

62. Finish the bathroom. No, it’s not done, but it is in process. The shower, walls, floors, and ceiling are done. Tonight or tomorrow Stephen will install the toilet. I’m hoping to go to Lowes tonight and buy the sink. They were sold out last week. If there are no toilet issues, he may be able to get the sink installed tomorrow as well. We are on the lookout for a storage tower. It’s so much harder than you’d think. I don’t think it can be any wider than 2 feet. We want it to be tall, like 6+ feet because we are tall. I’m thinking something brown, maybe with either drawers or pull out baskets. Any leads? Let me know! I also want something cute to hang on the wall in there. I’m thinking about hitting up Etsy for that. Anyone you really love or want to promote? Give me their info! We also need hooks for the towels. I may just get those at Lowes unless you have a better ideqa. We’ll post pics of the bathroom when it’s done.

So that’s where I am. Off to a good start, I think. If you start your own, let me know so I can mark that one off the list. I will also post a link to your blog so people can follow your progress as well.

Here’s your totally unrelated picture for today. This is me riding on the front of the truck at the deer lease. This was on Christmas. I’m wearing short sleeves. This is how we do it in Texas.