♫ We've only just beguuuuun ♫

The weather is starting to turn here in Phoenix. We kept hearing that the fall and winter were wonderful but we had been experiencing a prolonged summer this year :( But I am happy to report that we have been experiencing cooler temperatures as of late (it was even chilly enough in the house the other day that I got to bust out my fuzzy slippers) and I couldn't be happier! With cooler temperatures brings more energy for me and more energy equals the ability for me to do MORE instead of sit on the sidelines and watch Thomas do most of the heavy duty work (which I'm sure he will appreciate as well).

Demolition has begun in our kitchen... well, what's left of our kitchen anyway. I had to fly off to Los Angeles to work on the Long Beach Marathon and Thomas took that opportunity to gut our kitchen counters. Boy am I glad that he did it while I was away. The mess, the noise, the dust would have been enough to make me chew my fingers down to nubs. On top of all of that Thomas preferred that my asthmatic lungs not be exposed to that much flying debris. Thank the Lordy for that!

It all started out just a little bit at a time so that we could experience how easy (or how difficult, rather) this job really was going to be.
And the job continued while I was away in California for work. Pardon all of the grainy photographs but I took my camera with me on my trip so Thomas took these pictures to send me updates on his progress while I was away. Here's what the process looked like:

We still have to rip out the sink but we obviously don't want to do that until the last minute. We don't want to be stuck without a sink!! For now we're living with our lovely plywood counters complete with old staples and splinters galore! It's still way better than the tile and horrible grout!

Side-note: We had decided to do the demo ourselves because our kitchen is so large that it would have cost more than $800 to have someone do it for us. So we though, "No problem- we'll do it ourselves!" I mean, who doesn't like saving $800? Well, Thomas says that if we ever do anything like this again that we will definitely be shelling out the dough to have someone do it for us. Apparently he did not enjoy it!

Our counter-tops were supposed to be installed this Wednesday and I was uber excited about the kitchen being near completion before Halloween but, alas, my civic duty calls and I have jury duty for the time that the install was scheduled for so we'll have to wait another couple of days and have them installed the following Monday. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for the main living spaces to have the big projects done by the end of the year.

Frame the Date

A couple of weeks ago I made a little diy art project for our wedding anniversary- I framed the date :) I had used an old frame that I had that was a little beat up, some card stock and some stickers to make it all happen. When I finished I had something that looked like this:But- after looking at it for a couple of days and not quite knowing where I wanted to put it- I got to thinking that maybe black isn't the best color to showcase our wedding date. The white part of the frame is about 8 years old now and not quite as white as it used to be so I decided to paint it silver to match the accent on the cardstock. Next, since the black frame itself was beat up and had some chips in it that needed touching up I decided to go with a complete overhaul and just paint the thing a clean, crisp white. This is how it ended up looking:

I thought that with the new color scheme that it would look really nice in our hallway with our monograms and cardstock art. But the new dilemma? The frame is too small and the wall still looks kind of naked. My solution? Wallflowers!Now the wall has a little bit of pop and a lot more personality. Yay for a fun wall! I have some leftover wallflowers too so hopefully I'll be able to coordinate them with other projects coming up.