House update July 11

It’s been a while since we’ve posted. We went on a trip to California and came home and life is busy and sometimes overwhelming and progress on home projects feels kinda slow. So check back soon to get an update on our CA trip and baby #5.

Our cabinets were delivered this morning and we have the great task of keeping them safe and undamaged for 2 weeks before they can get installed. Not gonna lie I’m kinda nervous about that. Because we have 4 young kids one of which I still catch mindlessly drawing on things And one baby who doesn’t understand boundaries yet. ALSO we dog sit. Sometimes 4 extra dogs a day. And we all know what kind of mess dogs can make. Wish me luck, sanity and stay tuned to see how this drama unfolds. BUT back to the actual cabinets. They are beautiful!!! The base cabinets are a blue-grey and the uppers are white. The island is huge and amazing and will have a maple butcher block counter top. The rest of the counters will be a white silestone. Not quite sure about a backsplash yet. I am so excited to get the kitchen going.

Utah has this great thing called pressurized irrigation. I first learned we had it this last winter when my sweet neighbor informed me there was a geiser in the backyard. We then had to find the shut off valve, and come to find out it’s in a PVC pipe that is buried 5ft down. We found this 7ft metal pole in the shed left with some other random things from the previous owners. We got it turned off and never really thought about it again until recently, it’s been hot, the kids want to play in the sprinklers we need to water the grass and we went to turn it on and discovered lots of broken pipe. Mostly because of the excavation we had to do to replace the water main, and the mild leveling stuff we did in the back. We decided that since our overall yard layout was going to be so much different that we would just abandon the existing stuff and run a new pipe straight from the shut off valve. So my dear uncle benny who lives about 10 minutes away came over with his mini excavator and dug us a hole in fixed our pressurized irrigation. And since we haven’t finished our landscaping we just put a single faucet off the main and ran a long hose to the backyard to water the grass and the children. For the last month we’ve been using the house water for the grass. Never again cause holy smokes the irrigation water shoots so much farther through our little sprinkler. It’s quite fun.

Before our California trip I started tiling Stephanie’s bathroom. I did the decorative tiles and trim tiles. And started to install the main large tiles, when we kept running into issues with the tile cutter and the squareness of the wall/ soffet box and even the size of the tiles. It was quite angering. After not even one quarter of one wall done, and much frustration, anger and eventually defeat we decided to change the main tile for her bathroom. Matt pulled them off the wall and scraped the morter off. And we walked away from it. Until this week. I did not want to touch that bathroom again, so Matt has been cleaning up my month old mess and prepping for the actual tile job. New estimated finish date of Saturday 🤞😁

But also speaking of bathrooms remember that vanity we were so very excited about a few weeks ago? Yeah well we are returning it. The drawer slide hardware is already malfunctioning. It’s pretty lame. Not exactly sure what to do in its place yet but as it seems to always be with construction, two steps forward one step back…

And then when you start talking about returning things we have to talk about the doors. Matt went to Home Depot months ago and ordered all our interior doors. He got really nice shaker style solid core doors with milled jams. We waited 3+ weeks for them to come in and realized about a week later once we had started to install them, that 3 of them were not the right size. So he took them back and re-ordered the right doors. He didn’t install anymore and We waited another 3+ weeks to get the replacements. They come in, we bring them home an one has the wrong jam style, but we also noticed that another one of the original doors was wrong too. Very very frustrating. But now all but one door is installed. And we are waiting for that last one to come in.

It’s just a dang good thing that Home Depot is so close to our house, because whether it’s our mistake our theirs we go there sometimes 4x a day when working on a project.

As for other little things, all the can lights and switches are installed. All the plugs and plate covers are installed and All the HVAC vent covers are installed! Each of the bedrooms have their beds dressers and desks set up.

Life is pretty simple but it’s functioning. Piece by piece it will come together. Until then we will continue to find joy in the little things. Like wildflowers from our driveway 💕 Thanks for stopping by, see you again soon.