Nearing completion

Completion. What a great word. Anyone remember November 2007? Dan and I were starting the renovation of the kitchen with grand ideals to have it done by the next month before he deployed. Isn't that just quaint? We did get a lot of work done in those two months but here we are now a little bit later and I am finally seeing the finish line.

I won't bore anyone with the list but really all we have left is touch-up work, it feels really good. And I am loving my kitchen. I love waling into this room, I love the way it turned out and I love that we did practically all the work ourselves. The only thing we didn't do was install the oven and the counter tops. The backsplash was installed purely by me, I totally dig being able to say that. Dan did all the cutting.

Flashback to when we bought the house:



Now here is where we are at right now:







So now, besides the dozen or so touch up things we still would like to do, there were also some slight unforeseen hiccups. We changed the electrical outlets because they were all beige and we wanted white, sounds simple enough, yeah? Dan is no novice around electricity either, thanks to his time in the Guard, but now there are a few light switches that don't quite work the way they should. For example, the light above the sink is normally turned on by the light switch, now the only way to turn it on is when you have turned on the garbage disposal. Little glitches like that. But other that that, we are coming along, and on the bright side, I have never kept a kitchen so clean. It's like wrong to let this one get dirty, it actually gives me pain.

Coming soon, vacation pictures. And one last thing, happy anniversary to Dan and me, eleven years today!

Coming down

Man, has it been a wonderful month and half. Who knew having a husband around changed life so drastically? I really didn't appreciate what a transition it was from having him gone around 17 months to having him home - a lot. He has been working about three hours a day, when we weren't on vacation. He still probably won't start a normal work schedule for another couple weeks. I had no idea how independent I had become until I realized that I was getting irritated from having to tell Dan about my comings and goings, and not in a possessive way, just the regular way husbands and wives know what each other doing normally.

I just wanted to put in a quick update for some thing to look for. I will start posting pictures of our vacation soon, the cruise was so awesome. And before the vacation Dan and I were hard at work again in the kitchen and got a ton done before we left. It's just that between starting to be normal again, all the school work I need to catch up on from vacation, and of course, vacation laundry, all you can have right now is this teaser.

Just know that I am emerging from the bubble now.