Last Friday Night

So Matt was out of town over the weekend to attend his college roommate's bachelor party, which meant Elliott and I had big plans to LIVE IT UP.

On Friday, I ate nachos for all three meals. Well, okay my nachos didn't exactly have cheese on them, so really I ate chips smothered in ground beef and pinto beans for all three meals. And I began to understand why cheese is an essential part of nachos, as it keeps all the other good things from falling off the chip. But that didn't make me want to eat cheese, so I just used a fork to help me hoover up all the fallen ingredients.

That night, I was feeling restless after I spent a few hours watching Burn Notice and painting my nails and flipping through this month's issue of Marie Claire and doing my weekly meal planning. So I decided to go, of all places, to Lowe's. When the in-laws were in town last week, they helped us re-paint our front porch, and when the numbers were removed, they kind of broke. Cheap things. So I figured it was as good a time as any to get some new ones. I spent an embarrassing amount of time crouching on the floor and deciding what to get — some of the fonts were really ugly, and some of them were too small and shiny, and some of them were gigantic and cheap-looking. I had to lay out all possible color and font combinations until I found one I could live with.

Since my trip to Lowe's wasn't that exciting, I was still bored when I got back home. I decided that I should go to bed early and get my beauty sleep. I moisturized and everything! And then I watched a few episodes of Friends, because it was on TV and it's nice to have the TV on when you're home alone so the house isn't just dead silent.

So my opportunity to LIVE IT UP ended up with me just being bored and trying to find an excitement that eluded me. And I am a little disappointed that I wasn't able to think of something exciting and new to do. But all in all, it was really nice having time to relax, get a few things done, finish a book I'd been working on for a while, and get a lot of sleep. I suppose there are just some days where it's okay to not have adventures.

What do you do when your significant other isn't home?

Prayers for Moore

As most of you know, I went to college at the University of Oklahoma. I loved it in Norman. I loved the campus, the people, the town. My senior year, I got a "big girl" job in Oklahoma City, about 45 minutes north, and I loved that too.

So it's heartbreaking to see Oklahoma City and Moore (the town directly in between Norman and OKC) dealing with so much destruction from yesterday's tornadoes. So many people without homes. Schools and hospitals destroyed. People trapped under rubble.

If you have an extra prayer to spare today, please send it up for my second home state.

Two Years!

This week, Matt and I are celebrating our second anniversary! Geezums. Sometimes it feels like we've only been married for half a minute, and other times it feels like we've already been married for decades. In a good way, of course. :)

I'll be picking up some cupcakes in our wedding cake flavors (cake is a must every year!) and at some point, we'll watch our wedding video too!

We most likely won't exchange gifts this year to fit with the traditional "cotton" theme. Instead, we're thinking of replacing the linens on our bed, since we found a MASSIVE rip on the fitted sheet the other day and we only have the one set. Not super romantic, but hey, neither are we. Practicality is romantic!

In the meantime, I'm popping back up on Weddingbee to share a "snapshot" of our wedding day and look back at some of my favorite photos. Head on over and check it out!

A Hundred Things

This was my Monday night.

I needed a project since I haven't really done any crafty stuff lately. Rachel once left this oval canvas at my house during one of our marathon crafting sessions, and it sat in the closet for like a year before I found something I wanted to do with it. I made a list on my computer of 100 of my favorite things (easier to number them ahead of time than to keep count as you're writing!), then busted out my wedding Sharpies and went to town.

I got the idea from here. (And if you want to do one yourself but prefer using a computer template, there's one on that site!)

What do you love?

A Shiny New Exterior

The siding on our house has seen better days.

I don't actually know when those better days were, because it looked pretty bad when we moved in, and has gotten progressively yuckier as the years have passed (although it doesn't look anywhere near as bad as our next-door neighbor's siding, which they don't actually have to see because it's in our courtyard and not theirs).

(Told you so.)

The bottom of the planks were peeling up and several of them were cracked and crumbling. We didn't want it to get bad enough that we could wind up with water damage, so we had looked into getting it replaced. But that was where we had to throw on the brakes, because we couldn't really afford to drop a couple thousand on siding. And we especially weren't willing to drop thousands on siding that wasn't even ours.

But luckily Matt has the best family ever, and two of his uncles graciously offered to replace the siding on our house for us, if we paid for the materials. And even nicer, they said they'd replace the neighbors' siding too, if they wanted it done. (They did, thank goodness!)

So last week, his uncles and parents brought in their hydraulic lift and a whole bunch of primed siding, and went about installing it and getting the house fixed up!

But first, they had to tear down all the old siding first. Matt said this was the best part of the whole project.

Of course, when they did that they found that parts of the house hadn't even been insulated properly, so that had to be fixed too.

View from inside the attic.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law and I went to Home Depot to look at paint colors for the exterior of the house. We settled on Behr's satin-finish "Cozy Cottage" (740C-2) and got a huge five-gallon bucket of it. Eventually we plan to re-paint the entire exterior of the house, though there are a few more fixes we have to make first.

Once the siding was all torn off and new insulation was added to the gaps, the guys started putting up tar paper so if it rained overnight, the wood and insulation wouldn't get messed up, and then started nailing the new, unpainted siding up!

Because I couldn't really do a whole lot to help out with the manual labor, I went to Lowe's and Home Depot for extra supplies, went on beer and Gatorade runs, and made sure we had lunches and dinners prepared so no one else had to think about it. (When it comes to major projects, I say play to your strengths. I'm not good at doing home repair, but I know how to feed people!)

And once all the siding and flashing was up, it was time to give that sucker a couple of coats of paint!

The dark beige was the color the boards came in. The lighter color is the Cozy Cottage paint.

Some extra boards were added to frame the edges.

And after a little more painting, our new siding was done!

Beautiful! And when all was said and done, I got to take a ride up in the lift to "inspect" it up close! That was pretty cool. They took it all the way up (about 34 feet in the air), and you could see the roofs of all the houses on the street from up there.

The whole project took two and a half full days of work with four people working on it, so they didn't get to work on the neighbor's siding before they had to go back home. Besides, our courtyard is too small to fit the hydraulic lift in, so they'll have to come back another week with some scissor lifts to be able to reach it.

We are very pleased with how it turned out! And I think it will be a major help when we try to sell next year too.