How to spend a hot and sweat Sunday

Hello strangers, if you don't remember me, my name is Steph and you sometimes check in on my blog.  It's been a crazy couple of weeks, so I apologize for not posting in so long.

I recently underwent a major career change.  As of this last Monday, May 16th, I am now a Specimen Receiving Technician in the Surgical Pathology Department at UW Hospital in Madison!  It has seriously been one of the best decisions in my life.  And what exactly does one do with that job?  Good question.  I myself didn't know exactly what that meant until about 3 days into the new job.  I work in the Pathology Lab and I am the person that enters all of the specimen/patient information into the computer, before the specimens are tested for various diseases (aka Pathology...I actually had to google Pathology to find out what it meant : / ).  At some point I will be doing more lab-like work, but for the first couple weeks, I'm simply observing and doing computer work.  Now, I have zero experience in this, however they hired me because I am tend to be anal about attention to detail and can be compulsive about organization (remember this project?  And this one?) and the department needed someone like that.  And even though I admitted to having zero experience during my interview, I was told that the bosses like being able to train someone from the ground up...which is me for sure.  But anyway, I am looooving the new job.  And all of the gross stuff that comes with it too. :)  On my first day I saw an ovary the size of a football.  On day two I saw a finger in a jar.  I think it can only get better and better :)

But anyway....back to the topic at hand.  Today Matt and I built and planted our garden!  We picked up three 2x4's at Home Depot (and plants and dirt) and then came home and built a 2'x8' frame, which we then brought into the backyard, filled with dirt, and planted our 2011 plants. :)  We picked out 6 different tomato plants, 9 various pepper plants, and Matt grabbed a watermelon plant (how weird is it that you can even grow watermelon in WI...).  Check it out!

{In case you are blind, notice the difference between the grass on the right and left side of the garden?...That's because our neighbor's yard is on the left and our's is on the right.  Our grass has actually come a long way and thanks to True Green doing some treatments this year, our yard will hopefully flourish}

And our lilacs!!! (they were not planted today, I'm just excited about all the plants and flowers)  I love them :) We have 2 purple lilac bushes and one that's a little different with dark pink flowers.  (The garden is to the right, up the hill from the lilac bushes.  That medium sized bush in the middle is Russian Roses, but they haven't bloomed yet.  Also, the Hosta, Russian Roses, and garden are on the edge of our property line.)

And the rhubarb...which is growing like a madman everyday, even though it was planted in crappy dirt behind the garage and I always forget to water it...

Here are the flowers I planted out front a couple of weeks ago.  We're ripping those ugly timbers out next weekend and putting in cement pavers/blocks, to make it a bit more classy looking. (Sorry for the shadowed picture...the flowers are a deep purple color, the ones on the far left still need to go into pots).

{I got the frog at Saver's for $2.99!  Matt hates it, but I love him :) }

Stay tuned for our plan for the rest of yard...I rattled off about 60 things to Matt this afternoon about what we're going to be doing this summer.  He's almost as excited as me....almost. :)

~S~

Frumpy to Fabulouso in 3.87 Minutes

Ever wonder how to make your curtains go from frumpy to fabulouso in under 5 minutes?  Yeah, I didn't either.  UNITL!  I saw curtain clips at Target for about $5.00.  Now, I have them in the living room and master bedroom.  They allow the curtains to slide a lot easier and make this nice "clink clink clinky" noise too. :)  I would have a verrrrrry exciting bathroom post to write about and share with you....but I forgot my camera at work on Wednesday night.  But that's coming verrrry soon!

Anyway, here are some before and afters, since I'm hoping you can figure out how to use curtain clips (Also, please try to ignore the ugly, yet very comfortable couch).  And in case you're wondering why there are thinker seams in the middle of the panels, it's because we had buy 4 panels to cover our giant front window, instead of the normal two.

Before Closed:

Before Open:

{hahaha Suzie is such a good model...aka picture bombardment whore}

Before Up Close and Personal:

After Closed:



After Open:

After Artsy Shot:

And in case you're curious how the bottom looks.... (I by the way looove when curtains puddle a bit on the bottom....even with cat hair tumbleweeds throughout the house.  I think it makes a room look for casual and not so "in line" or perfect...not that my house would ever be considered perfect.)

Here's a wider shot....I didn't realize you could have already seen the clips in this post:

So, nothing too exciting at all, but it will add an inch or so to your curtains...which I usually need since I always hang curtain rods a tad too high.  Oh!  And since company is coming tomorrow for a girl's weekend (whoop!!!) the house should be good and clean, so I'll try and snap some pictures of the rooms you haven't seen yet. 

And in case you were wondering....the girl's weekend is for my bff, Miss Courtney's birthday:

She's going to be so pleased I put that on here... Happy Birthday Buddy!!! :)

~S~

"Ugggh, it smells like farts in here."

This last weekend Matt and I picked up a new bathroom faucet.  I had found one online that I was in looove with, but at $198.99, it was about $100+ more than we wanted to pay.  We wanted something that was classic and a bit vintage looking, since the bathroom was pretty modern and we wanted to make sure the new bathroom blended in with the rest of the house.  Unfortunately, Matt goes crazy for anything modern, so he was of course instantly drawn to this faucet:

I was not a huge fan, but since I normally veto his choices right away, I gave in and we brought it home with us.  When we opened the box Sunday night, we both figured it would take about an hour at most to complete the switch (which is why we started at 8:00pm).  Here's why:

Only 4 pieces?  This will be a breeze.  Yeah, not so much.  Here is the original faucet:

We were going to leave it, but the little knobby thing on the back of the water spout was too close to the mirror and then the frame would not fit...and also all of our bathtub hardware is shiny instead of brushed like the old faucet...and I'm a freak about things like that matching.

First step was to turn off the water underneath the sink.  The second step was to remove the old faucet and plumbing.  Here is Matt doing that.  There weren't any instructions on how to remove anything, so we winged it and hoped for the best.  The handles simply pulled off with a little help from a Phillips screwdriver:

Then Matt used his muscles to twist off the bottom pieces of the handles:



And when muscles weren't quite enough....

Once the handles were off, Matt had to crawl underneath the sink to take apart the drain pieces that were holding the faucet spout and drain in place.  My job was to be quiet and not criticize while he was cramped under there...I did a B- job of it.  I did stuff myself underneath to get a few pictures though:

That green tagged piece is what attaches to the hot water handle.  You can see the cold water one in the background.  The gold pipe goes up and attaches to the drain.  In order to get the drain off, we had to take off the white "U"/ backwards "J" piece...which caused a minor panic when I pulled on it and water started coming out, but it was just a little water that had settled there when we turned off the water.  Here is what we found in the white pipe:

SICK!  But not anywhere near as bad as I thought it could have been...seeing as I am known to just wash any and all stray hair down the drain instead of wiping it out.  Here's the shot of the drain being out:

The next couple steps involved me thinking I knew how to install the drain and ripping pieces of it out of Matt's hands when he tried to help, which resulted in him walking away from me for a few minutes.  And then I broke a piece of the drain....and called Matt for help.  We figured out that we could still install the drain and it would work just fine (thank goodness) and I taught Matt a lesson to not walk out on me in the middle of projects, so take that!

The faucet handles slipped right into place and attached to the water lines below without any problems.  Same for the faucet spout.  Taking off the old drain and putting in the new one were the most time consuming parts of the project, so our "one hour project" ended up taking almost 2.5.  But check out the new faucet!

Whoa!  Who is that sexy, glasses-wearing, roughed up, sweaty, post soccer game goddess in the mirror? :) (yikes)

Like the faucet??  Once it was installed I loved it.  All my previous reservations about it being too modern flew out the window and I think Matt definitely made the right choice.

~S~

What a man, what a man

Yesterday was mine and Matt's 3 year anniversary (cue awwwww) and Monday night after my soccer game, I came home sweaty and exhausted to find a great surprise.  Matt had been on-call all day (at home) and worked on the bathroom!  He managed to take it from looking pretty good, but not done, to looking GREAT and almost done. 

I had finished painting the vanity doors last week and had picked up two knobs for the doors this last weekend at Home Depot (we also picked up a nail gun and air compressor, both on sale for $69.99 each).  Matt put on the knobs and reinstalled the doors, without even hinting that he had done it, that rascal. :)  He also reattached all the baseboards  (minus one, that we can't find anywhere...) and attached the mirror frame to the mirror!  Happy anniversary to me :)  Here are some pictures, so you check out the amazingness that is Mr. Kendall (witrh a little help from me too):

We made the frame for the existing mirror using trim sold at Home Depot.  We bought 3 pieces (it came a white color) and then Matt used his Miter Saw (from Mark and Janet aka the in-laws for Christmas) to cut the pieces to size and at 45 degree angles.  Once cut, we used Liquid Nails to conect the four corners.  And since we did not have a nail gun at the time, we used a staple gun to attach the four corners from the backside of the frame. (Yeah, we're a bit hillbilly like that)  It actually worked and held up nicely.  Once the Liqud Nails dried, I painted 3 coats of the Marth Stwerart paint we had picked out over the wood.  We also bought, painted, and attached the 4 squares in each corner of the frame.  I like to think it gives it a little somethin' somethin' extra.  Though it looks different in the above pictures, the frame and vanity are the same color.

Here's a before and after to get a better idea of how much more awesome the new sink area looks.

Before:

And After:

If you're extremely observant, you may have also noticed the new sink faucet!  I'll post about that ordeal tomorrow...or later today maybe.  Here's another new thing we added (which you may have noticed on the back of the door above):



Cute, huh?!  I found them at Pottery Barn.

With all these little things being done...we are sooo close to being 100% finished!  I will be painting the walls (man, how many times have I already said that?...) THIS WEEK and also painting all the trim and baseboards.  Since our wonderful house has crooked walls galore, I have some serious caulking to do around all the baseboards.  And find that missing baseboard....  I know, you're super jealous of the fun times ahead, right? :)

~S~