"New" (to us) Car!

Cass and I bought a "new" used car to replace the Oldsmobile. The Olds was really starting to show signs of it's age and since I have an older truck as well we decided we should have at least one newer, reliable car!

So we found this ad on craiglist for a 2002 RAV4 with 45K miles on it, came out to look at it and took it for a test drive! The guy was asking $3k under the blue book value for it, so obviously we had to be somewhat skeptical about it. It had been in an accident but the owner had the damage fixed and there was no structural damage to the car's frame. It turned out to be a pretty solid deal for us so we made an offer and he accepted. We had a pretty good amount of money saved up for the car, but what we offered meant we'd have to take out a small loan but we plan on paying it off real fast.

So, the one hitch we ran into was in order to actually transfer the title, we had to send the title to Bosnia! The owner's wife whose name was also on the title needed to sign it as well in order for us to transfer the title. So a month of waiting and four trips to the SOS office later, we finally got the title transferred. We like our "new" car.

Edit: 11/4/2011 We paid off the car. It's now ours!! We also added some new aesthetic enhancments!

New Closet

Yet another area of our house that had poorly planned out and poorly used storage, our walk-in closet off our bedroom. The closet had one shelf that wrapped around the entire closet at about 6 feet high which was great for having a bunch of long hanging space, but we needed a lot more shelf space than that. Cass had been saying she wanted to redo the closet since Christmas, and since I'm so fast about getting around to starting projects, we started the weekend before the 4th of July (half a year later)! The closet had the style of hanging where you had to put the hangers on backwards which Cass "loved" as you can see from her expression. The original plan was to clear out the closet, and have it painted by the end of Saturday and hang the shelves on Sunday! Yeah, we'll see about that.



I got the old shelves torn out on Friday only to reveal some lovely gaping holes in the drywall! Greeaat. So I filled those on Friday which meant we had to wait until Saturday to paint. Then, on Saturday morning the joint compound I used to fill the holes hadn't dried yet, >.< D'OH! I must've put too much in the holes. I got out the hair dryer and dried them out and after some sanding, we got crackin' on painting the walls. We decided to use the same green color that we have on the walls in our bedroom that face north and south. (The east and west walls are a tan color. See May 26, 2009.)
The white paint behind the coat of paint we put on was of course gloss finish, so the first coat of paint looked terrible and we knew that we'd have to put another coat on, but our dilemma was how much more paint do we buy? Do we just get a quart or spring for the gallon which is twice the price? Will we have enough for the second coat? What if it needs a third coat? We decided to just get a quart and it turned out to be just enough! Score 1 for us! Cass liked it so much, I thought the closet would make a nice bedroom for her. We had to wait for 24 hours to let the paint cure before we hung anything on the walls. So we waited for about 18 hours and I got started putting up the first set of shelves. As I mentioned before, my plan was to finish the shelves on Sunday. The following picture on the left shows you how far I got on Sunday. Yeah, I fell a bit behind schedule! It wasn't particularly difficult to put the shelves up, it's just that I'd never done it before and I wasn't sure the best way to do it making sure the shelves were level. I figured out a system and got one finished and one more half way hung. I'm used to things taking longer than I expect, though. Happens all the time.

Monday after work I started hanging more shelves and got the long shelves on Cass's wall and my wall finished. With my "system" I started working faster, so it took me a quarter the time it took me on Sunday to do her two shelves and finish my wall. Cass and I host a small group on Tuesdays, so I didn't get to work on it the next evening. On Wednesday though, I got the two shelves with the hanging bars on the broad wall that faces the door. When we got that up, things really started to take shape and we were excited about finishing the closet. Thursday came along and I didn't have band practice at church, so I was determined to get the closet finished. I just had a few more small shelves to hang, so I knew it was doable. Probably the most difficult single task to do during this whole thing was cutting the shelves because I had to use a hack saw. I didn't have a power tool I could use :-(, and of course since I was hanging 5 small shelves, this involved the most cutting! Nevertheless, I got them all cut and hung.

Here's the finished product with our clothes finally in place with plenty of space to spare.


And the best part is all the shelves are like this...

LEVEL!!!

Lack of Curb Appeal...

It's been so long since I've posted I'm not sure where to start. Cass and I are starting to look at the outside of our house more and are formulating ideas for what we'd like to do with the landscaping since we have left it the way it was since we moved in which is pretty boring at the moment. Just look back to April 29, 2009 and you'll see what I mean. Our favorite things we have growing in our yard are our raspberry bushes which are exploding and hardly containable and our lilies. These lilies are perennials, so they just keep coming back and we have done nothing for them since we moved in. They just grow right on up on the side of our house, but the unfortunate thing is that nobody sees them! We're thinking it'd be cool to try and harvest the seeds from them and plant some more of them in the landscaping when we get around to doing so. We just don't know how to get the seeds from these! Who knows, maybe they've been sterilized.

We're not exactly sure when we plan on doing the landscaping. That all sort of depends on how much we decide we want to do and how much it'll cost. Looking backward, we've made a few more improvements to the interior house! I'll post more about those in the days to come! Just wanted to put this out there so that there's something new to report!

Shelves!!!

Look at that mess!!! Back in February, this is what our basement looked like! If you know Cass, you know that this bothered us to no end, but we never needed to go downstairs for anything so it got neglected.

We decided that this needed to be fixed! We had a whole bunch of leftover plywood from building the shed doors (see August 9, 2010) so we figured that'd make some excellent shelves! Now I just needed some 2x4s! Too bad those don't grow on trees! (Wait, they do actually just not in my backyard.) I also needed some nails. Quick trip to Lowe's took care of that!

We brought my tools and stuff down into the basement and cleared out a workspace for me and away I went. They only took me a day to build. We had 4 pieces of plywood that were about 18" deep and 8' long, and we had 4 more that were about 30"x20". Perfect for storage bins!

In the end, we had two super sturdy shelving units. One that looked like a 4 person bunk bed! Combined with a set of metal shelves we got from where Cass's Mom used to work, we ended up having enough room in the shelves to organize just about everything we had in our basement, after going through all our stuff and throwing a bunch of stuff out of course! We had extra garbage to throw out at the curb each week for about the next 2 or 3 weeks as a result of that! NICE!

We're quite proud of our handy work! This of course made room for me to start putting together my man cave!!! Check it out!

Our Christmas Vacation Photos

Well, I'm sorry that it took so long to finally post these, but after sifting through over 2,000+ photos and videos, I've picked out the best photos from our Christmas Vacation trip to Ohio, Georgia, Tampa, and our Western Caribbean Cruise. We posted pictures at the links below for you to see and if you want a copy of any of the photos, there should be a link on the bottom of each photo's page that says "Download in High Resolution".

There were so many pictures, I decided to split them up so that the photos of our trip leading up to the cruise when we're in Ohio and Georgia are in the "Christmas Break" album and our cruise is in the "Our Western Caribbean Cruise" album. Once you click on the album name below, you can click on a photo to get a larger view of it. We hope you enjoy them!

Christmas Break

Our Western Caribbean Cruise