One of the projects I have wanted to finish is the wood work I started upstairs. I really thought I would have it ready for stain this weekend, but I have yet to even plug in the sander! In my defense, I will tell you I managed to bring the sander and the sand paper from the basement upstairs! I truly planned on starting the wood work, but decided to wait when I realized I had no extension cord up there to plug in the sander!

I decided tonight while on the way to Menards that tomorrow I will accomplish some wood work, but I am being realistic! Instead of making my goal the entire upstairs I will work on a few pieces on the main floor. In our dining room we have two small trim pieces that need to have the paint picked out,  be fine sanded, stained, and then poly. These pieces are not done, because the originals were thrown out by the demo guys. There is also the bottom piece of the window in the kitchen that is new and just needs stain and poly. This piece was also thrown out. When the work first began on our house almost a year ago we stressed to every one who came in that the wood work needed to be kept. Sadly, not everyone cared and/or listened.

Other than that, there really isn’t a whole lot I plan on doing. Of course there is always cleaning, but I won’t bore anyone with that! As for fun stuff, this weekend Shane and I are taking Brendan sledding. Brendan LOVES the snow. I swear he would stay outside all day and play if we let him!

As for some small stuff we have completed in the last couple of weeks, it really has been piddly! I unpacked some more of our boxes last week. The majority of it was pictures and knick-knacks. Pretty sad that we have lived here for eleven months and have yet to unpack every thing! There is still an attic space full of boxes, but a  lot of it is baby items and scrap booking stuff. (Wow, I love the word “stuff” tonight!) Since we unpacked, we managed to put up some pictures upstairs. Until now, it has been bare and really hasn’t felt “homey” up there. Now it definitely does and it even helps distract you from the unfinished wood work!

The last thing accomplished was hanging up vintage, glass towel bars. I purchased these from the antique store in town almost a month ago and they have been patiently waiting! Shane surprised me two nights ago by getting out the drill and screws. I am still unsure of how I really feel about the glass bars. I loved them when I first saw them, thus why I purchased them! But I kind of liked them better not on the wall! Pathetic, I know!

Well, that is all for now. I hope every one has a great weekend whether it is relaxing or staying busy working on your home!

The carpet install went pretty smoothly. It didn’t take Lowes very long and they were pretty nice. Brendan is definitely all boy and loves to play rough. We did go with the thickest option for this reason. So far I am very happy with the results.

Sorry about the picture being sideways. I am not too computer savy with how to fix this. Trust me I tried! So I will have to have Shane do it later!

My only complaint about the carpet install was that it scratched up our wood work. After all the hard work I put into refinishing it I was and am still bummed. Lowes did come take a look as a small piece was also chipped, but did state it was unavoidable. So now we have to sand all of the woodwork and repoly. YAY! Not. So this is on our to do list. It will probably stay there for a while as I am burnt out on working.

Besides fixing the woodwork, we also need to finish some areas of the window frame, strip the closet and bedroom doors, and touch up some paint. With the doors we are hoping to have them dipped and avoid the headache, but we will see! All in all I am very happy how Brendan’s room turned out. Shane and I discussed it last night and his room is by far the best room in the house. I do think it was all worth it as Brendan looks at his room every morning and says, “Nice room.” Sometimes he replaces nice with the word cool! Last night as Shane was installing his windows Brendan was telling his Daddy thanks for those. It definitely makes it easier to put all the work into it when your two year old sure seems to appreciate it!

The bigger of the two decisions we made, was to expand our family. Casey is roughly 6 weeks along. After being inspired by The Macs, we are going to wait until out child is born to find our if we’ll be blessed with a little girl or another rambunctious adorable boy. So we now have another room to get baby’d. It’ll be a little different not knowing the sex, but I think we could have fun with it while making it work for whatever little bundle calls it home. We’ll be making the other upstairs bedroom into the nursery. I’d love to talk for paragraphs about this topic, but it is a bit difficult at this stage to come up with much more than what I provided .

The other big decision made is a major career shift on my end. We currently are blessed to be able to have me be the sole provider in the home, allowing Casey to raise our kids. It is the most underpaid (monetary) position in the world, but the reward of being able to spend your day with your kids are worth it (just don’t ask her on a bad day ). But, anyways, that big career change I mentioned… I’ll be transitioning from a full-time, salaried job to owning my own software development contracting company.

I’ve been paid to program since I was 15. I’m going to give you my story, whether you want it or not . I started out with one of those free websites with a full template back when I was ten. I’m pretty sure it said something like “I’m Shane, I’m ten. I have a website.” Impressive, right? I was mighty proud of it. From there, I transitioned into learning HTML to do some basic markup. Next, I transitioned into learning PHP so I could do cool things like tell you the date or something else jaw dropping like that. Then I got crazy and decided to write my own forum software. It was surprisingly successful until a huge security hole was discovered and I didn’t have enough time between school and it so I ended up selling it for some other poor schmuck to fix. I was 14 years old then.

Next, I started working for family doing some basic manufacturing to save up enough to buy parts to build my own computer. I was 15 at that time. With that new computer (using my futon as a chair, and the edge of a hand-me-down entertainment center as a desk) I started doing some free work to get my name heard. It wasn’t long until I was getting paid to do that work. I didn’t make much. Mostly enough to pay for gas and some gas station pizza at high school lunch breaks every now and then. Once I moved to college, I took up a job at Sears while moonlighting doing freelance programming. I lasted there for a year, and did another year at Napa until I landed a job after my sophomore year working for the company I do now. After graduating, I took a job at a $40bln company 5 hours away. It ended up being too hard to be that far from family, so we jettisoned back up here around the time this blog started and I went back to working for the company I am at now while letting them know I eventually wanted to go out on my own.

That takes us to now. As of November 1st, 2009, I’ll officially be self-employed. I’ve got my work cut out for me (speaking of which, contact me if you are an aspiring programmer [web or Windows based] and want to take on some work). I imagine this will explain the rush to get my downstairs office finished up soon.

Sooo, if you need any website or software development done, let me know. Also, if you are, or know, a good website designer, please let me know. Good designers are hard to come by, and I’ve got so much work I could dump on someone as long as they don’t expect to get paid a gazillion dollars per hour .

Sorry for rambling on so long about a career and leaving a paragraph to the more important point. I’m sure there will be much more to come on the baby, but little on self-employment . If you are coming over from houseblogs.net and are wanting to get baby updates, be sure to subscribe (http://www.google.com/reader, “Add Subscription,” “http://www.shaneandcasey.com/feed“) to our blog as I won’t be tagging it in a manner that will cause them to show up on there.

Last week Shane and I started looking at dogs. We knew we didn’t want a puppy, but rather an adult. We went back and forth a lot on breeds, but in the end it was mutually decided we wanted a Doberman. Shane managed to find a breeder 30 minutes from his parent’s cabin. Like I said, we weren’t interested in puppies, but the adults they were getting rid of. I was all set to go and check them out, however, they come at a high price. A price tag of $2,000+ to be exact. OUCH!

So we headed back to our humane society and spent some time with a terrier mix and two boxers. The boxers had a sad story. The female boxer you could see had puppies, but there was no puppies there. The pair was found wandering and it was thought they had been bred together and then dropped off once the puppies were old enough to make it. The lady also said that the mating pair were longing for each other. They were of course separated and put in two different kennels.

On Saturday Shane mentioned going to the humane society and taking the dogs out for a walk. We got there and the boxers were being quarantined and treated for something (can’t remember the name). I headed to the small/medium dog room and that is when I saw him! A 1 yr old, male, Miniature Pinscher. We took him out and he was perfect! An hour later and we were taking him home.

Today is day three of having our min. pin. He really has the greatest personality. He loves to play, be outside, snuggle, and best of all…he is great with Brendan.  He is also very social. He greets new people nicely and likes other animals. He is getting along great with our neighbor’s dog.

I am really bad at coming up with names. When we named our two Siamese cats, George and Toby, we just knew the names fit! So far I haven’t found our little doggy a name. We tend to like actual “human” names. I’m asking for every ones help for name suggestions. We’ll let you know what we end up naming him! Thanks!

Once the first few pieces of dry wall was off I discovered the plaster was in bad condition. As I continued to take off the remaining dry wall the plaster caved in, er fell off, exposing the lathe.

It was at this point you could see there had been a leak and the previous owners cut a hole in the lathe, fixed the leak, and put in insulation. Oops, wait a second. How did  know there had been a leak?! I figured that out, because the lathe to the left of the hole was completely rotted and covered in the “m” word. What’s the “m” word?! Yup, you guess it, MOLD! My little project of taking down the dry wall turned into a big project that took us two days to complete. Two days doesn’t sound so bad but when you look at how many hours we put in you realize it was in fact a big, long project.

Since this was my project it was up to me to rip out all of the lath, deal with the nasty insulation that rains down, and of course clean it all up. As of day two I was so frustrated and crabby I decided to take it out by hitting the remaining plaster with my pry bar as hard as I could. All that did was knock off a few little chunks and put insulation down my shirt. At that point I had it. I went to Shane and whined. I wanted him to finish ripping it out and I would clean the mess. My whining worked and he finished the demo stage, as well as doctoring up a rotted out joist.

Once the closet was all cleaned out, Shane put up new insulation. I have to admit that while this was an unexpected project I’m glad we did it. I’m sure I seem crazy since this was a closet and I could have just tried to make the existing dry wall work, but there is a reason for my madness. While it may just be a closet, the right side of the closet is used as a small play room for Brendan. There are shelves full of his books and toys all over the floor. Brendan loves to go in there, shut the door, and play. I’m sure to small child it seems like a fort. Now with this in mind, Shane came up with an idea that we might as well change out the closet lighting  and get it up to code since we’re down to the rafters/joists. It currently has a single incandescent, exposed bulb literally an inch away from the angled ceiling. In our closet the electricians had to put in a florescent pull light to replace the existing one to get it up to code since they worked on wiring in there.

While I like the original lights it does scare me because it gets super hot and its butted up to the ceiling. Shane came up with putting in a light on either side of the door and instead of a pull chain, wiring in a light switch. I love this idea, because the light switch will be low enough for Brendan to control, yet high enough so it doesn’t seem off if we ever do sell this house. Now that I have written a small book  it’s time to get ready for church. Happy Sunday every one!

So after getting frustrated I decided I would just put new carpet in. I picked it out and about died when I tallied up how much it would cost me. I went to Lowes and I’m looking at $600 for the carpet, premium carpet pad, tacks, and installation. After talking to my mother-in-law she had me rethinking the carpet. She’s voting for hardwood.

I love our hardwood floors in the house, but I’m still unsure about having them in the bedrooms (especially in Brendan’s room). Brendan loves to play on the floors. He is all boy; crawling around on the floor, wrestling etc. I like the idea of carpet just for the fact that it would be easier to play on. But I could do the hardwood and find a nice 8×10 rug that is thick. I’ve looked at a few rugs and it looks like it would cost me around $200-$300.

To sum it up I need to make a decision and I could use some help! Shane helped me create a poll.  Your answers and comments would be greatly appreciated!

[poll id="3"]

So back to what I wanted to post about: my many projects. Key word here is many! Note to Shane: sorry honey, I know it’s driving you crazy! So I really tried to just start one project and finish it before moving onto another. However, in my defense it is hard to take the heat gun and sander after the wood work when I’m home all day with Brendan.

My first project, the newel post, is coming along. All of the paint is off and Shane started sanding it for me. All that is left is to continue sanding. This is definitely easy enough, however, it is on-hold until we can get Brendan out of the house since it makes a lovely mess and we don’t have doors up here.

My second project is stripping the doors which is why they are not upstairs! Shane took them downstairs for me so the fumes could be in the basement. I have the old bathroom door almost done. I need to take liquid stripper after the sides that face the frame. I tried to take the heat gun after it, but it started smoking. Whoever painted it, just painted onto the unfinished wood making it not so easy! I decided to put this off as I hate working with liquid stripper. Actually, let me clarify…I don’t actually hate the product, because whatever Shane bought me works super fast and actually does the job! What I hate is the smell and I refuse to use it in the house.

Now that this door is on-hold, let’s move on to the other door. The other door is the one we removed from the bedroom/office going into the kitchen. This will be the new upstairs bathroom door. I have one side done thanks to the heat gun and I just started on the backside. I would seriously be done by now, but the electrician showed up and I’m too nice of a person to make him smell the fumes. Actually, I didn’t want him to leave early because of the fumes. Hehe. The electric company was suppose to be here Thursday and never showed and never called. So needless to say I’m not taking any chances!

Last project (yes another one) is the wood work upstairs. I figured why not since every thing else up here was in the process too. I finished the bathroom framing and started on my son’s door frame for his room. I was doing great! I was motivated and eager to finish. Then the fire alarm goes off. *sigh* Now I have no motivation and am sitting here writing this. I apologize if I’m jumpng all over. It’s been too long since I posted last.

On a slightly different note. In our basement bathroom we’ve decided to paint the window trim and baseboards. I’m wondering what to do with the door. Should we paint the bathroom side of the door and leave the front stripped etc., or should I just finish the bathroom side? Would it look funny having all the wood painted, except the door? Or another option is to not paint the window trim or the door and just paint the baseboards? Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!