Hardwood floors!

In beginning of November we started our hardwood floor installation adventure!  We had decided we were sick and tired of the yucky wall to wall carpeting in our family room and office.  After researching locally and online we decided to do the job ourselves (with the expert help of my dad!) and to order our floor online.  We also wanted to paint the walls so that was step one.  The family room got painted a very light sunny neutral and the ceiling turned white.  This was a huge improvement to the room since previously the walls AND ceiling had been a milk chocolate brown (see similar situation with dining room paint post).

Prepping the floors was a huge job, especially scrapping off glue residue on the floor from the carpet pad.  Lots of elbow grease to scrape, caulk  and patch.

 17 boxes of engineered hardwood flooring "acclimating" to it's new home.

The office.

 

We had a good system in the division of labor:  Emma=glue spreader, Ryan=board selector/pattern puzzler, my dad=board cutter and my mom=baseboard engineer, child coordinator and food/snack chef.

 Ta da!  Here is the finished family room with repainted walls and new hardwood flooring.  Yay!

Ready for the Holiday Season!

The fake tree is up and decorations are scattered all around, we're ready for Christmas :-)

Alert the Tooth Fairy!!!

Sofia's first loose tooth was discovered earlier this summer at the end of June, today it finally fell out!!!  We had just finished lunch and in the middle of a Jungle Rummy game Sofia asked me slightly confused why there was a gap in her mouth.  I looked and saw her tooth had fallen out!  Sofia was SOOO excited :-)  I was a little stressed out that the tooth was lost, but Sofia found it right there on the ground, she had spit it out since she thought somehow a rock had gotten in her mouth!  So funny!  Now, I wonder what the Tooth Fairy will surprise her with...  Sofia's guess was a ZhuZhu Pet.  I don't think the Tooth Fairy carries extra ones of those with her ;-)

There isn't many pictures of me on this blog, however we got a new webcam and I was experimenting with the snapshot capability so, "hi there!"  It doesn't seem to handle a low-lit room too well, but not too bad :-)

Random fun things!

Sofia and Kajsa decided to play beauty salon and tried out some kid make-up which included a sparkle lip gloss.  Of course, being little girls means the more sparkles the better so they smeared their arms, chests and faces with generous amounts of sticky sparkly lip gloss!   Ta da, don't they look bright and shiny?!  :-)

 For her birthday Sofia had asked for a desk in her room so she could do homework there since she is now in 1st grade.  I found a cute little wood desk at a yard sale for $5 and spruced it up with $40 of paint from Sherwin Williams!  Since the cost of this little desk was beginning to tip the scales the wrong way I had to economize on the knobs and instead of regular ones made Monkey's fists out of purple rope.  Turned out super awesome and Sofia loves her new desk.  I also moved everything around in her room and updated it a bit.  Sofia's favorite part of the mini-makeover was the doll house that Mormor and Morfar made, which was already in her room pre-makeover!!!

 Labor day weekend was officially labeled home improvement weekend!  Saturday I made over Sofia's room, Sunday we painted the ceiling in the dining room, put in the new custom shelf in the office (that our neighbor built), and Monday we painted the walls and trim in the dining room!  The dining room was previously a chocolate milk tan (walls and ceiling), so this paint project really made an impact.

 Our patio got an update with new outdoor pillows that I found on sale at Home Depot for $2 each!  Here our table is all set for a yummy taco dinner with placemats and napkins from Mexico courtesy of Carl and Raina :-)

Ryan was gone for work for a week and the girls were pretty excited for him to come home.  They decorated the courtyard with chalk drawings and sprinkled "love" aka rose petals :-)

Yosemite bound!

Tomorrow we're heading up to Yosemite for the annual "Yosemite Facelift" event. Sofia is so excited about going hiking that she packed a whole backpack for of stuff for the car as well as blankets and pillows, we had to check with her that she knew we weren't going camping ;-). Of course it's also super hard to fall asleep when you're excited! Here she is snuggling in Mamma's bed. (picture to come as I'm having trouble uploading photos from the iPad)

Spring is in the air!

The sun is shining and we've been enjoying 65-70F weather for the past week. Our "farm" behind Ryan's office is quite productive with all the winter vegetables that we planted. Here is a picture of today's harvest.Mmmm, this will be very yummy and colorful to eat :-)

Also some crafting activities around here included making a bubble twirly skirt for Kajsa. She picked out the fairy fabric herself. It turned out pretty cute, but next time I should probably google some tutorials on it instead of winging it as I ran into some tricky parts. The end result was liked by both Mamma and Kajsa!
Happy spring to everyone!

Photo models for an afternoon!

Sofia and Kajsa got to be photo models for a couple of hours for my friend Jenny, who is an awesome photographer. She is opening up her own studio in Fig Garden Village in Fresno inside the new Ga Ga Chic childrens clothing store. Their clothes are absolutely adorable and have amazing details - so cute! Check it out at http://gagachic.com