Kitchen remodel-Day 1

When we bought this house we knew that the kitchen would have to be gutted and redone as soon as we moved in. Because we ended up doing so much other remodeling before we moved in the kitchen got bumped a couple of months. Not only is it ugly it is not functional at all. The cabinets were falling apart, most the outlets quit working, and the dishwasher broke. We convinced Chris, our favorite contractor to come down from Utah and help us put our new kitchen in. Here are some of the before pictures.

This is a picture of the new pantry that Chris is building right off of the kitchen. Also in the picture is all the kids lunch stuff that I moved out of the kitchen but left accessible so that they could pack lunches. It has also become an all you can eat buffet for Mads when she is playing in the family room or watching T.V. I may have to move it.

This is what our office looks like right now. You can't even walk in!

Our temporary kitchen.

Men at work.

The end of day 1. A big mess, but a lot of progress was made!

Our backyard

I've been wanting to post pictures of our new house since we moved but things have been kind of crazy around here! We have kept our old home and we are renting it out to some good friends of ours. They were very anxious to move in since about October when we thought we would be moving! Thankfully they were very patient and waited for us to finalize everything and didn't back out. But when we signed those final papers they were ready to go! The problem was we really wanted to get a lot done at the new house before we moved in. So we moved out of our home and into a hotel for a week. Sounded fun, like an adventure! No cooking, no cleaning! That lasted for about one day. A family of six is not meant to live in one room for an extended period of time. Thanks on part to my father-in-law and a wonderful contractor who came all the way from Utah to help us out we were able to get A LOT done in one week. There is still a lot to do so I thought I'd just post some pictures of our backyard. The yard is the real reason we bought this home. We LOVE it! It is almost an acre and a half and full of possibilities!This is the view of the back yard from the french doors in the living room. The backyard is split into two main areas. The front part has a fence around it and has a pool, a big grassy area, a lot of trees and a bird aviary!
This is the view from my bedroom window. I love looking out to that every morning, especially when our neighbors ducks are wandering up the little hill between our yards!

There is a fire pit next to the pool that we have already used quite a few times. We're pretty much all addicted to s'mores now!

This is the bird aviary that we just use for storage.

This is a view of part of the grassy area in the back. We are on septic where we live and apparently that makes for great grass. But the previous owner had to dig up a lot of the lawn to fix the septic system so we're (and by that I mean Shaun) going to have to nurse it back to health!

This is the fence that leads to the back part of the property.

At one point they must have had quite a little farm back here. There are a couple of chicken coops and other animal dwellings. I think I really would like to get them cleaned up, patched up and get some chickens!

This is a shot of main part of the back property. I know Shaun has visions of batting cages and baseball diamonds in his head!

Yep, that's a pig pen. Brings back many good memories!

We have an abundance of fruit trees in the back. Some of these are apple trees, pomegranate, and maybe some cherry, but we're not sure yet. I guess we'll find out when they bloom and fruit!

We also have lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit and tangerine trees. We moved in just as they were fruiting and it has been so much fun to have fresh citrus right in our own backyard!

Christmas...finally

I've been absent from the blogging world for quite a while now. For those of you who don't know we have been in the process of moving. We made an offer on a home clear back in June and we were supposed to close on it in September. What we didn't realize when we made the offer on the home was that the owner of it had a lot of issues that kept delaying the process. We finally closed on January 7th of this year. For months we didn't know when we would be moving so we lived in a state of being semi packed, constantly thinking, "It could be next week!" The holiday season was rough. I love baking and crafting and decorating for the holidays and I did none of that this year. When Christmas time rolled around I was determined not to unpack another already packed box and I refused to buy a tree not knowing if we were going to just have to move one. My "Scroogieness" (is that a word?!) finally got to my kids and I relented and bought a tree. The picture above is it. It was about 2 feet tall, but surprisingly not that much cheaper than a normal sized tree! My kids were appalled! They called it our Charlie Brown tree. I had a good reason for buying it. Since it was a live tree we could plant it at our new home and remember this crazy Christmas. We ended up having a really great Christmas and it was fun celebrating it one last time in our little house!

The Final Soccer party

We finally had Amanda's end of season soccer party. Unfortunately it conflicted with Sam's indoor soccer game so Shaun, Connor and Sam weren't at the party, just me and Mads. It was held at a great little restaurant called Pat and Oscars.We enjoyed good food and good friends!Instead of trophies this year the girls got t-shirts. Amanda looks excited to get hers. I think the thing she was excited about was her mother yelling from two tables over "Amanda, look over here and show me her shirt so I can take a picture!"

Amanda with her friend Corissa showing off their new t-shirts!

Wrestlemania

Connor just stared a new sport...wrestling. I never thought this is a sport that anyone in our family would participate in. Apparently Poway has a really great wrestling program.People move here from all over the state to be involved in it. Quite a few of the high school boys from church are in the program and many have been to our house to have Shaun check them out, before and after matches. I think this is where Connor's knowledge of the sport even came to be.I have to admit I really like the boys that have been to our house and their families which is why I even considered letting Connor wrestle.

This weekend was his first tournament. Two of his buddies from church are also in the program and they have a blast together!

Connor getting ready for his first match. THat's his weight class on his arm.

Being a good sport!

Here he is in all of his singlet glory with his medal from the tournament.

As a mother who has had many children play many sports this is definitely the toughest. It's much harder to send your son out to battle one on one with someone than sending him out with a whole team behind him. We'll see how much longer he does this, but so far he loves it!

Black Friday

On Black Friday we decided to avoid anything that had to do with retail so we headed out to Poway Lake. I love that we have this Lake basically just down the street from us and decided we need to take advantage of it more often. We started off by feeding the ducks all of our leftover Thanksgiving rolls.Those ducks sure love Lion House rolls!

This was our favorite duck. He was very stylish with his Mohawk and curled tail feathers.

After feeding the ducks we went for a hike around the lake.

Connor ran ahead of everyone the whole way!

After a hike we rented paddle boats and peddled around the lake for awhile. This is how one boat stared out.

Mads didn't sit still for long and soon their boat looked like this.

Then this.

And then this.

When Amanda could no longer hold on to her we had to pull along side of them and put Mads in our boat. She is really fun to take tooling around a large, deep, cold body of water. That girl has no fear!

Thanksgiving Turkeys

We did not take many pictures on Thanksgiving this year. It was pretty low key. I'm beginning to sound like a broken record but we were supposed to be moving this weekend so we hadn't really made any big plans. My younger brother Logan came into town and that was definitely the highlight. We sent him home with our family's favorite party favor, a cold! It seems like every time one of my brothers come to visit we get them sick, they need to build up their immunities a little!We did want to make the cute turkeys we made last year but I searched high and low and could not find candy corns anywhere to make the feathers, so we had to make do with a little red frosting.