Nashville Flood and continued house projects...

Hello Friends,

Maybe most of you have heard already, but Nashville was flooded this past weekend. I'm at home; downtown where I work is flooded. Not only are parts of downtown inaccessible, but the power has recently gone out downtown. We're not actually sure when my office will re-open; it depends on the power. The damage is major. Check out www.tennessean.com for more pictures. Our house, thankfully, is fine. We are situated on a hill, but these pictures below are just blocks from our house. We feel very lucky. Flood insurance is not something most Nashville residents purchase, so pray for the families who have lost everything this weekend. I know that I will have a job when the water recedes, but many are not sure due to businesses being destroyed and the Grand Ole Opry and Opryland Hotel (one of the city's largest employer) out of business for an indeterminable amount of time.

Our friends Brian and Jenna looking out on the water level a few blocks from our house.

You can see where the water level had already receded from.

This seems like an inappropriate follow up from those pictures, but uploading these in a perfect order is a pain, so...so be it. Miss Chloe poses with her stuffed beaver toy.

Just imagine her saying "HEY!"

I can't remember if I've posted a picture of our washer and dryer, but I'm very pleased to have these in my house. No more hauling weeks worth of laundry to the car to the laundromat, to the car to the house.

These are the little projects I worked on while Caleb was away in California to keep myself occupied in the evenings.

And so the scraping begins....sigh....I've only just begun on the bathroom, and I'm already thinking I should change my voicemail greeting to "Hi, this is Kelli. I'm probably scraping paint or picking paint flecks off my face and out of my hair, so I'll get back to you as soon as I can....beeeeep."

FYI: We sold the air conditioner units! Yay! The first sold for $30, which was the nicest of the bunch, and we kept posting them on craigslist lower and lower until finally we just wanted them OFF our porch and posted the three remaining units for $30 total. We had a customer within the hour. It was great. They showed up in a tiny car and shoved all three in there with two passengers and two HUGE speakers in their trunk. Not sure if those units are still in their car. I have no idea how they were going to get them out.

Our backyard now that spring has greened it up.

An old barbecue that we uncovered from rubble and leaves and branches.

I feel I am becoming my mother. (Love you, mom). My mom loves birdhouses and collects them. This was a cute little towel hook I found at the flea market the other day for the bathroom.

The most recent project (besides scraping paint) are assembling shelves in the bathroom. Caleb put these supports up and assembled the shelves using particle board and piece of molding to make the front of the shelf finished. I've been painting the shelves white and the supports will be green.

She wasn't very sure of this.

Spring Yard work

Hello friends,

It's been a while. Some of you may be bored to tears by this post, and for that, I apologize. We have to counterbalance the air conditioning units still sitting on our porch with some nice yard work, though.

Caleb's parents have been from Kansas and back to visit us in this time and they were so very helpful in getting us started on the yard. I. am. clueless. about. planting. Thank you Dirks'. :) I'll take some pictures of the house while I'm home this weekend and the sun is shining in. We've been very busy. Caleb got back from his 3 weeks in California for training, and then he had a few days to rest up. Our very good friends Ryan and Liz came to visit us the weekend after he got back; we had a great time with them forgetting about responsibilities... Three days after they left, Dwight and Carol arrived and we had a great time with them also, eating and working. Then the weekend after they left (this last weekend), Caleb had his momentous one weekend a month off, so we planned to take full advantage of it by doing yard work in large chunks of time. And Caleb's been sick. But, you know Caleb, he not only dug out the beds to plant the flowers, but was inspired to climb the wild, gross trees and saw them down. I'll have to post a picture of the embarrassingly large pile of tree tops that we have in our backyard. Oh boy. At least the front looks nice.

Apparently, the only picture of the front of the house I have from "before" is this (which doesn't really show a lot):

Dwight and Carol helped us decide how to lay out the different plants and planted these puppies. On Saturday, Caleb and I laid the weed-free paper down.

Our mulch collection. With only a poor attempt at a calculated guess at how much we would need, we ended up with only one extra bag.

There used to be two awful looking rose bushes? here along the side of the house. We cut them down and it looks much less creepy already.

The bush on the far right will grow big and strong (we hope) and grow to about 6-7 feet to hide the not-so-pretties behind it.

This is what is left of the ugly, ugly bush that was mostly just in the way.

We really need to get a shed in our backyard, once the forest is cleared from it that is. The Ruckus is acting as somewhat of a kitchen island right now, in the sense that it's an obstacle to walk around and you can put towels on it. A bag of charcoal is confused for Chloe's dog food, screwdrivers confused with utensils. It's all so confusing.

Until next time...which hopefully won't be over a month....

Thanks for your concern...

The last couple weeks have been a little bit crazy. I have had several "concerned" persons asking if I am ok due to the lack of posts. All those heckling...I mean asking me about posting, I apologize, and succumb to your requests...

Caleb is currently across the country learning apple-y things, so before he left, there were a couple projects that needed completion, therefore packing days full of work and running errands. Before he left, we wanted to paint the bathroom and get the laundry room ready for them to deliver our very own washer and dryer this week! The laundromat days are numbered for us, a bittersweet end to that time in our lives :)

Most of the rooms in our house need a ceiling treatment of some sort, but the bathroom ceiling (due to the contractor's work), was nearly complete and just needed priming and painting. Because of this, we were able to do the "real" paint job in the bathroom. We bought tinted primer and "Luau Green" from Sherwin Williams (I've had a swatch of this color ripped out of a magazine for about a year now).

The primer ended up looking like smashed peas on our walls. We were a little frightened the paint color would have the same, unappetizing color, but painted on. Here is the primer with all the plastic:

And the end result:

This chandelier was installed around 2:30 a.m. the morning Caleb had to leave. Apparently, we needed a little humor in our lives that morning because as soon as Caleb had wired it up, we realized we hadn't put the tiniest piece on to enable the base and ceiling medallion to stay against the ceiling. Silly us. Not funny at 2:30 a.m. But still glamorous:

Ignore the pig-colored trim color in the hallway. Just kidding, it's hard to.

This was another late night project the night before Caleb left for CA. He needed to cut the hole for the dryer vent. We bought the necessary tools and cut the 4 1/2 inch hole in our wall. He did a great job, but cutting through plaster almost guarantees a nasty looking mark. Pieces around the vent crumbled and I did my best to paint around it. While Caleb has been gone, I painted the ceiling and walls in here. I'm tired of painting.

Also, since the last post, we have been able to move our furniture down and have been living like normal people. Sorry I didn't clean my house for the pictures. You'll forgive me, I know.

Here's a peek at part of what our ceiling in the dining/living room looks like since the popcorn removal. This is Caleb's favorite spot on the ceiling because he thinks it looks like cartoon scissors.

Happy Friday eve!