Back to school

This is the second week that school has been back in session.  I'm fairly excited for this semester since sewing and textiles ought to be a blast.  I already had my first textiles adventure!  One of our exercises in class today was a burn test to decide what type of fabric we were dealing with.  Today we worked with only natural fibers and burned cotton, flax, hemp, silk, wool, and leather.  The first three were fine because they're all made of plants, so they mainly just smelled like campfire.  The last three smelled pretty bad since they're made of animal proteins.  Strangest thing, wool smelled exactly the same as the smell while they're drilling teeth at the dentist.  (crazy, but once I put my finger on it, the rest of the class agreed.) Leather, well, leather is flesh.  So leather smells like burning flesh.  And if you've never smelled burning flesh, consider yourself lucky. Very, very lucky.  I dry heaved, and it smelled so bad we actually ended class an hour early.  Bonus!  

Nic and I are making slow slow progress on the upstairs bath.  It gets hard with limited funds, work, and school, but hopefully it will be done soon.  Tonight we put up a picture ledge from Ikea.  I have a couple decorations/frames for it, but I need to get the pictures for them.  It seems like there is a huge list of projects that need to be done and it never gets any shorter!  Oh well, this is the life of a full time employee/student/homeowner.

Textbooks

Sadly, I'm still trying to get my associates and I've been going to SLCC since 2007.  I never thought it would take me this long, but at least I'm still trying, right?  Right? 
Anyway, I really only need math classes to graduate, but I'm taking some other classes that will transfer to BYU (hopefully) for my major.  Along with math, I'm taking textiles and beginning sewing.  I can honestly say I've never been so excited for classes.  And when I thought I couldn't be more excited, I decided to look up my textbooks for the semester.

Seriously.  Best textbook ever.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Nic and I were pretty boring last night...we were going to go to a party, but we were pretty exhausted from a crazy week, so we just stayed home and watched The Dark Knight Rises, ate pizza and wings, and played Little Big World.  Can I just say, I hate new gaming systems.  I think after N64, they really started going downhill.

I thought I'd start the year off by giving a little bathroom update.  We started by measuring the Ditra Mat and then we threw up a new paint color.  I still love my Behr Appletini though, so it will totally make a comeback (laundry room).  Once the paint was done, Nic and his dad put down the tile.  I'm glad that I didn't have to do that part.  :)

While the boys were hard at work, I started building the vanity.  We looked at buying one, but the styles I wanted were just out of our budget, so I took to the saw!  I used a basic template from Ana White.

I didn't like the idea of using a wood top with a basin sink, so I found a nice top at Lowe's instead.  I used a Glidden Ultra High Gloss paint to finish it off.

We've done a little more work, including patching the gaping hole you can barely see above the vanity (it used to be a medicine cabinet), but we still have more work ahead.  Hopefully it'll be completely finished sometime in January!

Bad Blogger

That's me.  A bad, bad blogger. 
Nothing new is really happening for us right now, we've just been saving up to finish the bathroom (with a lot of car issues along the way to derail us!) and that should be happening this week!  Nic's sister is staying with us for Thanksgiving, and we want to have the bathroom upstairs done by then!
We have painted it, but I am going to repaint because I decided I like the green color better for the laundry room.  Hopefully I'll have a completed post by next week!

Slowly...slowly

Ok, so it turns out I was wrong.  The kitchen is not going to be our first project.  Right after we moved in, the toilet in the main upstairs bath decided to crap out. (ha)  Originally I just thought that we could buy a new toilet and work on the bathroom at a later time, but the previous owners had one of those weird countertops that extends over the toilet, and we couldn't find a toilet we could afford that was short enough to squeeze under.  So, bathroom redo!  Yay!

This is the view of the bathroom from out in the hall.  Sorry its messy, but I didn't feel like cleaning it all up before I took the pictures! 

Here's a closer up of the toilet bench counter and the weird built in the wall medicine cabinet.  Also, sorry the pictures are blurry.  Someday I won't have to use my camera phone.  Notice the ginormous mirror.  Nic is not sad to see that go.  He says it's weird to watch yourself pee.

So, here is what we have so far...

No toilet, no vanity, no floor, no mirror, no weird medicine cabinet.  But, we did buy a new light fixture which you can see in the bathtub.  We don't have lots of extra money for renovations, so I'll keep you posted as we get stuff done!