pigeon duty

We had pigeons nesting on our roof.  YUCK!  Greg took a Saturday and cleaned off the roof, removed the nests, and put wiring up so that they can't get into our rafters anymore.  It took a good four hours or so of work.

After we got all the stuff off the roof we had a whole shopping bag full of pigeon poop.  Our nice neighbor Jean let us have some gloves to throw out after the pigeon duty as well.

Our Solar Oven

We just added a solar oven to the list of cookware in our house a week ago. We got it from Global Sun Solar Oven's through ebay for $230. Here are some pictures:


It takes up the same space as a BBQ grill, and needs to be rotated with the sun in order to do it's job. Auburn loves the shiny foil. It's easy to move (lightweight as well), and easy to set up. So far here are the things we've cooked in it:

blackberry crisp dessert
vegetables (on a half cloudy day)
pork roast
eggplant/onion kabobs

My regular 9x13 glass pan doesn't fit inside, but one that is dark with straight sides will. We hear that it will cook anything, but won't ever burn it. I'm not sure I believe it.

Greg has a phobia of the food cooked inside the oven. He swears that it has "a taste" that is gross. Silly Greg.

Auburn's Room

The baby room is done! We did yellow on yellow pin stripes, and it took us 3 days. It really was a fast project (compared to all the other projects that are sitting around our house right now).

The two colors we picked out were "pale daffodil" and "moonbeam". "Moonbeam" is the stripe color, and "pale daffodil" is the wall color. We started by measuring out the spacing for the stripes and marking them with a pencil by hanging a piece of blue painters tape with a weight on the end of it:

We then stuck the tape to the wall and traced the right edge down. Then we pulled off the tape and painted with the color "moonbean" over the top of the stripe. We did this twice, 6 hours apart from each other:

Then we did our blue tape trick again over the top of the "moonbeam" paint stripes. We tied a weight to the end of the blue painters tape until it lined up straight and pressed it down. As you can see in the picture we then took "moonbeam" and painted over the top of the blue tape. (We did this so that the wall color wouldn't bleed along the edges of the tape. It helps to make a nice clean line as you'll see later.):

Again, we waited for this to dry, and we painted the walls with "pale daffodil":



It took Greg and I one hour to do the first wall coat working together, and it took me two hours and twenty minutes to do the second coat by myself. When it was dry, we pulled off the blue painters tape......and........

As you can see in the Alice-in-Wonderland-picture it looks pretty nifty now!

Dirty dirt....

This is amazing:

THAT is from TWO rooms and ONE hall in our house. YUCK! Because our house was a foreclosure when we bought it, no one cleaned it like it should be cleaned. Greg and I have been working our tails off trying to get all the space livable. This vacuum just proves our hard work. I can't wait to tackle the downstairs with it!

(Lest you believe that we up until this point have been living in filth, I just want to point out that all the carpet had vacuum lines. Very deceiving. But my see-through vacuum tells no lies. Believe what you will.)

Moving Day!

Our move went REALLY well on this past Saturday. We had 17 people show up to help! It was amazing how fast it went, only an hour and 20 minutes! We only took one picture; which is very sad because we love everyone that came and wish to express our thanks to them. Here is the one picture:

(Ryan Lowe, half-faced Matt Sondrup, Kurt Turley, and Eric Ermer)

All these guys were great. They even lifted all of our heavey furniture up our narrow staircase, by lifting it vertical! THAT is something I'm SO sad I didn't get a picture of! You would be simply amazed.

One of my friends watched Auburn while we moved, and then Lauren watched her in the afternoon while we unpacked. Lauren was the best! It was the first time that she has babysat (other than siblings). She even made a "playpen" with toys for Auburn! Look how cute:

Katie, her sister, also helped watch Auburn. Lauren even let me pay her in skittles! That is the perfect babysitter if I do say so myself. Auburn had so much fun that she fell asleep as soon as I put her in the car.

Thank you everyone who helped us on our moving day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

A little late...but exciting none the less! For Valentine's Day I wanted to do something nice for Greg, that we were planning on doing for the house anyways, so I got him a piano! I found one on Craig's list where the guy listed that he would deliver. Score!


It looks so good on our hard wood floor! If anyone knows a good piano tuner in Gilbert let me know! Happy Valentine's Greg! I love you!

Painting the Kitchen

I have been promising EVERYONE pictures of our progress on painting our kitchen. I'm pretty sure I'm slower than molasses when it comes to blogging. But molasses taste good. So here's the mini kitchen update:

Step one: We primed all the cabinets and painted the first coat before we went to Disneyland. This is four hours before we're suppose to leave for Disneyland:



Step Two: Paint all of the cabinets:



Step Three: we're not ready for yet....so here's a close up of the color instead.

Yummy! Doesn't that make you want to eat something in my kitchen? Thought so!