H E L L O W O R L D

Gosh, how I've missed this blog...

I write posts in my head to it all of the time. Occasionally I sit down and actually start a post on a project, but then Kalia wakes up from her naps and needs me, and the moment and train of thought are gone. To be completely honest, I kind of have writers block with this blog right now. I mean, where do I start off? Do I just talk about my projects and ignore the fact that I've been M.I.A? Do I tell you about what I've been doing in the meantime?

For those of you that are strictly here for projects, those posts are coming. We've done so much to the house over the past few months, all of which I do plan on posting about.

For those of you that have emailed and commented asking how things are going, this post is for you.

Last month was a big one. I quit my job, turned 30, and became a stay at home Momma. I'm breast feeding Kalia, and she's never taken a bottle. So working (albeit from home, which was both nice and a nightmare at times) while being my little girls sole source of nutrition left me at the breaking point a few times. My sister in law asked how I was doing with it one day and I told her it was like a juggling act, but I kept dropping all of the balls. I didn't feel like I could give 100% to either work or Kalia, so something had to give. Being an Electrical Engineer isn't exactly a mind-numbing career, and trying to design and debug computer chips while nursing Kalia was just...beyond challenging.

I am so blessed and fortunate that we're in the position for me to walk away from my job. One of the reasons we waited 5 years before starting to build on our mini family was so that I could take this option if I wanted to. If you knew me in high school or college, I used to say I was never getting married and never having kids. I've got a million private reasons why I used to say that, but the bottom line was I hadn't met the right man that I could see forever with. And then when I did meet him, I wanted to make sure we were solid before expanding. I honestly don't think I ever realized how amazing all of this could be.

Now don't get me wrong, Motherhood is much more challenging than I ever thought possible, but it is also much more rewarding. So much more rewarding!

As for Kalia, she's growing like a weed and doing all sorts of fun things these days. She is 10 months old and started taking her first steps last week. She can crawl faster than Kodi can walk, is very energetic, doesn't sleep a lot, eats a ton, is quite animated, laughs a lot, is a complete goof ball, and is like a bull in a china closet when she plays. She's every bit our daughter, and there's not a single thing I would change about her. Well, maybe I'd like it if she slept a little bit more, but I can say she comes by it honestly!

So for all of the holidays I've missed on posting about, Kalia says :

Happy Thanksgiving!

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy 30th Birthday Mommy!




and finally...Happy Easter!

Thanks for all of the sweet emails checking in. I promise project posts are coming up next! Hope everyone has been doing well, and I'm excited to 'be back'!

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Painting the House Part 1 : Stucco Tutorial

Last September, we started painting the exterior of the house.  Yep, I said started...we never got past the first 25%.  At the time, it made perfect sense.  We were having pavers installed for the pool deck and wanted to go ahead and get the back painted before installation.  Chris was in school, and I was in my first trimester of pregnancy.

For the past year, almost every day when we'd go for a walk or run, we'd laugh at how the back of our house was a different color than the rest of it.  We were busy working on the nursery, and then the whole having a baby thing left us with very little free time to paint this big 'ol house.

And then I found this :

Do you see all the cracking on the side?  And the rust coming through?  It was worse on the other side of the trim, but I couldn't wait to take a picture, we just started poking to see how bad the damage really was.

Taken  after we poked around some - it wasn't quite this bad to start off with!

It was bad.

And then Chris got out his side grinder and went to town.

Most sane people probably wouldn't have gotten that far, especially not with a 4 month old, but we're not sane sometimes.  We've done a little bit of stucco patch work, and neither one of us have been happy with the outcome.  This, obviously, needed more than just a patch job.

I gave Chris the green light to go ahead and see how bad the damage was, which meant he just keep breaking it apart until we got to good boards, by convincing him that we've needed to paint the house for some time now, so we'll just do the stucco work, and then repaint the entire house.

Logical, right?

Chris bought into it.  A few weeks later he questioned why he ever let me talk him into painting the entire house because of a little stucco trim work, but that's another post for another day.

Back to the stucco...

We decided we were going to google and utube "how to stucco", and then go to the big orange box store and have the guys there help us with getting supplies.  Then Kalia needed a nap, and to be fed, and a diaper change, and to be played with, and we realized that we might have bitten off a little more than we could chew.

So, we caved in and decided to get a few quotes.  If the quotes were reasonable, we'd pay someone to do it.  If they were absurd, we'd go back to plan 1, and just accept the fact that it was probably going to take us 10 times longer than normal to get it done.

First quote came in at $225.  We had a few other places we were going to have them repair too, so we thought that was pretty reasonable.  The second quote came in at $1500.  Wha???  We asked a buzillion questions and they both were using the same exact methodology.  Um, we'll take the $225 guy please.

We took pictures and asked lots of questions during the process, so that we'd know how to do stucco work if we ever needed to again.

Here's what the stucco guy was starting with.

And here's the how-to for any of you over-ambitious diy'ers out there!

First he cut back the rest of the old stucco work to make it nice and even.

Then he added the new trim boards (pressure treated wood) to fit.

Next, he took this piece of mesh and wire with paper backing :

And put it over top of the wood boards, securing it in with nails.

After that, he nailed in the protective vinyl edges.  The vinyl edges are an upgrade from what was previously there.  Most old houses used metal galvanized edging, which was why we had the rusting in the first place.  Well, that combined with the fact that the previous owners had the sprinklers spraying on the house.  We moved them out shortly after we moved in, but the damage was already done.  Water plus metal is no good!

Just an fyi, all of this stuff can be found at your local home improvement store.

To keep the edges secured, he added staples along with the nails.

We had another area that was starting to show some wear, so we decided to go with a quick patch approach on fixing it.  To do this, he needed to chip out some of the old stucco to give the new stucco something to stick to.  It's basically roughing up the surface like you would for most paint projects, but instead of sanding, he used a metal scraper.

This is what it looked like after he was done chipping it off.

To bond old stucco with new stucco, some type of liquid bonding agent is needed.  It kind of looks like Elmer's glue.  He applied this using a sponge to all of the areas where the new stucco would go on top of the old stucco.

That's just the prep work!

Next up, the mixing.  To create the sand finish to match the existing stucco work on the house, he mixed sand in with the stucco mix. He recommended not going too heavy on the sand to keep the final product strong.  The mix was approximately 50/50.  He mixed this dry in a large wheel barrow.

After dry mixing, he put the mix in buckets and added water.  To mix the stucco, sand, and water he used a drill with a stirring tool to make a very smooth final mix.

The actual stucco work itself is a lot like working with grout.

Just put the stucco on your trowel and spread.  He used a tray to hold the stucco, which seemed a lot easier than dipping the trowel into the bucket.  I'll have to remember that for future projects!

Then smooth it over the surface,

until your area is completely covered.

Finish by taking your soft sponge and gently wiping until you have a smooth surface.

And that's it!  It's definitely a lot of work, but at least we know it's do-able for the next go round.  The stucco guy even took off $25 for stepping on a plant (it'll come back), and for us giving him water.  What a guy!

Anyone out there willing to tackle stucco work on their own?    Make sure to stay tuned for more house painting projects.  It's quite a bit of work, but it's looking a-mazing!

Hope everyone's having a great week.  Happy Tuesday!

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You Are Beautiful

Hey guys!

At some point I'll be back to publishing more regularly than once every month or two, but for now, this is the best I can do.  I started back at work six weeks ago, so things just keep getting more and more hectic.  Don't assume that means we're not still house projecting, we most definitely are!  We're just a little bit slower, and it takes quite some time to get it up here on the blog.

Onto the project ...

I've been mentioning that we're redoing the master bedroom.  Part of that was the vanity / closet area, which we painted a little while back.  The closet has the two big sliding doors that are mirrors, which I walk by every time I go to take a shower or get dressed.  That didn't really used to bother me...

And then I had Kalia.  I'll be completely honest here, I've never really struggled with body image or my weight or anything in that regards.  I've always been really active, and my body, for the most part, has reflected that.  The doctor released me to exercise when Kalia was 6 weeks old.  I thought it'd take a month or two, but that I'd be back to my old shape in no time.  Well, two and a half months have come and gone since being released, and I'm still not where I'd like to be.  I do exercise every day, I do a minimum of a 2 mile walk with Kalia and Kodi, and a few days a week I do a 5k with Kalia in the jogging stroller, but I'm still not there yet.  I continually have to tell myself that it took 10 months to put all that weight on, it's not just going to disappear in four long months.

I walk by that stupid mirror (its become stupid now) every.single.day and am constantly reminded of how my clothes don't fit yet, how my body seems to have a mind of its own, and how I'm not where I want to be with my weight loss.  I'm not far off, I'm just still not there.  I'm at the awkward stage of my old clothes fitting, but looking like someone glued them on me.  I'm going to be 30 in 5 months, and I'm a Mom...pasted on pants isn't exactly the look I'm going for. 

Well, enough is enough.  No more pity parties, no more feeling bad about myself, and no more feeling sorry for myself.  Motherhood is such a beautiful thing.  The fact that we're willing to put our bodies through what we do to get this incredible little person here that we get to shape and mold and love more than we ever thought possible is a beautiful thing.  The fact that we sacrifice our bodies for 10 months to carry this little person and then bring them into this world is a beautiful thing.  That's what I need to focus on ... that's what I need to be reminded of.  My new found extra poundage is well worth the extreme joy and love that my little girl brings to me every.single.day.

Sorry about the rant...I'll try to avoid being too Mommy hormonal and move on.  There's a project in here too, I promise!

I bought two of these canvases on clearance from Jo-Ann's forever ago.  They were 8$ total, and I knew I'd find a use for them at some point.

Chris thought I was crazy.  Well, Chris always thinks I'm crazy, that's not really anything new.  Those canvases have been sitting in a closet for quite some time.  When I came to my "enough is enough" epiphany, I busted these bad boys out and got to painting.

I took step by step pictures of this, but they're lost somewhere in the 1925 pictures that are currently on my camera of mainly Kalia.  I'm a little obsessed, I know.  So, you get a few pictures of my cutie instead :

Amen to that!!!  Hehe!

Really, I took those canvases and put a coat of white paint over top of them, then took my brush and dipped it in a little bit of the dark aqua paint that we painted the vanity area with and faded that down halfway through the first canvas, and then took the light aqua color that we painted the master bathroom and faded that down all the way through the bottom of the second canvas.

After that dried, I just took my paintbrush and painted on the words using the metallic white paint I had left over from doing the faux granite effect in Kalia's bathroom.  It's not perfect, but that's kind of the point of the project.  It's not really supposed to be.  It's still beautiful because I made it, and it means something to me.  For-warning though, it's semi impossible to photograph.  There's no lighting in that area, and the flash bounces off of my metallic white, so just use your imagination to picture it a little bit more subtle :-).

With the flash on.  Kodi thinks the addition of Kalia is exhausting!!

 The rest of these are without the flash on, so the color is a bit more true.

I used the colors I did because of where I hung it.  I like how it blends both the vanity area and the master bathroom colors together.

So, what do you guys think of it?  I debated about doing it for awhile because I didn't want to come off as conceited, but it's my bathroom vanity area.  I know why I painted it!  If you have any questions on how I did this, please feel free to ask.  I'll respond to them in the comments section.

Hope everyone is doing well.  I've actually made quite a bit of progress in the Master Bedroom, redid the office, and am now planning away at making our awful formal living room Kalia's playroom.  Oh yeah, and we're repainting the house. Life is never dull around these parts!!  I hope to get the posts up soon.  My goal is to really start back blogging more regularly after Christmas time.  Kalia's starting to finally sleep through the night most nights, and I'm finding my balance in life, so I hope you guys will stick around to see what's next!

Happy Monday, hope you guys have a great week!

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