Shamelessly back in action...

Good afternoon and welcome to my 3rd attempt to regularly blog. We'll see how this goes. All I want from this is to have a log of home remodeling, but I have a lot of catching up to do, so here it goes...

Why have I been lazy? A lot of things have happened in the past 2 1/2 years. I  changed jobs from a downtown St. Louis Charter High School (Shudder), to my new school district, and then again to a different school in the same district, and now I think I have finally found a place I can stay put. I'm currently teaching 5th and 6th grade choir. See my jungle-rific music room below.

Kevin has had an appendectomy, and is also in a new job (minus a bodily organ). He's loving his new job and even gets to work with a percussion ensemble! Jealous!










 We've been on two trips: The first trip was to Chicago for the Midwest Music Conference, and of course, a 7-hour romp through IKEA. (I know this is crazy-long, but it was my first IKEA trip ever....so it was worth it.)

 On Spring Break of 2013, we visited our friends Kathryn and Sundeep In Las Vegas who have recently become engaged! Congrats guys! These photos pretty much embody our fantastic time. Kevin was post-surgery here. The trip almost didn't happen, but he was a trooper about it the whole time. 

 Also in the past two years, we have tried to be more healthy. I can't tell you if any of our efforts are actually working....but here's what we've done so far:

• Started buying more organics and less-processed foods. (Our new favorite place is Trader Joe's)
• Tried juicing! Kevin bought me a juicer and we love it....when we have time to do it. I have to say, the juice tastes great when you have ice in it. The frozen water is the key here. Otherwise, it smells like grass and isn't as fun to drink. One nice thing about this was that I took the juice to school a few days last year and a bunch of my 8th grade jazzers started trying it and liked it.
• We bought bikes and bike gear from my brother when he was still working with Trek. It was a good choice. You can see a picture of Kevin after we took a short bike trip up to New Town....a community outside of St. Charles, MO. It is built on and around canals and is really pretty once you get past the pleasant-ville feel of it.

 And then? We've been working on the house still and have accomplished many projects. I'm quite proud of us. I feel like this post is getting rather lengthy, so I will post updates about the house next time. Who knows, I might even branch out into other pages and topics.

Peace out,

J-Lowe

Who has two thumbs and sucks at updating blogs? This lady.

Hey all,

There have been many happenings since my last post. First of all, we made some definite headway on the kitchen floor.

Here you can see all three layers. The Laminate in the back, the underlay in the middle, and in the front is the tar-covered hardwood.

We both felt very proud of our work:

We had to remove some cabinets and the fridge to get the rest up. You can see where we tried to sand off the tar with our new Oscillating sander. All it did was gunk up the pads.

Kevin looked up how to remove tar. He found that if you use a mixture of boiling vinegar and water, the tar comes up after two applications and some scraping with a putty knife. The mixture is 1/4 vinegar and 3/4 water.

On the edges of the floor, you can put down newspaper to keep the water from pooling. Genius!

The final result was awesome!!! There are a few tough spots to get the tar off. These are places that the underlay boards came together.

We found a few holes in the floor. Obviously there was an old stove at one time in our kitchen. We will plug these with wooden plugs and fill in all nail holes with wood filler.

Also, since the last post, we attended two Thanksgivings with new NEPHEWS!! Here is my family's:

 Liam and Charles:

Aunt Kathy brought her binder of family history. Pretty cool.

My brother Mike has great taste in neckwear. My parent's border collie Indy is the sweetest.

 Grandpa White and Liam.....grandpa still sounds weird to say.

Then, it was off to the Lowe's! Check out the spread on their monster-sized table:

Kevin and his sister Andrea being weird as always...

Baby Graham!!!

So that's it...I'm officially caught up on posting. We have a Christmas Party at our house Dec. 28th, so we have a goal to get the music room and the kitchen finished by then. I keep going back and forth on colors. More on that later.






~Jessica

Are blogs like tattoos?

I've always heard not to get a tattoo the first time you think about getting one. One should wait and see if the desire to permanently ink one's skin pops up systematically over the course of a few months, and if so, then take the plunge. If not, you were probably better off without that snoopy tramp-stamp. This anecdote symbolizes my feelings towards starting a blog. At first, I thought the blog-bug would pass. I had it in my mind that blogging was equivalent to Xanga and other sites designed to express how much you can identify with the movie "Twilight". Now, I just think this is a great place to share photos of what we're doing in the house, and to chronicle our craziness. This blog is more for me than for others, but I hope everyone who has hounded me to start a blog gets a little bit of happiness out of my frequent sporadic posts.

This is me:

As you can see, I am holding a baby...something I am getting very good at. This little guy belongs to my bestie; Brenda. We have begun calling him "Sweet Baby James" (Or at least I plan to). There must have been something in the water because there are 4 other babies born to family and friends all in the past two months! 3 are my Nephews and all are boys!
Here's another one getting baptized! Babies everywhere! Baby Ethan did a good job and looked smashing in his baby tuxedo.

This is our house:

We're in the process of taking down the old-lady awnings. The ground floor is done. I can't wait to get the second floor ones off so that we can get some quality sunlight in our bedrooms. Somehow, I feel cheated that I can't see the sky from  the second floor.

We plan to paint the front door in the future and are bickering like a good married couple on the paint color. I would like a pumpkin orange....but now that I see the pumpkins in the photo, I am not so sure I would describe the color I am lusting after as "Pumpkin Orange".  Here's a link to the color I like:
Best Paint Color in the WORLD!!!

Kevin would like red... (Of course though, I am biased). Once I figure out how to make a photo page, I will post more pictures of the house and our projects. Right now, we're doing something a little crazy....ripping up our kitchen floors! It was on a whim this morning. We are doing away with 2 layers of laminate and 1/2" of underlayment. (How in the H do you spell that word?) There is wood flooring underneath! Unfortunately, U-layment was glued down, so we will have to dissolve that glue. Here are some pics for you to see how crazy we have been today:

Boring Old-Lady Laminate Before (Everything in our house is old-lady-sh):

 Tearing up 2 layers of Laminate. See Kevin chip:

Tearing up underlay. See Kevin Pull:

As you can see....we've been busy. Here's another project Kevin's working on. He's chipping the un-primed and flaking paint from the ceiling of our music room. What you see is exposed green board. Soon, we will be able to prime and paint after he patches all cracks with joint compound.

Thanks for reading. I promise I will be less corny in my future posts.

~Jessica Lowe