dyer [not so] diy: kitchen edition

after five years of dreaming, planning, and also procrastinating, we officially said goodbye to the original 78th street kitchen on august 12th. and a very, very, very long four months later, we finally have a working kitchen again!

as someone who is not great at making decisions and loves to overanalyze everything, a kitchen remodel that we plan to enjoy long term was quite a daunting task. throw in the fact that i'm kind of a perfectionist with impossibly high standards and it's borderline impossible. after the literal years we spent designing the layout and choosing the finishes, the final hurdle was finding a contractor to do the actual work. this was another lengthy step in the process, but in the end we found robert and he was delightful.

it was interesting timing to be without a kitchen when jack was starting solid foods. we did have a refrigerator and microwave, but no running water on the main level of the house. generally our eating habits weren't stellar to begin with, but the no kitchen situation brought them to a new low. thankfully i discovered microwaveable pot stickers, which became a staple of my diet, and a friend lent us her kitchen for some crock pot meal prep, so we muddled through.

the transformation is pretty stunning in both appearance and function. it's very surreal, but we're thrilled with the final result.

Read more

this house

i love it. i really do. i love that it is full of dyer family memories and i love how much donald loves it. but older homes are not for the faint of heart! 

we have a laundry list of decorating ideas and updates we'd like to do to the house, and honestly a lot of time the thing that slows us down is the decision making process. [which is a nice way of saying i take forever to make up my mind about things...like sometimes it is literally almost forever] but there's also the pesky fact that none of the trees on our property have been growing money lately. 

despite these facts we have still managed to get ourselves a whole lot of new house in the past six months or so. it started awhile back when we decided the next big project we would save for would be new windows. this would be our most significant home improvement to date, and i was really excited about the idea of having windows that would open and close without making me want to punch them. so we started to save.

then last june there was the storm that knocked over one of our trees in the backyard and onto the electric and communication lines. this was followed by a delightful five months of donald making a weekly phone call to google [because they seemed the most likely to help] to ask for them to get their lines taken care of so we could take care of our tree.

by the time fall rolled around we had our window money saved and were ready to go. we placed the order, paid our deposit and sat back to wait for them to show up. then about a week later we noticed a large crack in the foundation of our garage that had likely been there for years, but was now acting as an additional window since you could see through the wall into the backyard. assuming this was not ideal, we made some calls and discovered our house was sort of falling down on one side and needed to be piered. but the tricky part was that we couldn't install new windows into a crooked house, so the piers had to be in before the windows. 

this chain of events initiated what i like to call 'the week we spring cleaned our bank accounts', because in a span of six days we had six piers put under the house, eighteen windows put in the house and, since google had finally come along to take care of the lines, we also had the tree guy come and cut down the rest of our fallen tree.

then just a few months later our main sewer line, which we knew was probably coming to the end of its lifespan, started letting us know it was time for some attention. not wanting to be overshadowed by the shiny new windows, the sewer line succeeded in breaking the previous and short lived record for the most significant home improvement to date. we're hopeful that this new record will stand for some time...perhaps forever.

Read more

storms, star wars and summer

friday morning i rolled over in bed and noticed donald looking at me intently as if he wanted me to wake up. i mumbled some incoherent jargon questioning why in the world he would be waking me up at the crack of 9:30 in the morning. and then we had this conversation:

d: i think the power is still out.

s: okay.  did it storm?

d: yes, it was very bad. it looked like a monsoon outside. i considered waking you up so we could go to the basement.

s: [rolls eyes] i'm sure it wasn't that bad.

fast forward a few minutes. donald looks out the window and sees that one of our [very large] backyard trees has fallen into the power lines that run parallel to our house and all the lines connecting the pole to our house had been pulled away and were lying in the yard. i guess there was a storm after all.

this kicked off our already fun filled weekend a little early. after a bit of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs [what did people do with themselves before the internet] we ventured outside and determined we would not be back on the grid for awhile. so we packed up dag, along with the contents of our refrigerator, and moved in with biscuit and pep pep. between that, swapping stories with the neighbors and trying to squeeze in a little homework it was all of a sudden time for jedi nights.

i love our church for a lot of different reasons. sometimes i like to think lakeland exists because God thought it would be fun to have a church just for people like donald. the ratio of sci-fi/fantasy movie enthusiast to regular people is surprisingly low. as you might imagine, the anticipation of the upcoming star wars movie is quite high and out of that came a fun event for kids and parents called jedi nights. and when lakeland does an event like this, they do it up right. donald was tapped to be darth vader and i know i am biased, but he stole the show. the church rented a pretty serious vader costume and that combined with the light saber moves donald has been practicing for a couple decades made for an epic performance. we did almost lose him to heat exhaustion a couple time [that costume was hot!] but he persevered and the kids totally loved it.

then came saturday and a day of lake fun! scott and ali were in town so the king's invited a bunch of sbu-ers down for a little reunion. i had been trying to concoct a plan that did not include driving down and back in a day, but with all the other excitement that's what ended up happening. we left at 7:30am [yuck] and didn't roll back into raytona until 1am the next morning. the drive was brutal but the day was awesome! we spent twelve hours chillin' by the water with our college friends and their twenty six kids. we took the boat out, swam off the dock, rode jet skis and laid in the sun [well, some of us sat in the shade]. it was good times.

by sunday i felt like a walking zombie but it was totally worth it. our tree is still lying in its sad, mangled state but thankfully we hopped back on the power grid sunday afternoon.

Read more

east 78th street

we had a moment...my house and me. last weekend my mom came to town and we had garage sale number three, which i expect to be our last for a good long while. and though the first two sales were definitely helpful and worthwhile, this last one seemed to do the trick.

we've gone through, cleared out, sold and organized for the past year and a half [almost exactly] and i finally feel like i've got a handle on things. sure our house isn't perfect, i expect it never will be. i've loved it all along but sometimes the hardness of moving into my husbands already full house got to me. i was overwhelmed by the stuff. the amount of it. the not knowing what it all was. the not being able to find things. it was not exactly my cup of tea.  but little by little, progress was made.

with this final garage sale, at least in this season of life, i feel like we've turned a corner. i feel settled. there is space in the house and it is a good feeling. i am so, so thankful for the house we have been blessed with. we have a home we love, that we get to live in together [with dag of course] and that's what really matters.

Read more

goals and progress

at some point soon after our honeymoon i made a list of goals for our first year. it wasn't so much a goal list as a to do list, but i called them goals just the same. there were things for us as a couple, home improvement projects to tackle and budgets to be made. i revisited this list recently and it turns out i was a little over zealous in my assumptions of what we'd accomplish in the house department during our first year. and by 'a little' i actually mean 'a lot'. but i must say we redeemed ourselves in the money management category where we made great strides and met a lot of goals, big and small. i'm not gonna lie...i think dave would be proud.

so for this second year of marriage i made another list, and i think i did a better job of making this year's goals realistically attainable. there are still some us goals [create some of our own traditions, go on two fancy dates, take a trip together], and we made some goals that have to do with others [basically a list of people we want to be sure to encourage and/or spend time with], obviously house projects made the list [have the floors refinished, paint the master bedroom, add closet shelving] and there's a general section as well [order our wedding album, do a 'week in the life' photo project, take walks]...just to name a few.

and the best news is we've already checked two things off the list and it's only the end of january! last week we finally pulled the trigger on a big home improvement project we've been talking about for a year [and by 'we finally pulled the trigger' i mean i was finally ready to hand over the cash] and had our wood floors refinished. i guess technically we can only check one and a half things off the list, because they haven't been back for the downstairs yet, but the upstairs looks great!

now to move all the furniture back upstairs because our living room currently looks like this...

the other item we scratched off the list is our wedding album, which was ordered on our first anniversary because i thought that seemed fun. that and the fact that i needed a good six to nine months of agonizing over it before i actually clicked the order button. but it's on the way and it's going to be fabulous.

Read more

the big sale : round one

to say that i sometimes get overwhelmed by our house is a bit of an understatement. having never owned a house before, i've never had quite so much living space to deal with and i have discovered that organizing the stuff of two people is much different than organizing the stuff of one.

though we have been making progress over the past few months, much of it is not especially obvious. we have yet to 'finish' an area where i can sit and bask in the organization of it all. some days this gets me a bit discouraged, but then i came across a post on a blog i enjoy that made me feel better. the author made the comment that takes at least a year to fully move into somewhere new, and even longer if it's a home that's a bit of a fixer upper. and when i think about it that way, we're actually doing pretty well.

we've had our first garage sale, where we were able to unload quite a few unneeded items. and with the help of our personal landscaper [also known as donald's mom] we have also cleared a good amount of brush out of the backyard. we still have a long way to go, but we're making progress.

Read more