Fun Friday!

Our friend Shannan is visiting from California. We went to college with her at CSU, and she moved to CA a few years ago. She usually comes to visit all of her CO friends a couple times a year, luckily we are on the list :)

Shan came by yesterday to spend time with us! I worked in the morning, but then took the afternoon off to hang out. So with a Friday afternoon off, my husband and a good friend, what did we decide to do?






Go to the brewery of course!







New Belgium to be more specific. If you ever happen to find yourself in (or near) Northern Colorado, you should definitely go there. I haven't been on the actual tour for awhile and it was pretty busy since it's CSU's graduation weekend, so maybe next time. The tour takes a little while, but it is a neat company with really good beer!

Speaking of beer....






When I first went to the brewery, to taste free beer (by the way, it is still free), you would get a small sample of all of their beers.... Well, now (I am sure it is due to the larger numbers of beer they have available and the need to keep people from leaving drunk and driving) you only get to choose 4 to taste.





Not that only tasting 4 beers is that bad (you still end up with about a pint of beer), but I still reminisce about the good old days :) I can't complain too much though, since we live in Northern CO, about 20 minutes from the brewery and have liquor stores on just about every corner.


All in all it was a great Friday! After our beer, we went to HuHot for a late lunch/early dinner, we stuffed ourselves at this all you can eat Mongolian grill. I think it is one of my favorite places to eat!


We said goodbye to Shan (I get to see her today though) slept off a bit of our food coma and headed to hockey practice. We were a few people short, but we had several of our new/newer players there. This was for our beginner/D league team, so it was a good chance to work on skills. We were the last thing scheduled on the ice, so we got to stay late since James can lock up. Well...we stayed until about 12:45 or so (we started at 9:15), so it was a nice 3 and a half hour practice! It was great though! Off to another practice today and another tomorrow, then our first game of the season on Tuesday!


Have a great weekend!

James' Chair

So here is a picture of the chair I reupholstered, I still have one more to go.

James has claimed it as his, but I think Jules has other ideas...

Hope your day is wonderful!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's day to all the Moms in my life!

I have a great Mom! She was such a great mother to me as I grew up, and now that I am older, she is also a great friend!

I am also blessed with a wonderful Mother-in-law! We don't get to see her as often as we would like to, but we always enjoy the time we do have. I look forward to having her in my life for a long time!

My two Sisters-in-law, who are mothers to my beautiful nieces and nephews. I am thankful for their friendship and of course for my nieces and nephews!

My Grandmothers and Grandmothers-in-law (is that how I am supposed to write it?) thank you for being there for me and all of our family!

All of my friends and relatives that are mothers (and too numerous to list here), thank you for all that you do for your children and the rest of the people in your life.

You should all be honored not just today, but everyday, Thank You!

Yes, I am a Slacker...

Okay, so I have been a complete slack with my blog for the past month or so.

I promise I will try to be better.

No pictures today (It's been a long day!), I'll try to get some up later this week.

However, I will give you a quick run-down of things :) In no particular order:

We have a new nephew! Wyatt Logan Arnold was born on April 27, 2009! I've seen pictures and we hope to visit in a few weeks.

My work has been busy! Even with the economy not being so great right now (so not much sales for us), people still need service work or changes on their phones. I guess people still want/need to talk on the phone...

James and I are getting ready to play in 3 hockey leagues this summer! That should keep us busy and hopefully out of trouble! Hopefully James doesn't get too sick of the rink since he is working there and will be there at least three times a week to play. I am very excited though!

We've started Geocaching again...if you've never gone, you should try it! If you don't know what it is then go here to check it out. We did it a lot a few years ago and kept meaning to start up again, it just took until now. Anyway we've gone several times recently and even brought the boys (our dogs) with us a few times. It is great to get out and enjoy the area we live in and the boys get some exercise! Hopefully we can keep it up.

We have convinced two more people to start playing hockey. A friend and her friend, who I now consider a friend...hopefully she is okay with that :) We went to C league drop-in and had them come too (they will be playing in D league), it took a little convincing but they got right out there and played! They did great, I was very impressed! Thankfully all the other guys at drop-in were very supportive and nice. I think it helped make it a good first experience! I'll try to post an update (maybe a picture if they'll let me) as the season progresses.

I am still a "Craigslist Junkie" as my friend says! We got 2 wingback lazy boy recliners that had tears in the cushions. They are really cool, I've recovered one of them (again with needing pics, sorry) and hope to do the second one this weekend. James is a fan and says they are "library chairs" and I completely agree. We also got 2 other "accent" chairs (another matching set) these are in good condition so I don't plan on reupholstering them right away. We plan to put one set of chairs downstairs and the other upstairs. We've gotten some other stuff too, but I can't think right now, so that will have to come later.

We are planning to get our lower level (the downstairs unfinished part of our house, but not really a basement since we have full windows...the garden level I guess) cleaned up so it more usable space. We would love to finish the space eventually, but our funds will not support that venture right now. So in the mean time, we will pseudo-finish it :) We have carpet (free off of Craigslist) to put down, it is dark purple and kind of cool, James loves it! Our bookshelves and masses of books along with desk and TV will go in half of the downstairs. I have always wanted a library, so that is what is will be: a library/office/rec room. The other half will be storage and play area...drums, pool table, and hopefully a dart board eventually. I will try to let you know how the progress goes. I am a complete pack rat so I need to get all my stuff organized (James wants it thrown away, but that might give me a heart-attack so I will stick with organizing it).

The dogs have been using their dog run and we have wanted to get the rest of the yard cleaned up... However, we live in Colorado and have still been getting snow so that makes doing yard-work a little difficult. Hopefully the weather will stay nice now and we can get working on the yard.

We've done a few game nights with friends. We love playing board games and so do most of our friends, so that works good. I love having people over and playing games or just hanging out, so we are planning much of that this summer, so come on by!

Okay, I think that is all I can think of right now...I will try to not be such a slacker from now on :)

I will also try to get some pics up here since as they say "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Is it sad that a table makes me happy?

Do you remember this table? The deal from Craigslist....







Well, after a little elbow grease...



A few evenings after work...



And some breaks from working on the dog-run...

We have this:

I still want to put another layer of clear coat on the table top and need to put it on the base, but it is basically done :)

The chairs are not, as you can see in the picture..those will come later.

We had some friends over for St. Patrick's Day and ate Corned Beef and Cabbage! (I love corned beef and cabbage! I took a picture when I started making it and then forgot the after, so no food pics. However, we have another corned beef in the freezer so I will try to remember pictures when we make that one) Anyway, we were all able to sit around the table and eat together! What an amazing concept!

Well, we are enjoying our table (and chairs that don't fall apart) and are having some more friends over tomorrow night...

Have a great week!

Handy-Woman?!?!

I have been busy lately. Between work and hockey I stay fairly occupied, but then I added in a few projects....

So, remember the whole Craigslist deal on the table and chairs? Well, I started refinishing the table. Here it is before (well, sort of... I started sanding it and then remembered to take a picture, so I wiped the sawdust off with a damp cloth and this is pretty much how it looked when I got it).

Here is the sanded table (just the top right now, I will work on the base after the top is stained).

And...after the first coat of stain (it was getting a little dark at this point, I started this project at about 5pm someday last week...I'm not done yet, needs at least 2 more coats of stain)





Our neighbor stopped by today while I was putting on a second coat of stain (sorry no pics, it was cold out) and gave good reviews! It is amazing how much better the table looks without the "factory clear-coat" on it! I am very excited to get it done so we can use it, I just need a little warmer and non-windy weather.

So the next project (also not finished) is the dog-run. We had nice weather this weekend and James was working, so I decided to use our Home Depot gift cards to get the stuff to start building the dog-run. I helped a friend move on Saturday and then stopped to pick up the materials from Home Depot. I spent all of Sunday doing this:




See the area to the right of the wood posts? That is the dog run! Yes, our dogs are spoiled. Yes the dog-run is bigger (or as big as) many people's yard; they have 3 full size pine trees in it! We cut the lower branches off of the pine trees so they have more room and shade.

I dug eight post holes (with a manual post-hole digger) and cemented them in. We are going to hang chain link (one of the Craigslist deals) and have wood crossbeams on the top and bottom. You can see some of the upper beams in the pic, I used them for spacing and leveling while the posts where setting. The chain link we got didn't have all of the support poles and they are expensive to buy new; so we are going with wood, which is about one third of the price). I only got half of the area raked out...all the stuff on the left of the posts used to be in the dog run area. Once it's all done, we can keep their toys in the dog-run and clean up the rest of the yard. I was hoping to do some more work on it this evening...but it snowed last night and was cold today, so.....


I built this:

We tore down the wall in our kitchen and built an island last year, but don't have cabinets yet. Well, we have one that my parents had removed from their kitchen, you can see the edge of it on the left. We've had TV trays to the right of the cabinet to try to make the space usable, but it didn't work so well. Since I couldn't (didn't want to freeze my butt off) work on the dog-run I decided to build a shelf under the island so we could store stuff. I added a small shelf at the top to hold foil, plastic bags, etc...

I think this will help until we have time/money to build cabinets for the whole space. I am happy with it :) James just smiles and says "nice" I'm not sure he knows what to do with me sometimes.

Loving Craigslist....

If you have never checked out Craigslist then I highly recommend it!

There are lots of great deals out there....

When we first moved into our house, I found a posting from someone wanting to get rid of some leftover gravel from a landscaping project who was willing to deliver all for free! So we got a small truck-bed full of free gravel. This came in handy when we made some minor landscaping changes.

When we adopted O.C. and Baxter (dogs) we wanted to crate-train them. However the cost of new dog crates is expensive. So we found a small crate (for Baxter) which ended up getting passed on to my brother for their dog and then to another friend for her dog...well worth the $5 we spent. We got a large crate that the boys (that's how we refer to our dogs, our cats are "the girls") now share and we got a fold-up travel crate from someone else. We got all 3 crates for less than the cost of one new one!

Last year we were in need of a cheap (I am talking less than $1000), but fairly reliable second vehicle. This pretty much ruled out dealerships and most newspaper listings. We really wanted a truck, SUV, van or something that could hold more than our little car (we love our little Kia, but it is little). So we took to looking on Craigslist and after checking into a few options, we found a 1994 Oldsmobile Bravada (SUV) in our price range! We actually picked it up on James' birthday! Now, this vehicle has had some minor issues (this was expected) but overall has been great. It easily fits all of our hockey gear and has room for passengers at the same time! We are slowly making improvements on it, but at least it runs...it gets James to and from work, both of us and our gear to hockey and used for random other local trips.

So the latest deal is from yesterday...

We don't have a table in our dining room right now, partially because the boys' crate is there and partially because we have a table but most of the chairs are broken. So I was looking at Craigslist (I do this periodically, just to see if there is anything that we "need") and saw a posting for a pedestal table w/ leaf and 6 chairs...now this is not uncommon, but you never know what they will look like and often people over-price their stuff. So they included a picture and it looked good enough and the price of $75 was hard to beat. So I emailed right away and got a call back in about 10 minutes with directions. I went to the ice rink to switch cars with James (I had our Kia). I drove to the seller's house and took a look at the dining set... a little used, but in good sturdy condition and I am pretty sure it is solid wood, not veneer! I bought it and brought it home :) Hey, I love a good deal! My short-term plan is to refinish the table and chairs in a darker color (we have leftover stuff from doing our kitchen island) to match our taste, currently the set is a light pine. Ultimately I want to build a taller pedestal (or just add onto the current one, I haven't decided) to make it a counter/pub/bar height table. Then I want to either put new legs on the chairs to make them counter/pub/bar stools or just get new stools.

Those are a few of our deals! If you are in need of something cheaper than new and are okay with used (although there are some new things that people are getting rid of) check it out! It may save you some money, give you a good project and keep stuff out of the landfill.