More House!

So I'm finally back with more pictures. Kirsten and I have been busy camping and trying to squeeze everything we can out of the summer... But we don't have time to blog about any of that. Our house is coming along so fast we can hardly keep up with the pictures.

So we have walls!!


Here is our garage.


And the living room.


And the kitchen (and dining room through the arch!)


Here is the hallway coming in the front door.


And the upstairs hallway.


Master bedroom


And the outside! All of the siding is on which makes a huge difference.


We have one of these things!

So that was last week. We went back today and saw this...


Garage door!!!!
Also notice that Nickel made her first trip to the new house today! She loved it. So far her favorite part is the giant pile of trash in our front yard.


We also got gutters!


Nickel finding a new spot to lay down...


So the other major development today was that the drywall is completely finished! The pictures don't really show it but trust me it makes a HUGE difference. It is really amazing in there.

We are so excited. Best we can figure we are just over 6 weeks away from our new home!

I promise we'll be blogging about something else soon!

picking up the ball again...

Well things are getting out of hand. We have been way too long without a house post and SO much has happened!!!

So without further ado...


The plumber came and ran a bunch of pipes through our walls...


The the electrician came and ran a bunch of wires. So we had all sorts of outlets and could see for sure where all our lights would be!


And we got our tubs!! This is the master shower!


And the master bath got the pocket door wall that will divide the shower/toilet area from the sinks, which you can see one of the pipes for.


Somehow this is all we got of the guest bathroom but you can kinda see the tub/shower behind another pocket door that divides this room like the other one.


This is the laundry room all fixed up with washer/dryer stuffs.


And here are the stairs, which I realized we hadn't put up good pictures of yet. So they are to your right as you walk in. You go up a few steps to a landing and then turn left.


Then you go up more stairs to another landing, where you turn left again, a few more stairs and you're there. It's easier than it sounds, don't worry.


Oh and this was exciting! Our garage floor! Finished!! It was one of the first things to be completely done at our house!


Also we got our fireplace! The wood looks super fake and dumb when there isn't glass and such in front of it...


So this is what our house looked like that day...Pretty awesome! Shingles!

But wait! There's more!! When we went back a few days later, expecting only minor changes THIS is what we saw....



Just take it in! SIDING! Outside light fixtures!


Here are our doorbell wires!


And we got insulation! This is a wall in the living room. This picture is significant because if you look closely you will see two wires coming out of the studs through the insulation. That's because the day before this picture was taken Reed came over and helped me pre-wire the house for our surround sound! I didn't actually do much, and I'm certainly thankful Reed was there, but nonetheless it was fun to get to do a little work on my own house. And now our surround sound is all wired in the walls which means no wires running along the ceiling or floors! YAY!


More insulation over the front door.


Some weird ceiling insulation in the master bedroom.


And the back of the house!! Half-sided, and looking good I must say.


The left side of the house (from the back).


One of our outside water spickets. We have spickets!!

So that is all for now...but I have to tell you that we went to the house again today and couldn't believe what we saw! Unfortunately we forgot the camera, but we will head back over tomorrow and I'll try to get them up tomorrow night. Really exciting stuff!!!

Vanessa's visit!

Well maybe you thought we had forgotten to blog about our last visitor of the summer...

We did. Sorry Vanessa... We were so tired by the time she left that all we wanted to do was sleep, and then it was 130 degrees for like 3 weeks straight and then we just forgot. But tonight we remembered!!

We had SO much fun with Vanessa! We did tons of fun stuff...including (in no particular order)


We went to Cannon Beach, the best beach in Northern Oregon. It was a very typical Oregon coast day, as you can see. Cloudy. Freezing. But Awesome.


Nickel particularly enjoyed it...


Then the 5 of us went to see Dirty Dancing in a park by our house! We got some fried chicken, a blanket, The Name Game, and watched Swayze do his thing!




We also went on a hike to Punchbowl Falls. Kirsten and I did this hike with Chris and loved it so we decided to do it again with Vanessa.

And this time we found the waterfall at the end! Believe it or not we actually didn't see this last time we did this hike. It's a long story...we aren't stupid. But the waterfall is awesome!


Nickel also enjoyed this one. The water was FREEZING. I am WHITE.

We had a great time with Vanessa! Seeing family this summer was really amazing! Soon we will have a much more comfortable place for you all to stay so start making your plans now! We're always in the mood for guests!

Summer Restaurant Review...take 2

Well we finally have gotten around to telling you about another of our favorite Portland eateries. I think it has been widely (and accurately) reported that there is little to no decent Mexican food in Oregon. While that may be true, there is one shining star in the darkness. And that shining star is Por Que No?



Por Que No? is (like most great Portland restaurants) a very small, quirky place. Let me just say on the outset that there is no white queso here...BUT, everything else is delicious!



Their chips are some of the best I've ever had, and their salsa almost makes you forget about the lack of cheese dip.

My standard order is the chicken quesadilla (which is without question the best quesadilla I've ever had). Kirsten gets the bean and rice bowl, which is basically every Mexican food incredient you can think of thrown into a bowl.





It's really kind of hard to accurately describe how awesome this place is. Ask the Douglas' or my dad, they've been there!

More Portland hot spots to come...

House Update...

Sorry it's been so long but finally here is another house update. I had a realization as I was just typing the subject of this post that our new house has become the new "birthday post". By the time this thing gets finished you are all going to be so sick of it you'll be rejoicing that you don't have to hear about it any more. But hopefully it hasn't gotten to that point yet.

So here comes a lot of pictures...

Within a couple days after they got the downstairs all framed they had all the walls upstairs framed!



Unfortunately there were no stairs...so we could see it.



Then, the day they were going to build the stairs, these monsters showed up for the roof. So they had to postpone the stairs and get the roof on.



So then it looked much more like a house! Which was awesome! But still we couldn't go upstairs...



So we just walked around the outside taking pictures of things upstairs. This is the master bedroom window (which is seriously enormous). It looks out the back of the house.



Another shot of the back of the house...



The side of the house...



Oh and here is the sign at the front of the neighborhood!! We are lot 20 so you can try to find us...
And then finally it happened. The stairs went in (this was last Friday...sorry again for such a long delay). So here is the first (rudimentary at best) tour of the upstairs!

This is the master bedroom.


And the aforementioned HUGE window.


This is the master bath. It's actually 2 rooms, so what you can see here is where the shower and toilet will be and where I am standing is where the 2 sinks will be.


This is the guest bedroom. You are actually looking through the guest room, through the guest closet, into the master bathroom (on the back wall of the house) in case you are trying to get some kind of spacial feel for where you are.


This is the guest bath. Again, 2 rooms, so what you see is the tub/toilet, and where I am standing is where the sink will be.


Here is guest room #2 which will actually be Kirsten's office. It is now the tool shed.


This is the view out of the office (front of the house).


The view from the guest bedroom (left side of the house).


And the view from the master (back of the house).


And here's the laundry room, which is above the stairs.


And here's the attic!

So that's all for now. We actually have a couple pictures from this week, but we will post them soon. We don't want to cram too much in at a time! So that's it for now!!!