New Year's at Grace's

 

 

December Arizona Trip

Ok, I'm trying to catch up on all the awesome stuff I've been doing since I posted about the house.  In December, the Kellys and John went to Arizona to visit the Spectors!  It was so fun spending time with them!  It was a little weird that Arizona was about the same temperature as Pittsburgh in December.... but AZ had a lot more sun, which we really needed.  Pittsburgh is so cloudy!  So we soaked up the Vitamin D while we were there.  Here's a photo dump!

It was so fun! It's really cute how much the Spector kids love John and vice versa ;)

Sharon and John get a Christmas Tree

New house, new tradition!  For 2015, we got our very own live Christmas tree.  It was beautiful and big and smelled great.  It didn't drink very much water, though, so by the end it was very dry and dropped needles like crazy.  Overall a fabulous experience, though, and we'll get live trees until we have kids, most likely.  Photo dump!

<3

November Germany Trip

Oh, hey, blog reader(s)!  As you might imagine, November and December were super busy, yaknow with the holidays and whatnot.  Here's an overview of the Stuff Sharon has been Doing:

I went to Germany!  It was amazing.  John joined the Kelly gang for a tour of Christmas markets around Thanksgiving.  It was all my absolute favorite people, all together in a wintery wonderland.  We visited Heidelberg, Bamberg, Nürnberg, and Würzburg.  We drank Glühwein and beer all day, ate tasty treats at the markets, saw amazing old German architecture, bridges, adorable houses, some art, and some castles and churches.  It was a blast.  Here's a photo dump!

Heidelberg:

On our way to the Gasthaus (we rented a car), and a view from our window (Susan, John, and I shared a room, which was perfect and so comfy and awesome):

Bamberg:

Nürnberg, where John and I got an angel for the top of our Christmas tree:

And Würzburg, where we got Döner Kebaps!

YAY! Germany is so wonderful.  John loved being back in Bamberg, where he studied, and we talked a lot about moving there.  It was a great town.  It was a little weird being back in Heidelberg after 10 (!!!!) years, but it was also cool how much I remembered how to get around.  The trip was also great for both of us to practice our German.

~S
 

October: We go to the MD Renaissance Festival!

Trying to catch up on blogging! 
Every year, we go to the MD Renfest.  This year, it was just John, Susan, and me.  We dressed up (as always!) got a little drunk (as always!) and had a blast (yep!).

Susan even ate a turkey leg, since she's off vegetarianism right now.

John had been eyeing these wooden mugs for several years and finally bought one, and I got a drinking horn I've been thinking about for a while to go with my costume.  We look super cool.

~S

Project Kitchen, Phase 1

The kitchen was, perhaps, the biggest giveaway that this house needed a face lift.  The cabinets, though solid wood, are inexpensive, flat, and probably 40+ years old.  The hardware is bronze?  And the tracks of the drawers are gummy.

I want to clean and paint all of the cabinets.  (Replacing them is just not in our budget, nor will it ever be.)  I realized one day that most of my favorite kitchens on Pinterest were based around white cabinets, so that's the plan.  You can peruse my inspiration here: Kitchens on Pinterest

I decided while we were painting that I liked the white-on-gray look, so we painted the walls gray.  There is nice wood wainscoting in the kitchen, which I will either remove (*cringe*) or paint white (the lesser of two sins?)  Here's what we started with:

FIRST, John and I had to prioritize getting a new microwave.  The stove had no ventilation above it, and the room relied on a ceiling fan and proximity to an outside door for fresh air in case of cooking smells.  So we knew we wanted an over-the-range microwave.  Well.  It turned into a bit of "If you give a mouse a cookie..."

To get an over-the-range microwave, you have to have a way to hang it.  To hang it on a cabinet, we needed another cabinet to fill out the wall.  And the microwave needed its own dedicated circuit with outlet in the appropriate spot.  So it snowballed.   But we knew this was what we wanted, and in the grand scheme of kitchen remodels we still got off pretty easy.

When we moved in, we brought this portable dishwasher with us, so here is the area for phase 1 of the kitchen project, with fresh gray walls:

Basically a blank slate.  We picked some very simple, very inexpensive "in-stock" (not really, they had to order them) cabinets at Lowe's called Arcadia.

We also picked out a microwave, and then waited.  And waited.  And one by one, our new kitchen stuff arrived, we picked it up, got estimates from electricians, and eventually hired one who even installed the cabinets for us.  (His name is Bob, and we call him Bob the Builder.  And he works with his brother, Bill.  Bob and Bill.  You just cannot make this stuff up.) 


So although it took a while to order and then arrive, Bob and Bill got everything done lickety split and now our kitchen looks like this!

It's a huge change, and the kitchen feels much more "kitcheny" now.  Instead of a wall of cabinets and then just some appliances slung on the opposite wall, it feels cohesive.  When I add trim to the flat existing cabinets and paint them white to match these new ones, it will really be a beautiful little kitchen.  Welcome to the twenty-first century, Flynn!
~S