it's a girl!

For those of you who don't know, I'm pregnant. You might have noticed in some of the previous pictures since I look, well, really full. I am 20 weeks and our due date is March 29! We are super excited. I'm even more excited because, a couple weeks ago, we found out we are having a girl! Of course! Who in my family has boys?
This means that, pretty soon, we'll add a nursery remodel on this blog. Stay tuned!

nice and cozy

The kitchen, which we completely gutted (no cabinets, no drywall, no electricity, no plumbing, no dry wall, no appliances, no nothing), is sealed up! My in-laws came up for the weekend to help out with house. We installed denim insulation, which is so easy to work with. It's all denim, so it can be touched and handled without any scratching or irritation. See, the kids on the insulation website love it! We hugged it too.
In addition to the insulation, Travis and his dad finished hanging the drywall in the kitchen. It's getting to be cozy!

happy halloween!

A little late, but here are some photos from Halloween this year. Unfortunately I couldn't find my St. Pauli girl outfit in the boxes we haven't unpacked. The girls, on the other hand looked great! We went to a festival downtown and then hit the neighborhood for trick-or-treating. Now, I'm trying hard not to eat the leftover candy...

blue bathroom

Our bathroom was one of the first rooms to get a major facelift. First of all, it was blue. I don't mean the general color was blue. I mean, the tub was blue, the tile on the walls was blue, the vanity was blue, the sink was blue. Even the toilet was blue, or at least violet. And the floors are pink! How does that fit it?
We didn't want to spend a lot of money on the bathroom, so we decided to give it a face lift instead of a total remodel. That meant no re-tiling and no new fixtures. We had to change our minds about no new fixtures when I tried to open the vanity drawer and it practically disintegrated in my hands. Nothing was going to stay sanitary in that bathroom with that vanity. I haven't mentioned the medicine cabinet yet. In all honesty, the existing cabinet was pretty ingenious. I had a built-in light fixture, outlet, and a razor deposit which was a hole in the cabinet that one could drop old razors into and they would fall into the wall cavity. OK, the razor deposit actually creeped me out. Cool or not, there was no way I was going to put my toothbrush into that medicine cabinet. So, the vanity, sink and medicine cabinet had to go. And while we were at it, we might as well get rid of the violet toilet.
So we took another trip to IKEA (we go weeknights instead of weekends as a family rule) and bought new plumbing fixtures. Luckily IKEA has a lot of smaller bathroom furniture, which fit better in our one small bathroom. Surprisingly, it has a lot of storage too.
Since we didn't want to re-tile, we kept the tub and the blue tile. To tie into the blue color, but not go so overboard as to have a blue toilet, I found some wallpaper that had the same blue color in it. It is called "Daydream" and I found it from this wonderful website called hygge and west. Hygge is a Danish word that loosely means "cozy." It is a word that I really loved using my year living in Denmark, especially since so many places felt hygge in Copenhagen.
One other improvement to the bathroom was taking out the shower door. The previous owner worked with iron/metal as a profession, so we have an array of crazy metal work around our house. One item he made was a tri-fold shower door. I'll give him credit for an efficient design, but the door made our already small bathroom feel even smaller. Now we have a clear shower curtain only.
Here is a before photo of the bathroom:
And photos from after:

the hills are alive

I want to take a break from all the dust and debris of our house and show you some of the other wonderful parts of our house, namely, our wonderful neighborhood. My favorite part of our house isn't even on our property. In fact, it's across the street. Our house is located across from a designated open lands. There is a creek, a hill with wonderful trails, and plenty of deer.
I've been taking advantage of the trails and hiking them almost every day. From the very top of the hill I can see Oakland, the Bay Bridge, Mt. Tam and even San Francisco. On the north side, I can see Terra Linda (the community to the north), the Civic Center (the Frank Lloyd Wright one), and my parents house in Napa. Just kidding on the last one! Travis is always disappointed that he never sees rockets blasting off from the Civic Center, since Ethan Hawke claimed to watch them take off from that very same building in the movie Gattica.
Having a hiking trail right out our front door makes our location even better. I make all of our visitors hike the trail at least once. I think they appreciate it as much as I do.