Holy Sh*t!

Thursday night Jessica walked into the house and the first words out of her mouth were "Holy Sh*t!" This is because I began removing the drywall in the kitchen. While there was kind of a cool look to the 50s plastic tile in the kitchen, it doesn't work at all with what we are doing aesthetically. We wish we could have only removed the tile, but the old glue for the tile has left removing the drywall as our only option. Furthermore, we need to remove the linoleum tiles in the kitchen to lay the new cork floor. As a result, our kitchen (and due to the dust, the rest of the house) is more disastrous than it was before.

Valedictorian

Airlie graduated from her puppy class! (On Halloween. Thus, tutu. I'm a little slow on the blog updating...) She was one of, if not the best student in the class. Very attentive, a quick learner, and extremely eager to please! She's pretty much a rock star.

We're in Agility training now, and we'll hopefully start beginner obedience in January!

In non-dog news, Brad and I are working our butts off on the house! The flooring is all laid in the living and dining rooms and we're getting ready to start some demo in the kitchen. We have a lot of yellow plastic tile and gross flooring to remove in the next week or so. Then we'll be adding an island (with a dishwasher! Woo Hoo!), continuing the cork flooring, painting the cabinets, replacing the hardware, and installing new electrical. Our hope is to have the first floor (minus the bathroom) done by Christmas. It's gonna be tough... wish us luck!

Oh, Rain. What am I going to do with you?

Our plan has always been to install rain barrels to catch all of our roof runoff. Of course, we didn't plan on moving ahead with the rain barrel systems until we had replaced the roof and gutters. No use trying to catch water at the end of a downspout when most of the gutter is rusted through...

But, of course, this happened. Now we're preparing for a new roof, and we're suddenly in need of barrels.

I wanted these:

But I just got the quote and they're CRAZY expensive for some big hollow chunks of plastic! So we're on the hunt for new barrels. The problem is, we need a grouping in the back of the house to catch the water from the back porch roof and the south side of the main roof, and we need a grouping in the front of the house to catch water from the front porch and the north side of the main roof. We can line up the barrels along the side of the house in back, but the space between our house and our neighbor's is only 2'-5". (Yay, city living!)

It gets more complicated up front...

The north side of our house is right on the lot line. So, no room to put barrels on the side of the house up front. We're left with a space about 13" wide to the north of our front porch, or the area under our front porch steps. This is where the big money barrels I REALLY wanted would have worked wonderfully. They are only 7 1/2" deep! We could have stacked a few next to the porch and a few more under the steps and called it a day.

So, here are some others we're looking at:

This is pretty. Maybe a couple of these would be okay visible in the front yard, with some larger, uglier ones under the stairs... Like this:

This is a beast. It may not fit under the stairs...

But these are kind of cool:

They're big bags-o-rain! Rain bags. They hold just over 100 gallons and lay flat, perfect for under a porch. Not sure how multiples work, though...

Then we could just line a bunch of these up along the side of the house in back.

They aren't 7 1/2" deep. :(

But they are 14". Which is still good.

Anyone out there have any rain barrel experience? Suggestions? Comments on the wonderfulness of rain?