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?

Not a dog post.

So Brad has commented that I'm posting a lot about our dogs... Hehe... oops. I forgot this was supposed to be our home renovation blog. :)

So here's some super awesome stuff about our ongoing renovation!!

Right now, I'm working on finishing our drawings. We initially planned on doing a lot of the work over time, but now we're considering bidding the whole project out to knock it out in one fell swoop. We'll see just how much doing it all at once will cost us before we make that final decision... For all who are curious just what our plans are:

Plans in AutoCAD.

Interior Elevations in AutoCAD.

Ha. Okay. So you can't quite tell just what's going on from the screenshots. Basically, right now we have one 'finished' bedroom in the attic and the rest is raw space. We plan to add a bathroom and master bedroom, as well as fully updating the rest of the house. This may be better... Click the images to see 'em larger.

So, what do you think?

Helpers.

So we still haven't taken a good "finished" pic of the living room floor... BUT, I have good pics of my helper dogs ON the new floor!

Fat Rat.

Airlie Bear.

The Bear is getting BIG!

Sneezer and Fatty. My guard dogs.

Zorro, aka Sneezer, aka Sneeze Beez, aka Beezer, aka Zeez, aka Z, aka Smiles.

We've been dog-sitting for Brad's brother while he's on his honeymoon! This is Bella. 

And this is Cowboy. Cowboy likes to try to eat the cork floor. He's not such a good helper...

Sorry, Cows. I outed you.

Flooring

The floor in the living room is now laid. However, we have not put the urethane on yet because I nearly cut my thumb off (okay that's a bit of an exaggeration) when I was cutting the last piece. Luckily Jessica's first aid experience from when she was a life guard came in handy. 

  

We haven't taken a "finished" shot yet, but here is Jessica slaving away.

Go Cats!

Zorro and Rat are pumped for the K-State game on thursday!

Living Room Art

Last weekend, while taking a break from work and renovations I started to design artwork to be placed on our main living room wall. The sketches started as some sort of graphic representation of where Jessica and I are from, how we met, and how we’ve ended up in Chicago. However, I soon realized I was making this thing way too complicated and it was becoming very ugly. I pretty much started over with the aspects I liked and then showed Jess. Her eye and new vantage point was exactly what the design and my brain needed. The design then became this:

It is the state of Nebraska (where Jessica is from) overlaid on the state of Kansas (where I’m from) to create a conceptual version of the Chicago flag. Since I know nothing about sewing, Jessica is going to create the design as an actual flag. We’re then going to frame the flag so it doesn’t look straight out of a dorm room.

So... our roof fell off...

Well, part of our roof.

The wind gusts here in Chicago were major a few days ago... Our poor old house couldn't handle the pressure.

Looks like the new roof may be coming sooner than we anticipated.