Bathroom Floor

Bathroom Floor is halfway done. Only have to wait 24 hours to begin grouting!
Making progress, YAH!

too busy for the house

So...we find ourselves too busy to do much on the house this week.

I mean we've done nothing, nada, zip.

I'm active in my graduate level sorority and my husband's also active in his graduate level fraternity...and we find ourselves crazy busy with "year end" programs and events!!!!!

Luckily Phillip will be done with his program this Saturday and I'll be done with my program next Saturday and then we can begin having family time and "house" time again. Until then it will be pretty quiet on the blog.

Here's our events if you want to come out and show support.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=229666653715444 His

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166710140059289 Mine

Another week down

So another week has went by without the camera connector. I think we have just given up on ever finding the stupid thing.

Who knows it's probably in the most logical location, but of course we wont find it until we no longer even own the stupid camera.

Oh well, that's life.

So back to more exciting news... what we've been doing on the house.

To be honest: NOT MUCH!

We didn't really budget the roof costs into our monthly budget and so thus we are well over budget. To compensate for the remainder of this year's house budget we agreed to decrease how much we spent each month on the house from 500.00 dollars per month (which isn't a lot if you think about it) to closer to 100.00 dollars per month(which is almost like nothing per month).

:(

Sad, sad face.

:(

Which ultimately means that this blog is about to get really, really boring. Sorry everyone who has been following us. But we will keep updating it with interesting items, especially when we start getting creative and doing more dumpster diving and garage sales. So as far as the house has gone, we already spent about 80.00 dollars of our 100.00 dollar budget this month on supplies to finish up those small tasks in the house.

• 1st we finally installed the water line to the refrigerator so that we could finally have ice in our ice maker! which is so wonderful because I hated being only able to serve slightly cool water from the water filter to my guest.
• 2nd Phillip somehow miraculously found the broken part on the water heater and replaced it so now we have hot water in the house!!!! Can I get a whoop whoop anyone?
• 3rd Since the hot water was working now and we already did the fridge, we didn't have any excuse for not installing the dish washer so we also finally got the dishwasher under the counter and installed. (Note: my kitchen is finally looking put together, just got to finish the stick and peel tiles and I'm golden)
• 4th We finally finished the layout and cutting of the tiles for the bathroom, and purchased all the supplies to start laying down tile this week.

Note: the only reason we had the ability to purchase all the stuff to finish the bathroom and the kitchen is because we used a lot of Lowe's coupons.

• Which brings me to the point that I never was a coupon/sales ad person. I just bought what I needed, when I needed it, at the normal price. But after the whole TV show dedicated to extreme coupon-ers and realizing how tight our budget is I realized that I don't have to be "extreme" about sales and coupons, but I do need to take 10 minutes of prep time to work sales and coupons around my life in order to save around 10% of my monthly expenditures. And 10% saved is 10% more we can put to our baby's college fund, emergency fund and whatever other "fund" we need for the future. CAN'T BEAT THAT WITH A STICK!!!!!

Still lost camera connector

So the camera connector is STILL AWOL! So frustrating.

So once again I can't update with pictures but I can give an update at least.

So a LOT has happened since the last post.

....(I just noticed that each of my sentences starts with the word "so"...I wonder how long I can keep it going)

So the last thing we talked about was the roof. So guess what! ...( O.K. enough of that)

The roof has been fixed.

We had gotten some previous quotes for the roof from other contractors, but ended up going with a company called Murphy and Son's roofing. They were the most organized and professional. They showed us their outstanding BBB standing and a written contract for work. But the best part ended up being they showed up next day to do the work! What that means for me is no more using the restroom in a bathroom with the rain coming inside the house. Can I get an AMEN from all the ladies out there.

So the roof is done.

We've laid out the pattern and will being cutting and tiling the main bathroom here in the next day or two.

* Pout face b/c I wanted to show pictures of the floor here*

In the basement we've removed a ton of debris from the half attempt of a storage room the previous owners started, but had a lot of water damage from broken plumbing pipes and mold.

Otherwise, outside we've done some basic landscaping. We've pulled stumps from the front yard and a young tree from the side yard.

We still have some things on our agenda for the next 7 days including finishing the floor in the main bathroom and installing the toilet (which if I hadn't informed you, has been sitting on our front porch since before we moved in...we've been in for over a month). We also signed up for a program put on by our public utilities that uses the money they received from the American Reinvestment Act to loan homeowners money for energy star appliances and construction-grade updates for energy efficiency. The homeowner then repays the public utility company back over a period of 10 years or so on their normal energy bill interest free. Once paid off the money goes back into the fund to help other homeowners do the same thing. We turned in our paperwork a few weeks back and we have a confirmation date of mid June, for the initial evaluation.

Which is exciting because our air conditioner, furnace and water heater are so old and in bad condition they barely work. This program will help us out a lot, I especially LOVE the interest-free part of it.

Before I end this post...people please keep your fingers crossed that I find this stupid camera connector. I hate trying to replace stuff like that from the manufacturer's websites. *PRICE GOUGERS*