Shane Life

We began at about 8:30 a.m. or so on Saturday and when the last tile was laid, it was almost exactly 12 hours later. Many thanks go out to our tile helpers -Â Brett, Dave, and Tom - and our yardwork helpers - Carol and Ashley (who in a stroke of pure genius, did our mowing and weedwhacking because there wasn’t much room for them to help in the kitchen). And Mom for taking pictures during the day.

There were no major injuries (save Tom’s sleepy foot and my small hand gash, see below) and the final product looks amazing. We are so excited to finish up the grout and then to tile the area under the fridge (had to wait on that one).

We could not have done it all without the help of Dave and Brett. They were so crucial in us getting this project done and we are so thankful for their leadership and assistance. We tiled just over 300 square feet in about 12 hours and the final product (well, almost final…no grout yet) looks amazing. Alli and I are anxious to get all our stuff back into our new kitchen. It looks awesome so far…can’t wait to see it when it is totally done.

Below is the best picture of what it looks like. Once we get everything in, we’ll take more photos and post them up.

Alli and I (with the wonderful help of Dave Talcott) have taken on the project of tiling our kitchen this week. On Tuesday night, I pulled up all the carpet and vinyl and started laying out backerboard. I soon figured out that it is a pain to cut and gave up until last night.

Dave and I finished laying the backerboard last night. I got a scoring tool at Home Depot that made the work of cutting the pieces of backerboard TONS easier. Alli helped by screwing in the boards once we had them set where we wanted them.

It’s been a lot of work so far and my back is screaming at me, but hopefully, by this weekend, it will all be over. The plan is for me to start tiling tonight if I feel comfortable, but we have to figure out the layout first. Hopefully, Brett is going to come help a bit tonight after he finishes parking cars at the Chiefs game. Once our layout is done, it’s tile-laying time! We are still trying to figure out what to do with our fridge. We want to tile under it, but we can’t figure out what to do with it until then. I would rather not take it down any stairs, but I don’t really want to put it outside either (but that may be our only option).

2 nights in a row after work, I’ve been working on the kitchen until at least midnight. I’m hoping to work again tonight and tomorrow and then we have reinforcements coming in on Saturday. if we can knock it all out Saturday, I’ll be thrilled. I’m really happy with how it looks. It’s a nice multi-colored tile and I think it is going to make a huge difference to our kitchen. We are both really excited.

Pictures soon.

I finally picked up our tile.

I went to Nebraska Furniture Mart to pick up our tile over lunch today. 31 boxes of French Quarter tile, 29 sheets of backerboard, 6-50 lb. bags of thin set, and 2 bags of grout later, my back hurts and the tile and all that other stuff is in our garage. You should have seen my car. I tried to take a picture of it, but it didn’t turn out the best:

But at least I got a good picture of all the stuff:

Now all I have to do is learn how to lay tile. Anyone?

Alli and I happened upon our house and this development by a freak accident. We were just driving around Olathe and found this random street at the back of a subdivision that was filled with new houses and lots. It was separate from the other subdivision and from what we could tell, the houses looked nice.

They were. It was really difficult for us to find any other house that gave us as much for the money as this one. We moved pretty quickly (maybe quicker than we should have, but we were only a year into our marriage…we didn’t know much).

We were able to customize this house as much as we thought to at the time (but would have done more had we thought about it more) and we got a great house. I have two favorite parts of this house:

1. The master bedroom. It’s HUGE. because our house is a front-to-back split, the master sits above the garage, which is nice since we have a really big garage. So our master suite gives us a lot of room and a great bathroom and closet.
2. The basement/movie room. This became our movie room once we bought our big screen TV (before we even had furniture to go in the room). We spend more waking time in this room than any other in the house and we love it. It’s cozy and decorated with all sorts of movie posters and memorabilia. And it has comfy couches and a great TV.

Some might say we live out in the country and I agree…it is far, but we have very good highway access and we are only about 25 minutes from my work, give or take 5-7 minutes based on the Olathe lights.

We enjoy being in our house and we are very thankful to have a roof over our head.

This is what I did on my day off today. I moved dirt. A lot of it. My day consisted of a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and some dirt.

It was made even more fun by the constant drizzle that we’ve had in KC for the past several days. Good times. Makes moving dirt lots easier when it turns into mud. Not slick at all.

At least I had my iPod to keep me company on this dreary day. It made that hard work a lot easier. But I’ll tell you what…my back…didn’t really appreciate the whole “hard work” thing.