Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! Those of us in the Boston area decided to celebrate this tasty holiday by bringing out some of the "child" in us. In other words, we got together on Sunday night to carve pumpkins and eat candy. Katie T. and Phil didn't think they had carved pumpkins since they were little kids! We all plunged our hands into the slimey pumpkin bellies, carved intricate designs with carving knives clearly designed for safety and not effectiveness, roasted and ate pumpkin seeds, ate pizza, enjoyed delicious apple crisp courtesy of Christine, and snitched bites of our favorite Halloween candy treats. Fun was had by all! 

Alex and Ruby: we missed you guys!!!! Today for Halloween we will be cleaning up the porch a bit, putting the pumpkins on display, and hoping for a couple of trick-er treat-ers. As our house has a higher likelihood of seeing a couple of kids come by, Christine and Matt will be coming over to join us! 

Our foray into fostering poodles

For quite some time now David and I have been discussing fostering a poodle through Poodle Rescue Vermont, the organization we adopted Ash from. A few weeks ago we decided to sign up and see what happened. Almost immediately, we were met with a very warm reception and a request to foster one of their very special poodles, named Pepper. Pepper is special because he has had a very serious fungal infection, and so has needed quite a bit of medical care and attention from PRVT. He is doing well now and his most recent tests came back completely normal. He is still on a couple of medications, that we give him in the morning and at night.

To help keep all of Pepper's followers up to date on his progress, we have created a second blog devoted to  Pepper and any future poodles that we foster. You can visit it here: http://fosterpoodles.blogspot.com/. There is also a permanent link to to the fostering blog on the sidebar of THIS blog.

Pepper will be with us until PRVT finds his forever home. So far Pepper has done a fantastic job settling in - he is very much a people person and not at all timid like Ash was in the beginning. He and Ash aren't quite sure how they feel about each other yet. The first day was met by an exchange of low growls and general apathy towards each other, and then on the second day Ash decided that he wanted play with Pepper and so invited him to play on many different occasions by pouncing towards him or tugging gently on his ear. Pepper isn't sure how he feels about this though, and so hasn't reciprocated yet. Ash isn't sure how he feels about David and I giving Pepper attention, so that has led to a few small snafus. However, I think they will warm up to each other with time - once they work out what their roles (e.g., right now I think they both think they are top dog). 

We will keep this blog devoted to our lives, updates about the house, and stories about Ash. If you would like to follow Pepper's journey, please visit our fostering blog!

Finally... the bathroom is finished!

Finally, after many months, the bathroom is finished! We started the renovation back in May and got about 80% finished in the first few weeks and have been chipping away very, very slowly for the last few months. The bathroom was a significant change, with both the sink and tub moving to different locations. The "before" picture really does not do justice to how bad the bathroom was. Try to imagine the cardboard walls, the inches of caulk sealing the round tub to a square wall, and the "no mans land" behind the shower head (to the left of the sink) when you look at the pictures.

Notice Ash posing for the camera in the after picture

The new layout actually gives a lot more space, as we went with a 48" tub (rather than a 60") and recovered the "dead space" on the right side of the room.

Demolition - you can see the layers of wall that have been added over time. Lots of wallpaper! With the help of Grandpa John and Tommy we removed everything but the toilet, all the way down to the lath. There unfortunately wasn't much worth salvaging in this room.

The first step in re-building the bathroom was to construct a wall to enclose the bathtub. We were excited that the new layout would create a little alcove for the toilet, making it less crowded than in the old layout. I was pretty happy with how my first big plumbing job turned out - and after the initial tweaks, we've had no leaks! I also had never done any wall tiling, but a few YouTube videos helped get me started and in the end it was a pretty straightforward job. We did not plan well with the grout though, and most of it had hardened quite a bit before we had time to wipe it off. We were able to "scrape it smooth", but it took much longer than it should have. Caroline was a trooper helping to install the cement board underneath the floor tile at 2am in the morning - she had just had a gum graft done and so wasn't feeling in tip top condition. We were pushing the time envelope so that the tiles would have time to set over night and we could continue working the next day. Luckily Mom was there to help us move along for this part. 

In regards to the window, the new lay out is much nicer because the window is actually part of the bathroom - making the shower more private and allowing more sunlight to enter the room. However, once the window became such a prominent aspect of the bathroom, it was necessary to replace the sill and trim as they had significantly rotted due to being exposed to the water in the shower. In addition, it was all pretty cheap wood and looked very out of place in the house. Dad made the new sill with his router, and it looks pretty good!

We are really happy with the finished bathroom, and everything is much more usable. We have so much more storage (which Caroline is having quite a bit of fun organizing). We now have a cabinet over the toilet, drawers in the vanity, and an amazingly spacious shelf from IKEA next to the sink for towels and commonly used items. We particularly love the back splash over the sink - it adds a nice accent to the room! Also, not shown very well in the pictures is a nifty vertical towel rod (also from IKEA) next to the sink - it has lots of pegs sticking out in different directions so is a really space efficient way to hang multiple towels. 

We still have a few finishing touches to make (e.g., painting the floor vent, installing a threshold, touching up some wall paint, installing a curved shower rod, buying a new bathmat, etc.) To see more pictures of the entire renovation process, click here.