Summer Sandbox Project

Two posts within two days!?  I bet your minds are blown!  Haha!  I told you I had some summer projects to show you.  This summer, Brandon built Zoey a sandbox (yes, the dog...but also for future kiddos).  Before you get all "That's weird" and "They're those dog parents" you would have to see how much Zoey LOVES IT!!!  Seriously, she can really go to town digging....and it is probably her favorite thing to do besides play ball.  And we were sick of her digging in the yard, so.....the sandbox.

Brandon worked really hard on this and he did an AWESOME job!  It was his first "building" project that I know of and it was pretty cool to watch him work.

All the wood.  P.S.  Those green chairs are another project in progress :)

Our patio got taken over for a while by the framework....Zoey liked to jump over the beams.

Brandon working hard :)

Making progress...

I didn't ask too many questions about the "how", but I got home from work and the sandbox was in its' place!

Zoey's fence was around the area we planted more grass seed...she likes to eat it.

We had some rocks that got dug up last year when we were working on the lawn, so he hid them in the benches :)

 

All finished (except the sand of course!)!!!

Daddy's Little Girl :)

She's trying to get me!

 And of course Brandon couldn't stop there....he made a cover!  Gotta keep the pesky animals out.

He did such a great job!  And.......doesn't our lawn look great?!  

Remember last year....yuck

Ewwww

 It is SO much nicer now!!!

I'll have to get some pictures of Zoey playing in the sand soon (it is in).  Well...that's all for now!  Have a good day!

Sunday Funday

The next big project we have for the house is painting the basement.  Since we have a Michigan basement it can look sort of grungy and gross.  When we walked through houses on our house hunt, we noticed that painted Michigan basements (gray floors and white walls) looked so much nicer.  We bought the floor paint and floor cleaner shortly after moving in and now we just need to get stuff for the walls.  We will need a paint sprayer because the walls are sort of crumbly.  

So, on Sunday we spent whole afternoon cleaning out our basement.  Almost everything is in plastic bins that we invested in after getting the house (highly recommend getting 15-20).....and yes I also get the colorful holiday bins for my holiday decorations :).  Of course I couldn't just move them...I had to go through them as well!   I had (no joke) 5 or 6 bins of stuff that I had saved for a classroom....overkill much?  I grabbed the stuff I wanted to bring to school and condensed the rest of it into one bin.  The one bin I couldn't bring myself to look too closely at was my bin of college papers and notebooks that I saved in case I needed to reference some historical subject (yeah right...google here I come!)...but I also couldn't bring myself to dump it quite yet.  Poor Brandon had the job of carrying all of the bins (including the super heavy college and book bins) all the way up to the second floor bedroom.  Here are some pictures of the process.  

We had these bins up on pallets in case we got water in the basement....but we didn't!  You never know in a new house.

We vacuumed off the lids because they had already gotten dusty and ear-wiggy....yuck.

After...all cleared out.

Stuff to bring to school....do we own a truck?

My hot husband (both figuratively and literally...lol) carrying the pallets out to the garage.

Our guest bedroom now :). 3 bins deep and 3 or 4 high!

The corner is all cleared out!

We spent the last hour going through all of the tools and, can I call it crap (?), that was all over from all the different projects.  We returned stuff to my dad, put things away (Brandon needs a big ole' manly tool chest for Christmas) and started 2 garage sale boxes.  Phew.  Needless to say, we got a LOT accomplished!  

We ended our night by taking Zoey for a nice walk and spending some time with her.

She loves us. :)

Summer

Summer sure has flown by this year and I'm sorry I didn't post more...  I have lots of picture updates coming but I procrastinate because my computer loves to crash while uploading them and that irritates me so much!!!  Anyways, being the techie guru that I am (not), I downloaded the blogger app onto our iPad and finally I can share and upload pictures almost instantly!

See!?  Proof.  Haha!  

This summer has been really nice.  I taught summer school through the end of July so now I have August to relax before starting all over again.  I have been a little bit stressed about school this coming year because we have lots of changes coming including switching over to full blown teacher taught curriculum that we are still working to develop.  Being the only social studies teacher in the building means that the work to develop it falls on me.  But I am making do with the help of my co workers!  

Currently I've been watching a lot of my favorite TV shows to relax: Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, and my new summer favorite, Dexter.  I have also kept the house record keeping clean if I do say so myself. ;) And of course Brandon and I have been spending a ton of time with Zo-bug, as we like to call her.  She is 6 months old already, can you believe it?!  I'm sure you have been dying for more pictures of her....so here you go:

Fully prepared for fall football season :)

"Dad, why aren't you paying attention to me?"

Neighborhood watch.  Ball included.

Practicing her tunnel skills so we can prepare for agility classes in the future.

And...sleeping in one of her favorite spots.  So cute. :)

We've done a lot of things around the house and yard this summer but one of the biggest and most expensive things we did was the plumbing.  We had to upgrade all of our pipes because we had some copper/galvanized pipe issues (I think I got that right...haha) and our home insurance rate was going to go up if we didn't take care of it....so we did!

Pretty new pex pipes....ooooh ahhhh

We also moved the washer and dryer to a different corner and re-did the venting and drain pipe.

It's so nice having them next to each other now.  Our next project is painting the floor and walls and then we will build shelves.

It was a year on August 11 I believe that we got the keys....so this weekend would be the 1 year anniversary of moving in!  And I'm feeling so nostalgic...remember when we picked it....our cozy, comfy house?

We have already made so many great memories here and I can't wait to see what's to come!