Guest room remodel

If you've wondered why you haven't heard from us, it is because we have been busy working on our basement. This turned out to be a much bigger project than we anticipated! The wood paneling on the walls was in pretty rough shape, and the drop ceiling wasn't nice to look at. Thankfully, we had lots of help. My parents came out for a week and put in long hours helping to demo, drywall, tape, and paste our basement guest room. Here are some before, during, and after photos.

BEFORE

There was a hook-up for a wood burning stove that we decided to chisel back and cap off.

DURING



AFTER!!!!

Guest Room

Workout Room

Scrapbook room

We have an awesome tree in our yard!

We didn't know this since we bought our house in December but it turns out that one of the two trees on our property looks incredible while it is blooming.


The metro DC area is quite beautiful this time of year with the cherry blossoms and what not. The many tourists, however, are presumably the cause of the terrible commutes I've been having the past couple of weeks. Hopefully they don't all find out about our cool tree or it might make traffic pretty bad on our street.

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Easter Sunday

We had a great Easter Sunday with the Margaron family. This included an Easter egg hunt in our front yard, an amazing meal prepared by Becky, and a walk to the nearby playground.


One highlight of the day was a trip down the slide with Emma and Zoe the Dog.


We always love getting to see Matt, Eli, and their girls whenever we have the chance.


As every year, we had a lot to be thankful for this Easter.

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Colorado Trip

Several weeks ago Becky and I went to Colorado for a week of vacation. We got to catch up with friends and spend some time up in the mountains that we miss so much. We spent part of the trip staying with friends in Louisville (our old town), and the rest of the time up in Grand Lake with our great friends the Summey's and the Bohrman's. The six of us (who are now 7...or I guess 7.5 if you count our soon to be addition) all used to live in Colorado together. Now we live in Maryland, Dallas, and Phoenix, so it was amazing that we could all get together.

I got three days of snowboarding in and had fresh snow each day I went. It was amazing. I felt sorry for Becky who wasn't able to join us for the skiing. But as you can see, Grand Lake is a beautiful place to spend a few days.


The roads had gotten a bit icy which made for some great sledding. The three-man skeleton is scheduled to be a new event in the next Olympics and we might enter. I got dibs on not being on the bottom.


We were of course excited to see the students we had spent several years with during our time working with our old church's student ministries. One of the families was nice enough to host a time for all of us to hang out. It was so great to see everyone, and to see that this community of students is still so close.



Coming home was a bit difficult for me. We just have so many great friends and memories back in Colorado, which makes it hard to leave behind...not to mention it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. We were thankful to be able to go back and visit, and we look forward to the next time we get a chance to visit our old home.

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Syracuse 75 Georgetown 71

On Thursday night my dad and I went to the Syracuse basketball game against Georgetown in downtown DC. It was a ridiculous game as we had a lead of 22 with about 11 minutes left, and managed to allow Georgetown to get within 1 point with about a minute to go. It was quite nerve-racking for fans of the Orange, but it definitely made for an exciting game.


This girl had her jersey on backwards when she got to the arena...


As we headed to the metro station after the game we came across a hilarious scene. A bunch of Syracuse fans had joined in with some street musicians by dancing and singing along with the words "Go 'Cuse!" over and over again. Here's a short video clip.



We rode the metro with these dudes after the game. The one on the right is a Syracuse student who had driven down that day.


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Day 2.

One of the first things I did this morning was walk to the end of the driveway to see if our street had gotten plowed.....no it did not.



Arguably even worse, they had tried to plow it and got stuck! This left a large mound of icy snow balls half way up our street. After a few hours shoveling with some neighbors we got through our portion of the street and the icy snow mountain.


As one neighbor pointed out during our shoveling, the only ones who like this much snow are kids and dogs. I guess this is because they don't have to shovel. It is true however, that our dog really likes the snow.



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It doesn't snow that much in Maryland...

...this is what people told us when we moved here. And apparently that usually is the case. This weekend, however, we are in the middle of the second huge snow storm this winter. It is important to understand that people here are not used to snow storms, and the general public kind of freaks out from a few inches. For example, last Saturday afternoon we got about 3 inches and our Sunday morning church service was canceled despite the fact that there wasn't even any snow on the roads anymore.

So with this weekend's actual blizzard, it's a real possibility that most people won't leave their houses for several weeks. This storm would qualify as a legit snow storm in New York, Michigan, or Colorado.

When I woke up the morning and went to let the dog out the front door, I had a hard time getting it open because there was so much snow blocking our door.


It is now about 2 pm and I've spent about 5 hours of my day shoveling, and it's still snowing. Here was the view looking out onto our deck.


There was so much snow that at first the only way Zoe the dog could move around was to do a full leap each time she moved. The result of this hard work was a series of paths throughout our yard that she runs through repeatedly at a full sprint.


Here's a couple of pics of the snow about 6" of snow ago.



Becky playing in the snow with the dog.


Is it ridiculous that our dog makes it in about 50% of the pictures on this blog? If we take this many pictures of our dog, I can't imagine what it will be like when we have a human child.

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