Sunday, August 31, 2008

Livin' La Vida Loca

The whole month of August was livin' one crazy life. Good Crazy though. Let's see if I remember it all. As many of you know, last September we bought a fixer upper (I mean Fixeeer Uppeeeer) in Concord. Last year we mainly remodeled the Living room (if you don't remember, here is the link to the post about it in our 2007 Christmas Letter), the kids' rooms, the hallway bathroom and this month well lets see: August 9: Took the kitchen apart. Everything. All the cabinets and appliances, the floor (four layers of linoleum- Yes four) and later on the windows and the sliding glass door. August 10: Blessed Baby Samantha. Had a party in our house. We barbecued outside and I made the side dishes at my mom's house the day before. We had Grandma Grandpa Bradshaw from Beaver Utah, My sister Kimia and her husband Jeff from Provo, Our good friends Parvin and Rostam and our parents. Josh gave a very beautiful blessing and we had so much fun having family in town.
For the next two weeks we (the kids and I) lived out of our car and stayed with our parents in San Jose while Josh was remodeling the kitchen with the workers. Thank you for letting us live with you for a while.
August 15: We celebrated our fifth anniversary. We were not together for the actual day but we went to Diggers diner for burgers and shakes two nights before.
We finally got back home on the 17th and tried to put our kitchen and our life back together. It was a lot of work with three little children but it was worth it. Our kitchen was absolutely disgusting. Now, let's just say everything we did was a huge improvement. Ready for the big reveal? K. First lets start off with some before pictures.
I know embarrassing, even for a before picture but here we are getting ready to pack the kitchen up.
Icky floor. We were planning where the Dishwasher and some base cabinets go.
We needed some room for our pantry so we had brought in the garage cabinets.
One of the worst part of the kitchen was this ugly ceiling fan.
OK. Ready.....
Tadaaaaaa
We put in granite tile countertops (The one piece kind was way expensive), tile floor (no more linoleum, yeah) and new windows and sliding glass door.
Since our kitchen shares a wall with garage, we made a hole in the wall to put the fridge in and a pantry next to it.
Ahhhh, the clean nice ceiling fan. We also put in recessed lighting with dimmers.
We love our new kitchen. The food even tastes better in this nice clean kitchen.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

5 Wonderful Years

Last Friday was 5 years that Josh and I were married for time and all eternity. I remember thinking that day that how wonderful life was and I could not love him any more. But not only my life has gotten better everyday, my love has grown a lot more along with deep fondness and appreciation. I love you honey and here is to many more years together.