oh, caulk!

one of the final details that we have been doing in our remodeling project is caulking. the hubby and i scraped and removed the old caulk around the crown molding before we painted and then removed the old caulk from both bathtubs over the weekend. the hubby had a pretty frustrating time trying to caulk below the crown molding in the dining room, but he ended up doing a great job. after seeing how annoyed he was with the caulk gun, i decided that i would do him a favor and do the rest of the caulking myself. besides, he had more important projects that needed his attention (like installing cool, new toilet paper holders and hanging a few pictures). do you know how maddening it is when you finish up a caulk line and the caulk doesn’t stop coming out of the tube? it just keep squirting out, even if you put a cap on it!
i was crouched inside the guest bathtub caulking, and the hubby was using the level to measure for the toilet paper holder right next to me when this conversation took place:
wifey: “you know, caulk could be a bad word in our family's vocabulary after this experience. you could say the word and no one would know that you were sort of cussing.”
hubby: “except that it already sounds like a bad word.”
wifey, not quite grasping what the hubby meant: “wouldn’t it be great? you could say something like, ‘oh, caulk!’” pause… “um, yeah, i see what you mean. scratch that idea.”

location. location. location.

well, after countless hours spent painting, cleaning and rearranging, i'm ready to show you a few pictures of our condo that we hoping to sell very quickly. we showed it to a couple last night and are going to list it with our realtor this weekend if that couple doesn't make an offer by then. the bathrooms were totally redone and the pergo floors throughout the condo are all new as well. what do you think?

r-e-s-p-e-c-t

i just have to brag about my husband for a minute. this past month has been incredibly stressful for us. we've been working on the condo to get it ready to put on the market, looking for a house to buy in a city that we haven't seen for 3 years (we're going house-hunting in person soon), and just dealing with daily life. although i work really well under stress in the office, i don't think i deal with it so well at home. sometimes, the hubby will find me cleaning the toilets at 11:00 at night just because i suddenly find it more important than going to bed at a decent hour. or, in the midst of trying to de-clutter and move things to storage, i'll start baking cookies because cookies are safe and make me feel like the home is in order even when it is not (ever seen disney's "the kid" with bruce willis? i love his line, "safety in sandwich... safety in sandwich"). thankfully, i have a husband who can sort through all of the stress and create some sort of order for us both. he wrote out a detailed plan and schedule for getting everything completed on time and has even given me tasks to do every day. that might sound pretty old school to you guys, the husband giving his wife "chores," but i asked him for it because i knew that we needed to be on the same page and i really needed him to be in charge and take the lead. i am a very driven, type-a person and the last thing we need right now is for me to take over and start giving my husband orders. and that's just what i would do if he hadn't done it himself. i have a renewed respect for my husband after these past couple of weeks and i just get so excited about it and want him to realize how amazing he is.
here's a more direct example of how amazing he is: the living and dining room have been in disarray because we had to pile all of the furniture in the middle of the rooms and cover them with drop cloths while painting the walls around them. yesterday, the hubby didn't have to go into work until late in the afternoon. do you know what he did all day long? he cleared the kitchen countertop, cleaned up all of the paint supplies, put all of the furniture back in place and even rearranged it in a better layout than before that makes our living room look so much bigger and emphasizes our really cool screened in porch. i got home from work and it was such a relief to have everything back in its place and in order. whew. he even waited for me to get home from work before he left, just so we could sit down and relax together for a few minutes. what a guy...

flip this condo!

a few posts back, i very briefly mentioned that the hubby and i were trying to paint every single interior wall in our condo. that was only part of the story. no, we couldn't stop at just painting! we are also getting new toilets and shower/tub faucets for the bathrooms, getting a whole new sink cabinet for the guest bath, new lighting fixtures in the bathrooms, new tile in the guest bathroom and new pergo flooring in the foyer, hallway, dining room and living room. don't worry, we have a contractor helping us. lowe's really loves us right now. a few hundred bucks here, a few hundred there... poor hubby. we are doing all of this work in hopes that it will make our condo stand out from all of the other condos on the market and that it will sell quickly. as soon as all of the work is complete, i'll post some pictures... maybe even some before and after pictures!
and completely off the topic, sara and i may be getting together soon in atlanta. the hubby and i have a wedding to go to and sara just happens to have some plans in the same part of town at the same time.

fall tv line-up

everyone has their fall tv line-ups posted on their blogs right now and so i thought i'd jump in the mix. except for one problem: i don't have one! that's because we don't have cable in our house. and it's by choice. you probably think the hubby and i are really weird now that i've said that. neither one of us had cable before we got married and we didn't feel that we needed to add it to our already crazy-busy lives after we got married. we rent movies all the time, so it isn't like we are totally against having a tv. it's just that, well, it would be too easy to get sucked into watching a tv show (or two or three) every night if we let ourselves, and we have so many other things that we never seem to have time to do anyhow. right now, for instance, we are painting every single wall on the inside of our condo, trying to decide what to replace our carpet with, looking for a piece of tile to match the cracked one in the guest bath, and looking for houses in the city where we'll be moving in just a few short months. and even if we weren't doing all of that, we have soooo many books that we bought but haven't had time to read, recipes to make, piano to practice, books to write, a dog to play with, etc. the list is always going to be there and i just feel that for us, personally, it would only hurt us to add several tv shows to our current schedule. i'm not trying to be holier than thou, i'm just telling you what works for us at our house. are there any other strange people out there without a fall tv line-up?

hardware and a quick dog story

several months ago, while my husband was deployed and i was working, our dog got bored and ate a hole in the wall. i tried to patch it once, but the dog ate right back through the plaster and ripped some more paper off of the wallboard. he is over that stage in his life now and knows that if he wants to continue to live, he will not eat any more wall, but the evidence is still right there in our entry way. yesterday, i told my hubby that i was going to the hardware store to get the supplies to fix the hole. he informed me that he would really like to be the one to fix the hole, but that i could get the supplies. that sounded good to me.
yesterday also happened to be the day that i had promised to bring lunch for my hubby's department at work. i decided to wear a dress to look cute for my handsome man, but while dressing myself, i failed to think about the fact that i was planning on going to the hardware store after lunch. oh well! anyhow, so i got to the hardware store and as i was perusing the many types of spackle and patching supplies, i decided that i needed advice on which product was best. an older male employee rounded the corner and i asked if he could tell me which was best. he advised me and then as he was walking off, he turned back around and said something about how he doesn't usually compliment female customers. huh? i thought he was about to compliment me on my bravery and confidence in coming into the store to get the supplies and repair some giant hole in my home all by myself (i never told him that my hubby was actually the one who was doing the fixing), so i probed and asked what he meant. seriously, i was getting puffed up, waiting to hear how cool it is that a woman wasn't afraid to do some hard work around the house, but i was disappointed when he went into this spiel about how he lived in new york before and has seen some beautiful women and that i was beautiful, blah blah blah. my bubble was burst. he was just another dirty old man. oh well.
oh, and a semi-funny story that i forgot to tell the other day. our dog, bozeman, has several doggy friends around the neighborhood. one of his friends just got a new puppy-sister this week and she is so adorable! bozeman was laying in the grass, letting her climb all over him, when her brother (and bozeman's buddy) came over to bozeman, lifted his leg and peed all over bozeman's chest! i couldn't believe what i was seeing, and almost wanted to laugh, because bozeman had the biggest smile all over his face like his friend had just given him the coolest gift. well, guess what? i gave bozeman the gift of the bath as quickly as i possibly could. ick.
guess what else? today, i turn 27 years old! yikes!

great way to meet your neighbors

the fire alarm in our condo building just went off and it was so loud that i couldn't even think about what to grab and take outside with me in case it really was a fire. i just grabbed the dog and my purse and ran outside. i tell you what, the neighbor who i play "post-it note tag" with was out there, so we got to talk about the leak that came from our condo and dripped down to her condo and then the neighbor across the hall stuck her head out the door and i got to see what the inside of their condo looked like. and then there were neighbors that i knew were home but didn't bother even looking outside to see if it was a real fire or not. are those the doors that i should have been pounding on as the dog and i made our way downstairs? probably, but as we reached the ground floor, the alarm stopped and our property manager was right there to tell us that it was just a test. nice. i felt like i was back in my college dorm. oh well, it got me up from the computer =) now i get to go take the dog for a walk in this miserable heat. might be a good excuse to walk him at the beach... hmmm...
oh, and when i get back, i'll tell you how a few of the other officer's wives and i had a meatball sub lunch sale at my hubby's work today for a fundraiser. it was so much fun and i got to wear my cute apron so i could protect my white shirt.