Twist and Shout

We haven't done a whole lot on the house recently (that's another post) because we've had some other stuff going on. And life moves pretty fast, so we've been looking around a bit.

One thing that Leslie left out of her birthday post was that she had some new friends at our house for awhile. I had a big pile of tree trimmings and pulled weeds and whatnot sitting in the side lawn for a few weeks and, when I finally had it hauled away, we discovered some previously unknown guests underneath: baby bunnies! This was, of course, very fun and exciting news for Leslie, who is a true lover of all things cute and fuzzy.

Bunny #1

Bunny #2

Last Monday there was a golf outing for an organization of which my company is a member, so I got to go play at a very nice Jack Nicklaus designed course in Noblesville that I'd otherwise never be able to touch. We started nice and early, like good golfers and fishermen do, and played through to the afternoon. They had a nice lunch for us after and passed out awards for things like longest drive and the like. Afterwards I went home to do some painting. It was a long and hot day, but it sure beat sitting in the office. It also showed me how much work my golf game needs. It needs a lot.

My Coworker Winning "Closest to the Pin"

This past weekend two of our friends got married in Cincinnati. Because of this, Leslie's best friend / maid of honor at our wedding came into town, along with her boyfriend, for the weekend. We got to hang out with them downtown on Friday night along with Leslie's friend's sister, who's a student at the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and her boyfriend. We went to PEARings Frozen Yogurt, which is right by the circle and was very good. After eating our desserts we took a walk around downtown and enjoyed the beautiful summer night. We also stopped in at Rocket Fizz for some drinks. Finally, after our walk we headed home. Leslie's friend and her boyfriend met us there and stayed the night. So far they are the most company we've had overnight, so we'll stick that on the "Number of People in the House Overnight" High Score Board: 4 (including us).

Our Soda Pop from Rocket Fizz!

The next day the ladies wanted to do some shopping, so we went to two of those places that the only men you see are the ones with blank looks following women around the store... Hobby Lobby and Home Goods. Leslie picked out some nice things for the house. I'm not sure when we're going to get around to any sort of decorating, but once we do I'm sure she'll make it look nice. The wedding was that evening in Cincinnati, so the four of us ate a late lunch and all headed down. We had a great time there and got to see a lot of friends we haven't seen in a long time. The wedding and reception were both beautiful and it was fun to see two of our friends finally get married. Leslie even got me to dance (if you can call it that) a bit.

Enjoying the Reception

I've also enjoyed taking advantage of this lovely weather by getting the grill out. This week I grilled some pork chops and asparagus. I made some rice, sautéed mushrooms and onions, and a maple syrup whiskey sauce too. Gotta love summer grilling.

Summer Grilling

Fancy Pants Dinner

And that's about all that's been going on for us. The only other family news to share is that Ellie's birthday was Wednesday. Yep, our little kitty is one year old now. So since everyone loves our cat more than they love us, I'll simply close with a few pictures of the birthday girl.

Ellie's Seat in the Den

Kitty in a Bag

"Wait, how did you find me?"

Birthday Girl!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for a house post coming soon! No, for real. I promise. Also, I've got my real camera out and ready to go! Now all we need for more, better quality posts is for me to set up the computer and for us to get internet... so yeah, this could still be awhile.

Birthday Happenings

An update on our social lives...

My birthday was this week (the big 25!) and Jeremy and I had many days of celebrating! We started by taking a 3-day weekend (best.decision.ever). This meant that we could stay up a bit later on Thursday night, so we got things kicked off with 4 movies from Family Video and a pretty legit blanket fort. A fun time was had by all, even Ellie!

Fort Miller

On Friday, it was so nice to be able to sleep in and spend some time with Ellie. In the afternoon, we went to Buck Creek Winery for a tasting. It was so fun and it was neat to do something different. We brought home some wine and some CHEESE. They sell a few different cheeses from Fair Oaks Farm (we went last year and it was awesome... we saw a cow being born!) The cheese we bought is literally the best cheese I've ever had in my life. It was hickory smoked Gouda and sooooo yummy!

Birthday Girl!

Friday night we were able to spend some time with friends we hadn't seen in a while. It was great to catch up on each others' lives! We had dinner at Bubs, a local restaurant that sells huge burgers! You can get elk or beef burgers - I got beef and Jeremy got elk. We had a fun time back at the house at our first ever bonfire! Jeremy bought a fire pit last week on sale at Menards and it is one of my favorite purchases to date. A bonfire is a summer essential. Ok, who am I kidding - the s'mores are the important part!

Can You Guess Which Burger is Whose?

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Trancik

First Bonfire of the Year!

Saturday was a fun day too, with more birthday celebrating! We went to the Indianapolis Zoo in the morning with my sister and her family. We saw a one year old elephant, and she was adorable. Just running around, playing in the water and being cute. We also were able to enjoy the White River Gardens which look like quintessential British estate gardens. At least what I think they look like!

So Excited at the Zoo!

Bath Time

Lawn Ornaments

So Many Almost-Butterflies!

No Idea What Kind This is...

Weird Squirrel Offering His Acorn as Tribute...?

Saturday evening was by far my favorite part of the weekend! Jeremy surprised me with an outing to the drive-in movie theater in town. I've never been to one and always wanted to go, so it was perfect! We saw The Internship (pretty good - more heartwarming than I thought it would be) and Now You See Me (which I need to watch again - I was too tired to pay attention to the "how they did it" at the end of the movie). It was great to snack on popcorn, watch movies for cheap and support a local business! It was a late night for us though - we didn't get home until 2:30am.

Waiting in Line for Popcorn

Sunday was a bit more of a productive day - we helped some friends move into their house and we painted primer in the den (update on the den coming soon - it looks GREAT!). Monday was back to work, but Tuesday was my birthday! We celebrated with our yummy cheese from Fair Oaks Farm and bacon, because what is a birthday without bacon? My nephew said we were eating silly food - I guess bacon doesn't really qualify as dinner to him.

 

Our Silly Dinner

My birthday present was awesome: Pretty Pretty Princess!!!! I might have to make Jeremy play with me! Lowe's and Menards also sent me birthday presents (well, not so much presents as purchases). It was so great to have our purchases arrive at our front door the same day as my birthday, and you'll see what we got in our next post. The house is definitely coming together, and it was so great to celebrate my first married birthday in our home.

Feeling Irish - Soda Bread and Shepherd's Pie

So for some reason we decided to make shepherd's pie one night. And I decided to expand upon that and make some soda bread to go with it. I used these two recipes, so check 'em out: Irish Soda Bread, Shepherd's Pie.

Dinner is Served

The bread turned out pretty well. I made a few changes, as I tend to do when cooking. First off, I didn't have buttermilk, so I used a homemade method for that. I also didn't have raisins (and don't really care for them) so I used craisins instead. Other than these changes I followed the recipe as is, since it's baking and not cooking... I'm not usually that brave. One thing that I would change next time, though, is that this calls for more caraway than we care for. I'll probably scale that back to about half of that for next time.

Making the Dough

Hot Out of the Oven

I love Alton Brown and Good Eats, which is why I looked up and "used" his recipe. But I wasn't making everything from scratch and already had a good idea of how I wanted to do things, so I used his recipe for just a few things. We had part of a box of dehydrated potatoes (don't judge me...) from something else we had made awhile ago, so I used those instead of fresh potatoes. And, to make things simpler, we just bought a bag of frozen peas and carrots to use instead of fresh veggies. Lots less work this way. I used Alton's recipe mainly to see what he added to the filling - the tomato paste, chicken broth, etc. I also added some cheese on top of the potatoes. You know, because this is America. It all came out pretty well and was a lot less work than doing it his way, so not bad in the end.

Cooking the Filling

Spreading the Taters

Hot Out of the Oven

Now that the kitchen is unpacked and we're starting to settle in a lot more these food posts will hopefully become more of a thing. But who knows, I may stop feeling so adventurous and just order pizza every day. We'll see. I also need to get my real camera out so I can stop using my iPhone camera and get some better shots. Again, we'll see...

Quick Recap

Unfortunately we have been short on two very important elements required for posting blog updates: time and internet access. We were signed up to get our internet connection hooked up on June 1, but they're apparently working on the infrastructure in our area and won't be able to connect us until mid July. Meanwhile we feel like cavemen. And we do feel bad about not updating more often... seeing as a lot has happened since the last post. And I mean a lot. Like, somewhere between a barrel full and a hogshead. So I'll do my best to give a "quick" overview of all the work we've accomplished in the last week or so.

As Leslie said in her post awhile back, we decided to repaint the downstairs to a different shade of grey. We finished the kitchen and great room first so when we finished we could move some furniture into place (mainly the piano and TV stand). That allowed us to free up a lot of floor space (since we no longer had a massive mound of boxes in the center of the room) to organize kitchen things. And by organize kitchen things I mean that we took everything out of the kitchen we had previously moved along with anything we still had boxed up and spread it on the floor. We then were able to see all we had and place it in drawers and cabinets accordingly. I also installed a few new light fixtures in the kitchen so we can actually see what we're doing in there at night now. So yay for a basically complete kitchen! We also got some of the other important things done like setting up the TV and getting the movies unpacked. The few areas that we finished later were the two walls in the small hallway between the kitchen and the den (our newly official name for the former dining room), and both sides of the beam that runs in the middle of the family / living room area. We are incredibly glad to be done painting grey.

Our Lovely Mantel

Furniture Moved to the Walls

Kitchen Things Everywhere!

New Paint, Light Fixtures, and Full Cabinets

We also finished painting our bedroom a nice shade of navy blue before we moved in. No pictures had been posted of it yet, so I figured I'd add some just so it doesn't feel left out.

Hey Look, a Window!

Hey Look, a Door!

Leslie also mentioned that we had carpet installed. That went smoothly for the most part, but not without a hitch. They called Leslie on Thursday saying that they pulled up carpet in the bonus room and found wet subfloor and obviously didn't want to just lay carpet over it. So that night I worked on fixing that while Leslie worked on painting our bedroom. I was expecting to find a huge area of floor that was ruined, but it was really only a pretty small patch - about 1.5' x 3' of damaged floor. So I cut out the old stuff, sprayed bug killer in it to kill the ants (oh yes, lots of lovely ants), and dried it out with a fan. I came back the next day to finish it up (I took a half day from work to get an A/C quote... more on that later) and got it all patched in the early afternoon. I forgot to take pictures after I finished, but I'm forgiving myself for that one since I was trying to get out of the way quickly so the carpeting could be finished.

Damaged Area

Why Hello, Ants

Added Sister Joists Ready for Subflooring

We also discovered that our air conditioning didn't work the week before we moved in. So I spent some time getting it checked out to see what the problem was, finding out the evaporator coil and condenser needed to be replaced, having three different companies come to the house to give me quotes, and then finally having the work done. I took awhile to look over all the options and decide what I wanted, but I suppose that's what happens when you're an HVAC contractor and you have HVAC work done at your house. It worked out pretty well though, since we got a good deal from a good company on some good equipment. We got the coil replaced, the outside condenser unit replaced, a new line for the refrigerant, a new whole house humidifier, and they even threw in a one year service agreement. Now, as cool as all that is, my favorite part is the Nest Thermostat that I installed after they were done (and it'll be even better once we actually have internet installed). Call me a nerd, but how neat is that?

New Coil and Humidifier

New Condenser Unit

Nest Thermostat and New Humidistat

Another fun thing we've been up to is getting furniture picked out and ordered. We went up to the Kittles in Castleton for their Memorial Day sales and ordered a sofa, a chair, and two end tables for the great room. Easy enough, we thought. Well, a week later Leslie gets a phone call saying that the fabric we picked is fine for the sofa but doesn't work for the chair. So we head back up and pick out fabric again. Not too painful, but just another thing we had to add on to our week.

And I believe that about sums it up for what we've been doing on the house. We have also been keeping busy with family events, seeing friends, grilling out, and lots of other stuff that might get a separate blog post. We also spent an evening cleaning out the old apartment to get it ready to hand back over. It was kind of weird saying goodbye to the apartment. It was our first home as a married couple and we had a lot of good memories there. But time to move on, and we love our new house. We're very excited about making many fun and happy memories here, hopefully lots of them involving you - our friends and family.

Thanks for reading and hopefully we'll be blogging again soon!

I Can Has New House?

We have gotten so much accomplished this past week. Tons of painting, unpacking, and purchasing. But I'm not going to tell you about that right now. Why? Well, I don't feel like it and I haven't taken pictures to show you yet (I'm really bad at taking pictures as things happen... I'll work on that). So keep with me and we'll get there eventually. But in the meantime, here's our kitty having lots of fun in her new house. And yes, it is (according to her, anyway) her house.

The Night We Moved In

Helping Measure for Furniture

 

Back on the Purdue Blanket

Kitty Kisses

Assisting with Kitchen Organization

Helping Fold Laundry

Guarding the Kitchen Stool

Staying Up Past Her Bedtime

Hopefully you enjoyed those. Like I said, there's much more to come (and I don't just mean cat pictures), so stay tuned. We'll also try to post more frequently (and therefore with shorter posts) now that things are starting to calm down. No promises, though...