I'd Like to Thank the Little People...

Worst Blogger Ever Award goes to me!  Truth is, not much has been done since my last post. We have really cut back on working on the house during the week. The electric company replaced our meter (the old one was 26 years old), but the heaters still appear to be sucking electric.

We did manage to finish the kitchen though! The microwave was installed on Saturday- which finished off the major work.

Let me remind you of the kitchen the way it was...

We had a laundry list of things to do that included:

Peel Wallpaper
Paint Walls
Paint Cabinets
Change Hardware
Replace Appliances (Refrigerator, Dishwasher, Stove, Microwave)
Replace Molding
Tile Backsplash
Remove Heater from behind fridge
Paint Door
Change Lighting
Change Faucet
Update Electrical Outlets

As you can see, we have accomplished a lot! But there's still a few things left to do, that will probably have to wait until we move in.

So without further ado, I present to you our (mostly) finished kitchen!!

You can see the unpainted door and little crawl through to the bathroom to the left of the dishwasher. You can also see where the molding needs to be replaced behind the fridge.

I think it needs a rug or something to cover up the floor. We don't plan on redoing that part until we tear out those cabinets. Other than that, I'm in love!

What do you think?!

Bubye Birdies: Bathroom Renovation Part 1

Making fun of the wild things you see in houses while on the hunt is fun... until they belong to you. I remember the first time I saw these love herons like it was just yesterday...

We were caught off guard the first time we laid eyes on the hand painted love birds we saw the first time through the house. Seemed like an easy fix- we'd tear down the wallpaper, put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and replace the shower doors.

We hired some help for the wallpaper... 

Then Bill released the birds...

Side note: We took the doors out to the curb- obviously someone would want these beauties (plus it was trash day).  We came back the following day to find this scene at the curb:

All I can say is those birds better have broken out of their glass and flown away. I don't want to start off on a bad foot with our trash men... but if they did do this they don't know who they're messin' with! (I will say someone also suggested that the cold temps may have caused the glass to shatter... those trash guys better hope this was the case!)

Moving on...

Then our plans got bigger. We wanted a new toilet. Then a new vanity. And while we were at it, why not tear up the floor? Once all of that was out, why not the shower walls too? So we started demolishing the entire room, but more on that later...

Google Search: coupon code atlantic city electric?

We've had a pretty interesting few days. We got our first electric bill. It was for $845.03. You read that correctly. And no, I didn't misplace the decimal. $845.03 for a place we don't even live in yet!

So now we wait for our billing dispute to go through and gets loads of estimates from heating guys to switch our electric heat to gas. Anybody know a guy? who wants to do it for $5 and a case of beer? lemme know.

Anywho, I decided I'd start to share our bathroom demolition/renovation with you. This series may take a while to finish as work on the bathroom has stalled. (We're trying to not use the electricity as much as possible, so we're spending a little less time at the house this week while we sort it all out.)

But for now I will start to show you the demolition process. I'll leave you with a little reminder of what we're working with...

Dishwasher, Dishwasher, Clean us a Dish...

After the chicken nugget experiment, we had some dirty plates. So we decided to test out the new dishwasher. Living in a rented apartment, we're lucky we even have a dishwasher. It's old so we pretty much need to wash the dishes completely before we load them for a sanitizing cycle.

We always see people (on commercials mostly) loading really dirty dishes into a new dishwasher and the dishes come out sparkling. So we decided to give it a whirl.

Question: Will our dishwasher fully clean a dirty dish caked with ketchup and honey mustard?

Hypothesis: Our dishwasher will fully clean and sanitize a dish caked on with ketchup and honey mustard.

Step 1: Create dirty plates.

Step 2: Load dishwasher with said dirty plates:

Step 3: Set dishwasher to normal cycle and press start.

Step 4: Wait 120 minutes.

Step 5: Open dishwasher and analyze results.

By golly, those dishes are spotless!

Conclusion: Our dishwasher fully cleans and sanitizes a dish caked on with ketchup and honey mustard.

It's Chicken Nugget Time!!

Yes, this is an entire post about Chicken Nuggets. It's that important. 

When Bill and I were shopping for appliances we started to notice a trend in ranges: most of them had a "Chicken Nugget" button. In the beginning we thought this was strange. Then it became a joke, we'd sarcastically laugh about how we wouldn't buy an oven without one of these fancy buttons. When we walked into Art Handler we were sold on the deal they had on the Frigidaire professional series. But the best part? Not only did the oven have a chicken nugget button, but so did the microwave! We decided then and there that the first thing we cooked in the oven absolutely HAD to be chicken nuggets.

Well, last week we had the appliances delivered. The microwave wasn't in yet though. We hooked up the fridge and dishwasher, but the outlet behind the stove needs to be changed, so we only hooked the gas up to it.

We decided to pick up some chicken nuggets while we were at the grocery store today anyway.

 
When we got back to the house, we brought in some back up:

I pressed the chicken nugget button and the oven read 20 then started heating up.

(CHI stands for chicken nugget)

Because this was the first time we'd turned it on, the oven had that "I've never been turned on, so I'm going to smell like burning chemicals" odor to it. We decided to hold off on putting the nuggets in, canceled the nugget button and preheated the oven to 400 to burn off those toxic chemical smells. The oven couldn't have taken more than 5 or 10 minutes to get to 400 degrees. Talk about efficient!

While all of this was happening, we loaded up a tray of nuggets:

After about 15 minutes, we decided it was go-time. We pressed the nugget button again, popped in the nuggets, and 20 minutes later we had perfectly cooked chicken nuggets.

We were a little bummed that we bought cheap nuggets and actually had a serious conversation about how delicious it would be to get some frozen chicken nuggets from Wendy's to cook with our button. We're pretty serious about this.

All and all, we were pretty happy with the outcome. We had crispy, golden brown chicken nuggets. I don't know how often we'll actually use this feature, we're not really big chicken nugget eaters. I'll let you know how it goes with the nugget button on the microwave once it's installed, though.

Let's start decorating!

I know I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I started to get an itch to buy pretty things from places other than Home Depot. Being on a serious budget has severely cut down on my shopping for anything other than tile, paint and Smart Ones (a girl's gotta eat). With paint on the walls and ugly blue carpets on the upstairs floors, I decided to satisfy the spending itch by purchasing duvet covers to get an idea of where these rooms were going.

side note: I'm purposefully not posting anything about our BRAND NEW APPLIANCES until they are completely installed. The microwave did not come in with everything else, but we should have it by Saturday.

Anywho, Bill and I registered for (and received) a beautiful duvet that's mostly white with a green border mixed in. (Bill has issues with "girly" bedspreads) However, with the lovely blue carpets upstairs, that just wasn't going to work....

I started by looking for duvet's with a coordinating blue theme... and then remembered I hate the color blue. It's just so lame. Then, I thought about something neutral, like browns and off-whites, but just couldn't picture it with the blue carpets. Then a light bulb went off. How about silver? Bill would probably think silver was manly enough, and maybe- just maybe I could find something pretty. I did:

www.overstock.com

I can finally picture a room I like with blue carpet! The best news?! Bill likes it, floral pattern and all! Then it was on to the guest bedroom. As a reminder, we painted the bedroom walls a steel blue color...

As an avid home renovation/decorating blog reader (I <3 YHL) it's hard to miss everyone talking about www.westelm.com. I decided to check it out and found a duvet I absolutely love:

www.westelm.com

And the best part? It was on sale! We all know how much I love a good bargain (read: won't buy anything unless it's heavily discounted). At 20% off, I decided it was perfect and placed my order! And surprisingly, Bill likes all those flowers! I'm thinking it's the beachy feel of them that won him over..

It's so exciting to start to have an idea of where these rooms are going! There's only so much painting and tiling I can handle! I can't wait to be able to start really decorating these rooms!