Battle of the Bed

I'm pretty sure that Nakita's dog bed is the most comfortable dog bed ever made. We used to have problems with Tex trying to sleep in Kita's bed and now the battle has begun between Deja and Kita. Today I put the bed in the kitchen with me while I was making dinner. Kita immediately jumped in and claimed space to the bed. Deja kept circling the bed, whimpering, and trying to get in, but Kita wasn't having any of it. It was pretty hysterical to watch. Next thing I know, Kita's snoozing and Deja is creeping in to the side of the bed. It worked. If you can't beat them, JOIN THEM! Both girls took a nap for the next hour side by side in a bed definitely not big enough for the both of them. Way to go girls, learning to share :)

The New Puppy (that's already bigger than Kita)

After all the fun we had with Tex, and being heart broken that we had to sell him, we decided to get another Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy. I did my research long and hard trying to find a breeder, let alone one who wasn't on the other side of the continent, and finally found one a few hours south of here in Waynesburg KY. It is definitely a smart thing to get settled, establish your routine, and THEN decide if a new puppy fits in with that, but since the ridgeback is such a rare breed there was a waiting list of about three months and I had to either reserve a puppy in April or wait until Christmas time or possibly next year. Well, I went ahead and reserved a puppy and decided that if we couldn't fit the puppy into our life style we would just forfeit the deposit.
An informed buyer is smart buyer so I took Brody to see the pups when they were about 2 weeks old. Poor guy, I didn't even give him a choice! Puppies at 2 weeks old are too cute to say no to ;)

We came back at 5 weeks to check on our little girl and finalize our pick of the litter. Look at this cute little face

 At seven weeks and 3 days we made our way down to Waynesburg KY to pick our little girl up. We had a few hours to think of a name but nothing really struck us.  Then it hit me, I'd made a journey like this before.. to pick up a dog... on the other side of a state... and it was also a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy... it's kinda like Deja vu...  And so it was settled, Deja would be her name.

We picked her up at a whopping 15.5lbs, already 4 times bigger than Kita and she was the clumsiest little ball of energy we'd ever seen!

"Me and my dad. Look how bling bling my collar is :) "

Black and blue- ..er, Red

Since our colors in the kitchen are red and black we decided to paint and recover the table and chairs. Take a look at those chairs and all those nooks and crannies! So difficult to paint! :) While we waited for the garage to dry we painted the chairs. Saturday night we visited our new friend JO-Anne's fabric and picked a cream and red floral pattern for our seats.
I learned really quick how to recover chairs. Staple gun, hammer, and A LOT of staples later, we finally had matching chairs and table.

The garage...

Saturday morning, bright and early (ug!) we started cleaning out the garage. We swept, sprayed and scrubbed the floor so that it was squeeky clean.

 I sound like a wimp but I think a hose nozzle would have been a good investment, my poor little thumb hurt by the end of the spraying (but I got it nice and clean!)
We then poured the etching solution over the cement and brushed and scrubbed to fully prepare the cement. Once it was done and it had dried (which didn't take long since it's SO hot here) we got to painting the side cement.

Brody painted while I sprinkled the sparkles. Ok so they weren't sparkles, but it did take a lot of skill. I finally mastered the side toss so that the paint chips stuck and didn't land on the floor. When we had just about finished the side cement we started wondering why the paint was getting thicker and thicker.  Well... it turns out you have a pretty hard deadline with epoxy and apparently we had reached that limit. Within about 5-10 min the paint had completely turned into a hard glue! Frustrated and tired we tried to scrub the epoxy off of our feet, toes, arms, legs and even faces and headed to bed since we were out of epoxy.
Monday Brody went to Lowe's (needed a break from Home Depot) and got some more epoxy for free since the last batch turned into concrete so fast!
Day two of the garage began and thankfully it went SO much faster than day one. Within an hour we had the rest of the garage painted and sparkled, hooray!

Nice, clean and finally done! Our neighbor came over and asked if we painted it blue and white for the native UK wildcats. Oops :) we're just trying to fit in, since UK is kind of a big deal 'round here.
Now we're just waiting for it to dry so we can put everything back in it.

Homeowners!!

WE DID IT! We signed 1800 documents today and now have a place to call our own!

A cute little three bedroom house just perfect for our needs.  We were really blessed to find this house in such a short time and we got a really good deal, so all in all we are really happy campers (I say campers, since we have no bed and are literally sleeping on the floor :) )

 Just some extra pics of the house :)

Free-ninety nine

We inherited some furniture from "the Old Lady" and needless to say it was a bit out dated. Thankfully I'm more of a pack rat than Brody because I decided to salvage the furniture rather than throw it away.  Here's what we started with, "U-G-L-Y You ain't got no alibi!"

After yet ANOTHER trip to Home Depot we started out removing all the drawers and handles from the drawers, even the mirror had to come off.  We sanded all the surfaces and then used a combination primer/paint to make over these "has been's".  The handles were probably the most work. Since the furniture was so out-dated the correct size of handles to fit in the existing holes was hard to find, but we managed to find the only set of handles that would fit and thankfully we liked how they looked.

A few coats of paint later...

Not bad, not bad. For a price tag of free + some paint and handles I think we got a pretty good deal.

You've got mail

We needed a mail box so we headed down to Home Depot to see what are options were. We had originally wanted a brick mail box, but we quickly discovered that brick and mortar is QUITE pricey :) So we down-graded to a standard wood post mail box. There were many options to choose from and we settled on a black box with a large square post. The original color of the wood was pretty plain so we picked out a dark stain to spice it up. We found some silver numbers to nail into the post and give it even more character. Since we needed to keep the post in the ground for many years to come we added a couple fifty pound bags of cement to our home depot bill. 2 hours later we left home depot (it's pretty easy to get distracted in that store, especially when you've just moved into a new house)
The next day I woke up and went to work at Ticona and Brody went to work in the garage. By lunch time Brody had sanded, puttied, painted and screwed the box on to the post. We picked a location for the silver numbers and Brody finished putting it all together.
After work we strolled down to our helpful neighbor's house and borrowed several shovels, a rock crusher, and a wheelbarrow. The digging was harder going than we imagined. I'd like to say I helped with the digging, but about 4 inches into the soil it is clay/rock and Brody is much more equipped for heavy digging :) I did hold the tape measure down the hole though, so Brody knew how much to dig.

We finally got the mailbox in the ground and poured the cement around it. I held it in place for about 10-15min while the cement dried and Brody put the grass back around the base. Voila! We've got mail!