Home!

We have landed back at our house today! Hooray! Of course, both kids have lost it crying for half the day. Asher has some kind of virus deal happening in his mouth that makes eating impossible and so he is not a happy camper. I am trying to unpack us and still have the house look like it did while we were gone. Not an easy feat...

But I have managed to upload a video from the month that shows you Matt and Brian Hancock as Rob and Gib blending rhymes about toppings for ice cream. The song is called "Oreo" to the tune of "Low" by T-Pain. 

Enjoy!

Our house on Ice

Last night the weather turned nasty here. Starting around 6pm we were getting some freezing rain, it changed over to snow around 10pm and the snow fell all night long and intermittently during the day today.

As I was going to bed last night, I walked into our room and it was FREEZING. Typically, our room is the coldest in the house, but it was unusually cold. I thought it was because we had left the blinds open during the dark hours and went to bed. I woke up about an hour later and asked Matt to turn up the thermostat. He did.

Around 6am, Asher woke up wanting his pacifier (yes, he still sleeps with a pacifier) and I had to find it. As I went back to bed, I checked the thermostat and it said "62". That's right, 62 freakin' degrees INSIDE my house. To some of you experiencing, ahem "the change" that might sound like heaven, but with two kids in the middle of the winter...this was not good. So I did a double-take and somehow our furnace got turned off! OFF. As in no HEAT in the middle of a snow storm. Granted, we only received an inch of snow, but the high is supposed to be 29 today. Fahrenheit.

I turned the heat back on and went to bed. It is now 1:30 and the house has just gotten back up to its optimal temperature of 70. Yikes. I was shivering all night long, I can only imagine just how cold my kids were! Thankfully they were both wearing blanket sleeper pajamas. If you don't know what these are, picture footy jammys that are fleece. I think that they were still cozy all night. Not so much for me.

Home Again, Home Again

We are home! We have a ton of unpacking, mail to sort through, groceries to buy and general catch-up. I will post as soon as I get my feet under me!

House Projects

I have the home improvement itch again (and you can't get a creme for that!). So Matt and I went to Home Depot and Lowes to start scouting for the supplies that we will need to spruce things up around our house. Here is the list of projects that we want to get done to the house in the next year:

1) update/gut master bath. We will tile the floor, paint the walls, new countertops, faucets, mirrors and lightfixtures.




















2) redo our back deck. We need all new handrails, stairs and probably the actually deck wood should be replaced as well. Plus, we really REALLY want new patio furniture.

3) chisel out the random tile wall at the bottom of our stairs and replace with drywall and insultation.

4) buy and install a new garden shed.















5) new light fixture for our stairs.



















6) new countertops for our kitchen.









We started working on the bathroom. We bought new paint and a light fixture yesterday and we picked out the tile. We hope to have a first coat of paint up in the bathroom sometime early this week and then we will take everything out of the bathroom and start to tile. This is one of the major projects of the house, but I am so excited to have a new and updated bathroom. I think that this will be of the sticking points if we want to sell our house, so we have to do it. We'll see if we ever get to the these other projects! Our major obstacles are time and money. So if anyone has either of those laying around, feel free to bring it on over to our house!

The main reason for wanting to do all of these projects is that we want to sell our house next spring. It probably won't take a HUGE amount of money to do these projects, but if we get them done, and do them well--the payoff could be really significant. I know that a lot of people talk about a housing cooldown. But there has been such thing here in Asheville. This town is a destination and houses will always sell. But the more that we can do, the bigger the paycheck. But in order to tackle this list, we just have to get started. So here we go!