Well, the swimming pool….the one item that needed renovated that we all seriously wanted to get done first, but the whole being able to live in the house came up as a higher priority.

The words “swimming pool” was not really the right words that should have been used to describe what our pool used to look like and was definitely not somewhere I would want to swim in.

Here are some pictures of the pool from when we purchased the house…it was a swamp, piled high with trash, broken pool loungers and way too many frogs and other animals we were unsure of.

Above and Below – The pool when we arrived in October 2014

Below are some pictures of the work that Kevin and Charlie (with some help from Kevin’s work friend Paul) completed.  The pool is 40 feet long by 18 feet wide and 10 foot deep at the deep end and 4 foot at the shallow end.

So with the new liner attached, the process of filling the pool started….because of the way you have to fill it up bit by bit to cut out holes for the filters and pump outlets, we had some challenges.  It took over a week to get the pool filled and ended up with algae.  However the right chemicals have killed the algae.  Below are some pictures taken once the pool was filled.

Erin and Jordyn…plus Charlies feet 🙂

Jordyn

Shelby taking a swim

Tracey cleaning the algae

Nearly there

We are still struggling with keeping the algae at bay, but plan to empty the pool before winter, refill and winterize.

Just ordered a cover…the costs that we have incurred for the pool are $800 for liner, about $200 in chemicals, $100 for the cover and $30 for winterizing chemicals.  Luckily our water bill has not increased because here we have a standard fixed city utility bill of $35 that does street lights, trash and water.  I am sure because of running the pump our electric bill will increase as well but have not seen that bill come in yet.

So next year I estimate that it will cost us about $300 to keep up and running for the summer.  Well worth it considering that I have spent an hour a day swimming since we got it set up, Charlie loves it, as does Kevin.  Tracey and Erin certainly spent a lot of time swimming whilst they were here too!

Our kitchen is finally complete (except two very tiny jobs left to do).

We took the kitchen from a grimy, bug invested space of nastiness to a cool, fun kitchen.  You have already seen some pictures that I posted of the kitchen when we purchased the house, and even some pictures of the process….but now the final results.

Here is a short reminder…

And here are the results…let me know what you think!

So our new fridge/microwave and dishwasher are shown in this shot…just love the bottom drawer freezer…Not sure why we choose orange for the walls, but we have always wanted orange somewhere in our house (even in Colorado).  Here we know that we will never be selling the house so its OK to have any color we want…surprisingly, everyone that has seen the color so far loves it.

We had to use vinyl tiles on the floor…eventually we will put hardwood floors down once we have done some foundation work, but this is perfect for now.  I love how we put the tiles down…we put them down diagonally and rotated the pattern.  Makes the room feel much larger.

Of course, we also had to put back up our wonderful under cabinet lights.  All the colors look awesome on the glass tile back splash.

The cabinets have been cleaned, painted inside and then stained and clear coated on the outside.  We got some awesome brushed nickel handles that have a antique style, but are modern due to their color.

The hallway beyond the Kitchen going to Charlie’s bedroom on the right, and the bathroom.  We plan to replace the bathroom door and get a handle to match the hardware on the kitchen cabinets.  Found a place in North Mississippi that sells old refurbished panel doors, so one day we plan to head up there to check out what they have.

Bell’s picture has pride of place beside Charlies bedroom door 🙂

This picture shows the great job that Jessica and Sam did on the cabinet doors.  They are chocolaty and very rich in color.  We followed through with the brown colors in the glass back splash and the counter tops.  The bright orange on the walls and the awesome new windows brightens the kitchen up perfectly.

So, old kitchens typically do not have a built in trash can so I searched the flea markets for something that might work to hide our trashcan.  I found a box that was originally used to store sweet corn.  It needed a good clean and I used Olde English dark oil on the exterior.  Turned out perfect.  You can see the dogs water peeking around the corner, so I have been on the lookout for something that can hide the bucket but still give them all easy access.  Our little spice rack is holding the spices that I use the most regularly.  The rest are in a kitchen cabinet.  One of my favorite pictures is on the wall and finished off the hallway perfectly…Thanks Dana for the picture 🙂

Finally our new gas stove, which I love and a low hanging pot rack…so glad I can reach them all easily now :).  Don’t you just love the purple lights 🙂

Awesome job all the way around.  Love my kitchen so much that I even like cleaning up and emptying the dishwasher!

So call out to Jessica, Sam, Charlie and Kevin on helping to get the job done!

I thought I would post pictures of how we decorated the Living Room for Christmas.  This room is probably one of the rooms that needs the least work.  We have to paint the ceiling, strip and stain or paint all the trim and sand/stain/finish the floors.

The kitchen was rather disgusting.  In fact it was really disgusting.  Your feet stuck to the floor as you walked.  The cabinets had years of grease on them and the windows were filthy…one of the windows was held in by expanding foam a previous owner had used to fill in the holes in the frame.

Inside the cabinets, the previous owner had lined them with a sticky back plastic film…hunter green for the sides/walls, and white with green flowers for the shelves.  You could see quite clearly where insects had walked. The smell was really not very nice.  We did our best to try and clean things, but soon discovered that just cleaning was not going to work.

Here are some before pictures of the kitchen.

Original dishwasher which even had some dirty plates in it…

An outlet and wall covered in fly droppings

A good picture which demonstrates the foam under the window and level of grim that was on the kitchen floor and cabinets.

Even with all the grim, I could still see that this kitchen could be reclaimed.  Eventually of course we will put in a brand new kitchen, but we were working on a budget and figured that at least the cabinets would work for us for a few years.

Just look at the color of the water in the red bucket!!!  Yuck!

Betty trying to clean the floor with her tail!

The fan with pretty gross too – we decided to throw away the fan because after trying to clean we knew that it was too far gone!

Below is a picture of Betty trying to hinder our chances of working on the kitchen cabinets!

So, Charlie, who is an awesome little worker, decided it would be his job to pull up all the nasty sticky linoleum from the floor.  He ended up having to pull up 2 and sometimes 3 layers of linoleum from the floor. I think it took him 3 days to finish. Once complete the floor finally looked clean, and then we moved onto the cabinets.  I removed the doors, and removed all the sticky back plastic from the shelves, walls, and drawers.
Again we were hoping to just be able to clean the doors, but we had to scrub so hard to clean, the doors were losing the polyurethane finish and were patchy and really did not look very nice.  For a couple of weeks we had doors stacked up on the front porch in varying levels “donedom”.

Between Jessica, Sam and I we managed to get the all the doors sanded, stained and clear coated the doors, drawers and cabinets.

Below are some pictures of the kitchen in varying stages.

As you all know, we recently moved to Mississippi and purchased an old house that was built in 1907. There are always pros and cons associated with such a big move.  The biggest con, has been moving away from our friends, who are all very much and very intensely missed!

Selling of our house on Gloria Ct was incredibly stressful, but we made it through all the stuff associated with a house sale and having to deal with Realtor’s and loan companies who really didn’t care about the whole situation of us moving out of state on a tight budget.

Once the Old Dominion trailer had been picked up and we were left with just us and the animals to get moved, we got out of Colorado pretty quick.

I want to say a big thank you to Jennifer and Rob Mills, who allowed us to park the Old Dom trailer at the farm whilst we were packing it…it was a great help to be able to get everything out of the house and not worry about being on a tight deadline with a pending sale.

I also want to say a big thank you to JD LeClair – our horsey veterinarian, who got all of our paperwork inline with the big move to Mississippi for the ponies.  It is really quite shocking the amount of paperwork needed which included a health certificate, negative coggins tests, vaccinations and State entry paperwork for each scheduled stop along the way.

The journey down to Mississippi with the ponies was scheduled to be over three days.  Jen and Jordyn came with us with their truck and towed the ponies.  I drove the Mustang.

The horse trailer was packed with stuff.  The dogs, cats and guinea pigs traveled in the back of the truck, apart from Shelby who seemed to prefer the back seat of the mustang.  It was definitely a challenge to feed all the gp’s and cats whilst worrying about them getting out of their travelling boxes.

We stopped in Kansas and Missouri.  The stop in Kansas allowed us to see a beautiful stables that both Jen and I were incredibly jealous of.  They had an awesome pot bellied pig there that Jordyn wanted to keep. The ponies enjoyed a night of running around in a big arena and talking to the other horses.  We didn’t get there till gone midnight so I was glad that they had such a big space to stretch their legs.

The next morning, we load the ponies, get ready to leave only to discover we had a flat tire on the trailer…Kevin used his portable air pump to get some air in it.  Luckily we found a local tire dealership that had a tire, and who was willing to change the tire without unloading the ponies.  Amazingly with all the loud noises from air tools, Kaylie and Bold weren’t even a little bit upset and carried on eating their hay!

The journey to through the rest of Kansas and into Missouri was pretty uneventful.  Our route allowed us to miss St Louis and stop at our next boarding facility which was in the beautiful Missouri hills, tucked away.  A totally cute barn and arena with wood fenced pens and shelters.

We arrived again the dark but the ponies were super stars.  They unloaded from the trailer and enjoyed the time that they had to stretch their legs.

We stayed in a Best Western that night…not gonna say which one as you may not want to stay in one of the rooms.  Bob who does not do well travelling was a little constipated and we had to give him a bath as his bottom had some nasties there.  We did clean up and wash out the tub afterwards…I promise!!! 🙂

We went out to dinner at an awesome place called Steak and Shake.  Had a great burger and some awesome milkshakes.  It was really good to relax.

The last leg of the journey did not go quite as smoothly.  In Arkansas, I got pulled over by a State Trooper because one of my lights was out on my license plate.  He stuck his head in my window with his flashlight and Shelby put her head out the window and gave his face one big lovely lick.  He let us know about the light, I showed him the spare bulbs in my glove compartment and said we would replace at the next gas station.  He said have a safe trip and we were on our way again.

About 10 miles from Mount Olive, Charlie decided he had to stop and go to the bathroom.  We pulled over at a gas station south of Magee.   I went back to check on Kaylie and Bold.  Right when I went to shut the door she got her head trapped between the wall of the tack room and her body in the trailer.  She couldn’t get it up, and we all started to get worried.  We unloaded Bold and then tried to unload Kaylie.  She was so stressed she was pushing back on the butt bar and we couldn’t get it undone.  After what seemed like hours (which in fact was probably less than a minute) of struggling, she managed to free herself and her head was back again above the wall of the tack room and she was looking out the door as if to say, what are we all stressing about.  This experience has proven to me that I really need a slightly larger trailer as Kaylie really does fit in their – its a bit of a tight fit!

With less than 10 minutes left to drive, this was a sure sign that Kaylie was getting tired and needed to get out of the trailer so we dragged Charlie out of the bathroom and hit the road.

We arrived at our destination in Mount Olive shortly afterwards.  Audrey (who owns the property where we keep the ponies) was there waiting for us and had two stalls all ready and waiting for us with hay and water. We unloaded the ponies and let them munch on some grass for a while.  They seemed happy to have escaped the trailer.  Audrey also had a small house in town that we were staying at, but before then we had to take all the animals to our house and get them settled.  In the dark, in an old house it was an interesting process.  We put the dogs in cats in what has become our bedroom, and the gp’s went in the other room at the front of the house which is now the living room.

We finally went back to the rental house and all collapsed into a heap – just such a relief to get here with no injuries and no accidents.

We spent the next few days having fun and getting the ponies settled into their field and new home.  We went to New Orleans and Jen got to see some cool graveyards.  We walked Bourbon Street and had lunch in town.

It was good to relax and take things easy for a few days.  Kevin had to go back to Colorado for a few days for work, so he and Jen hit the road back to Colorado – it was a tearful farewell for both Jen and I, but I have the knowledge that we will be hanging out again in October for Halloween…which I am already planning for 🙂

Kaylie tail hanging out of the back of the trailer – we removed the top doors so that they had plenty of air and ventilation for the trip.

First stop in Kansas above…see the pot bellied pig?

Swimming pool at hotel in Hattiesburg

Jordyn giving a tough time during lunch in New Orleans

Two pictures above are Charlie and Jordyn on an ANT sculpture at the Hattiesburg Zoo.

Kaylie and Bold in their new field – lots too eat and lots of shelter

Jen’s favorite part of Mississippi – the bugs – this spider’s body was bigger than a quarter!

Driving over the bridge for Lake Pontchartrain – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pontchartrain – Interstate 10 – takes you straight into New Orleans

Charlie having lunch in New Orleans

Jen on Bourbon St in New Orleans