$350 Kitchen makeover before/after

These are taken the day we moved in. New floor, new paint on the walls, cupboards, and trim, new curtain rods and curtains. You can hardly tell we have 5 different styles of cabinets and 3 different styles of countertops.

Project

The kitchen project is underway! I have the walls painted, and now the cupboards and trim need to get done. The walls are "almond toast," the same color as our livingroom. The cupboards and trim will be "cottonseed." Kind of a light cream color. Doing the cupboards are going to be a pain, but hopefully they'll get done soon, since the kitchen is completely torn apart. After the painting, I need to put down new floor tile. Phew! I'll post pictures when it's done. This is the biggest project we have to get the house ready to put on the market in February. We still have trim to put up in the dining room, hallway, bathroom, and our bedroom. As well as finish our closet, and fix some siding on the back side of the house.

Christmas 2010

Christmas Eve and Christmas were pretty good for our family this year. We were at church Chistmas Eve for Cael's program. He was a cow, and this is his buddy Ethan, the donkey. Ethan and Cael found one of the kitchen carts and decided to entertain themselves. They would push each other and then spin around. Meemaw Keylon was "taking orders" for supper at the window. We had supper with the Keylons, Gaschos, and Reynolds clans.

It's getting closer...

Allen is back to working out, thank goodness. I'm just glad that he's feeling better. He has the day off tomorrow, so he'll be back out there, running. He bought a balaclava the other day, which I was very happy for, except it was a day late for me, since I did a 12-miler in the snowfall on Saturday. I didn't think my face was frozen, but when I tried to yell at my buddy, Chloe the farmdog, to go home, I realized that I couldn't talk very well. Unfortunately, that was only about halfway through my 12. Allen tried it out on Sunday afternoon, and it worked pretty well. He's got to be ok running in the cold. MO in February is no picnic.

On the mend

Allen's attempts of getting rid of his kidney stone on his own was not successful, so today we had an appointment at Good Sam in Kearney. The doctor decided it was time that Allen was rid of it. 45 minutes later, the doctor brought me a small vial and showed me what was giving Allen so much pain. He's still in pain, but at least we know that this will end eventually. Healing has begun.

A trip to the ER

Sunday morning, Allen got up at 2am so he could go to work at 3. He was experiencing some pain similar to what he's had before in his side, so he took some medicine and set off for work. He got to the edge of town, but had to double-back and come home. He was in a lot of pain. For those of you who don't know Allen well, he has quite a high pain tolerance. Cael and I got up to get ready for church, but something made me stall. About 9:30, he told me that something was definitely not right, so we called his sister with the symptoms and then headed into the ER. 3.5 hours and a CT scan later, he has a kidney stone. I told him that people say it's worse than childbirth, but he told me that he'd rather do this 100 times than go through my childbirth once. This too shall pass, but it needs to do it faster! At least he only has one, and it's "small" (3mm), so hopefully it will work its way out of his system sooner rather than later.

Cael got into a Lego kick the other night, so he and Daddy sat down and built an awesome tower. Cael calls it his "training tower." Apparently, it's where Daddy is going to go to train to be a soldier, and it's where Cael is going to go to train to be a firefighter. By the way, that's what Cael has "decided" to be when he grows up.