This is where the sidewalks and patio will go. Nice green overgrown grass from the buckets and buckets of rain we received this Spring!

Here the walks and patio are being framed up.

Starting to pour!

The final product! We still have some more comfy furniture for the patio to come. It stinks the grass is so brown for these pictures. We need some rain!

It’s been almost two months since I’ve finished wiring the basement and I made poor Ed haul about 40 sheets of drywall with me on a rainy day. So after Kevin and Glenno stopped over today to help me getting started on the drywall I figured I should update everyone on my progress. I can’t believe we got more than half of the ceiling done just today!

I know this is the first time I’ve written about finishing our basement. So I’ll give you a little background. I started at the end of last year. I drylocked all of the walls in October of last year, sometime before our vacation to Ireland. The week of Christmas break is when I started framing in all of the walls. The idea is to have an office for Sara’s business/workout area. A spare bedroom for guests, since someday we plan on filling those upstairs rooms with children. A full bath and kitchen for our guests. Oh and a huge entertainment room with a projector and stadium seating! Below are three stages of photos: framing, insulation, and drywall from today. Big ups to Glenn, Kevin, Mark, Nick, and Ed for helping me out when I needed a hand for an hour or a day.

A crazy thought popped into my head one day while doing my daily doings. I was trying to figure out how to make the large open space of our foyer more enjoyable. I wanted a centerpiece for the area that would make people stop and say, “wow!” So I got the silly idea to make a two story bookshelf. I ran the idea by my lovely wife as a sort of, whatadayathink. She thought that it’d be pretty cool, and here she is in this picture modeling off the final product. So we did a quick guestimate to how many shelves we wanted and did a few browsings at the local diy stores for shelves and brackets. I did a test run at 3 shelves. And then next day I went out to get 3 more because of how cool it was looking. A week or two later and we were at 8. We planned 9 originally, but decided against the last one, thinking it would be too close to the ceiling.

It’s amazing how this really draws your eye upwards and makes you notice how high the foyer actually is. We still are decorating in the foyer and making things look nice, but man is this a show stopper or what. Sara really loves it which makes me happy. She was having so much fun arranging all of her books and nic-naks on each shelf with their own individual stories. She keeps telling me, “I feel like I live in a Barnes and Noble!” Apparently that’s her lifetime dream, I’m glad that I could give her a little piece of that. Thank God for another one of my crazy wild ideas!

update:  Oh and by the picture you can see the first shelf starts at 3′ from the floor.  Just out of reach from any little kiddies wanting to be Spiderman.  These shelves are only rated at 15lbs max, good thing I had studs that lined up for both floors.

So it’s been a little over 6 months since I’ve posted. I realize I haven’t updated since we’ve moved in or anything. I wanted to let everyone know that it has been an amazing 6 months living here. We couldn’t be happier with the place. I’m almost done putting up Christmas lights for the holiday season so I wanted to show it off a bit. I’ll post up some better interior shots later this week. I can’t believe I haven’t even posted moving in photos! I’ll pick it up more I promise.

Update: I had to upload a new photo since Sara was able to help me finish the gable end of the house above the garage with the final string of lights.� It’s now complete and ready for night up light!

Sara and I closed on the house yesterday afternoon. We have a few things to tie up, but it is official. I’ve already taken a few truck loads over to our garage and freed up a bunch of attic space from Sara’s parent’s house. We’ll be taking more stuff over the next few days and should be fully moved in by Saturday. We’ll have to do a ton of cleaning, organizing, and putting away, but the big leg work will be done. I surprised Sara with a baby grand piano that took many months of careful planning and sneakery. It came from the Brown household and I’m sure there were some that were sad to see it go, but it’s really only a guick phone call and trip away. Carol gave us a bunch of balloons, decorated the piano, and made the sign out front before we came home from closing. My mom came by and gave us bread, salt, and wine(think It’s A Wonderful Life). Thank you to everyone that helped us out along the way, we couldn’t have done it with out you (yes, that includes you too Katie)! Just think one year and one week ago, we were still living in Chicago, 400 miles away from all of you….it’s been one crazy year.

We will be adding some interior shots up here as soon as we get some furniture and decorations up over the next week.