Change is in the wind around here. It's been a crazy busy past year, with our wedding, honeymoon, both starting new jobs, buying this house, and completing two master's theses. Oh, that's right, I said two, because on Wednesday morning, in the culmination of three years of work, Kyle successfully presented his applied project and his thesis committee loved it! Just a few hours later, we both walked across the stage at Wells Fargo Arena with 700 of our peers, officially capping our college careers. It was a wonderful celebration and a huge weight lifted off our shoulders (mostly Kyle's).

So, naturally, I immediately put him back to work on the house.



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If you follow me on facebook or instagram, you probably saw that we got a new door and window system over a week ago, but since the door was mis-cut several inches short on the first go-round, I've waited until now to post it. As you might remember, when we bought the house, the doors looked like this:



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Hi everyone! First, I want to apologize if you're not super interested in butcher block countertops. This post will probably be boring for you. But if you are thinking about ever installing butcher block in your own home, I have a whole lot of information you might be interested in. Come along on this countertop journey with me!



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Remember when I mentioned that we were about to start flood irrigation? Well, Friday night, we did just that. And hoo-boy, was it an exciting evening in the Larkin household.



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With Kyle in the home stretch of his thesis (he defends May 2nd!), work has slowed down here in the DotM house. Since I'm now the brains AND the brawn, and have been managing all the other little details that come with moving (changing addresses, meeting with installers, bringing the last bits over from the old house, cleaning, unpacking, taking piles of stuff to Goodwill, etc), it's hard to do everything. But, here and there, after work, on lunch breaks, and on weekends, things have been happening. I finished painting the main part of the house (just the bathroom left!), Kyle installed our fancy new thermostat, we got master closet infrastructure, kitchen countertops are in progress (I'll show you lots more in the next post), I pruned the trees in our back yard. We've unpacked most things. You know, the process. It's happening, more slowly than I'd like, but it's happening.

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So, friends, the kitchen is on its way to completion but it's not there just yet. There's a whole process wherein I need to seal the new butcher block counters to make sure that they're all friendly to water, oil, and the various messes I will certainly make. So though we moved in last Sunday, we've been eating a lot of takeout. You know how that always sounds nice, but then it isn't all it's cracked up to be? Even on our honeymoon, in food paradise British Columbia, there was a point where I was sick of all the beautiful fresh produce and sparkling local seafood. Going out for every meal, every day gets a little cumbersome (not to mention expensive!) and I just felt like, can I just make myself a sandwich already? In that case, Kyle and I found a little place that served super simple pasta and it satisfied some of my cravings for a home cooked meal (likely because that's always my go-to). In this case, I said hey, we've got an oven!

So, making dinner without a kitchen sink or a cooktop. First, pick something you can make in your oven (a roast chicken, because that's my other go-to, the very first thing I ever learned to cook for myself), and/or something that doesn't need to be cooked at all (a lovely salad with strawberries, since they're in season and actually taste like themselves instead of that cardboard cutout of them you get the rest of the year).



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I have been working out in the living room during the day with all the windows open, and the lovely freshness of it all is really nice. I hear birds all day hanging out in the tree out back, which was a big deciduous mystery until it starting getting leaves a couple of weeks ago.



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I sincerely apologize for the radio silence, Internet. It's been a crazy week and a half.



When we last spoke, we were building a kitchen out of 138 IKEA boxes. The week after that was Kyle's spring break, so my mom and step-father Don were planning to be in town for their usual spring visit (typical: sunny days and baseball games. Not typical: slave labor). Instead, we put them to work ("like beavers," as my grandmother put it), and it was a whirlwind ten days. I took the week mostly off of work, so we were at the house 8-12 hours a day every day - my parents actually extended their time here to finish some projects. The house was a whirlwind of paint, primer, spackle, sawdust... you name it. There was no real safe place to put the camera, so unfortunately I don't have as many pictures as I'd like. I had this amazing one of my mom COVERED in paint (messy painting runs in the family!), but sadly my phone deleted it.

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I mentioned in my last post that getting the flooring was a bit of a saga. We shopped around a lot, and decided on bamboo flooring because of cost, sustainability, and general prettiness. After living with concrete floors for the last few years (and even knowing the lovely concrete in this house) we'd decided we wanted to do wood of some kind, to give our feet a little more cushion. It sounds silly but for reals you guys, walking on concrete all the time in bare feet can lead to some really sore soles at the end of the day. We knew from our research that there were some issues with bamboo (harvesting the grass too young can lead to it not being very hard, so can over-coloring it through a steam process called carbonization, or the way its woven together to create planks), but we ended up choosing a product that we were pretty sure happy with. We borrowed our friend Mike's truck and drove to the store to buy our 1,483 square feet of flooring (the whole house, minus bathrooms and laundry room. Oh, and that carport unit we're completely ignoring for the time being).

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It's a funny thing - sometimes it's hard to find the time to write about something when you're busy actually doing it. This has been a crazy week; we worked at the house on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, plus all day Saturday and Sunday. Usually, we've been working all day Saturday and then part of the day - for stuff like clean up, store runs, and so on - on Sunday, but we try not to work too much during the week so we can get our own work done. I hate to say this, but I think we might be getting old. After our long day at the house on Saturday, we've been waking up every Sunday barely able to move. We had been doing some pretty labor intensive work; taking up flooring, tearing down walls, so it felt pretty justified. This weekend though, all I did was assemble cabinets, and Sunday morning my back and knees hurt from kneeling and my hands were swollen from holding the screwdriver all day.



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