Another Finished Project!

This week we decided to remodel our fire place. I found some ideas in magazines, used my imagination and drew up the plans for our perfect fire place. After that Jake got to work and made my idea come to life and it is beautiful!

The "before" picture. And in case you're thinking "Why remodel? That's a beautiful fire place!" Let me show you some up-close pictures.

As you can see it's not that pretty.

Covered in paint, crayon, and whatever else was on it, not to mention some chips in the brick that wasn't so pretty.

This is a little more than half finished. We painted the brick step and what surrounds the fire place, covered the bottom in wood, added to the mantel piece, and put sheet rock on the top. Jake does a wonderful job!The finished project!

And the final look...still missing some decor but that's pretty much it. It looks better up-close and personal so come over and take a look! We love visitors!

CRUISE!!

Jake's 5th, Our 2nd, Dad and Cece's 3rd, and our family's FIRST CRUISE! And we had a BLAST! On Saturday, Jan. 24 we left the hotel in LA and went down to the port to board the big cruise ship. This picture is us waiting for dad to catch up from parking the car and as William would say "We're off!"This is a picture of our cruise ship when we were in Mazatlan, Mexico.
Two Handsome boys who are happy to be on the cruise ship and in 80 degree weather!
Mason is SO ready for this vacation. Our first port Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We didn't do much here except shop because lucky us we are coming back in June to stay for a week!! Can't wait!

The famous arch (in the first Pirates of the Carribian movie)

Another view. We got lot's of beautiful pictures because we took off durning sunset.
Still Cabo. The ship above my head is a pirate ship and the beach to the right is Lover's Beach.
A pretty picture of a Cathedral in Puerto Vallerta, which was my favortie place even though we didn't get many pictures. Not that I'm not grateful to be going back to Cabo, I wish we were going to Puerto Vallerta. I wish we could have seen more. I really want to live there, I loved it.And last but not least the ship Jake wishes he would have been on....
Yay for Cruising! We are so lucky that we got to enjoy this awesome vacation with our family. As soon as I can figure out how I will put the videos we took on here too so check back soon!

Kitchen Update

For Christmas we were very lucky to get a new kitchen sink and 2 new faucets (I guess everyone realized how bad our old one was). We installed the sink and a faucet and took the other faucet back and bought kitchen hardwear. We also got new light fixtures and under-cabinet lighting. We're not done yet but I had to show off how good it looks with all the new stuff.

Money, money, Money!

Since August of 2007 (when we got married) we have been...ok, mostly Jake has been....collecting change in a 3 litter bottle. We are proud to say that we finally filled it to the top (or pretty close). After dumping it out and then sorting for maybe 20 min and then counting for about 45 min and then rolling for another 30 min we are glad to say we are a whole $326.47 richer! I took some pictures but it turns out they were all fuzzy (and really not that interesting) so I decided not to post them.

Gingerbread House

It's finally FINISHED!! As some of you know the Cohoon family had a Gingerbread House building competition. It was between Jake and me, Mike and Meagan, and Bobby and Emily. The deadline was Christmas Day and we had some of the neighbors come over and judge, that way they wouldn't know which was which. Jake and I got the "Most Edible" prize. Bobby and Emily got "Most Original" and Mike and Meagan won "Grand Prize"!

Front View

Back/Top View (that's a lake on the side)

Close-up of Top Side View

Our idea. It's a building somewhere in Russia.

Mike and Meagan's Gingerbread House. I haven't got any pictures of Bobby and Emily's but I will soon.

Family Time

This is our lovely Christmas Tree. You can't see the ornaments very well but that's ok, and don't worry we now have an angel on top.

On Wednesday Jake and I had my Dad, Cece, Mandy, William, and Mason over for dinner (Kayla had YW and got to go to temple square instead - we missed her). After dinner we were all just hanging out and I realized I don't get to see my siblings that often which is why I don't have many pictures of them and they get bigger every time I see them! William has a loose tooth and Mason can rollover now! Oh, and Mandy's taller than me (no fair!). Anyway, I got the camera out and here are some of the moments I captured:William Reading Cute little Mason Just Chillin'Mommy and MasonMandyAnd last but not least, Nala (our dog-for those of you who don't know....just kidding aunt suzette)

Kitchen

So my last post stated how messy the kitchen was and how I couldn't stand it. It was true. Not even 24 hours after that post I went crazy and cleaned the whole kitchen, cabinet doors or not. I organized my cupboards, cleaned out the fridge, swept, mopped, everything. It stayed clean the next day and then the day after that got messy again because we started painting some more. It's ok though because now it's clean again and the cabinets are all painted. We still need to paint the walls but I am so happy to have the cabinets done I had to put up some pictures.Jake's fabulous idea for painting the doors without having to put news paper everywhere. He put things under them (by things i mean boxes of cake or pasta, Tupperware, tool boxes, whatever he could find really. So we had a row of doors in our kitchen. It worked out pretty good and I only had to scape a little paint off the floor. TA DA!! CLOSE-UP (It's a little discolored in the picture)