The good, the bad, and the vacation.

Let's start with the bad. Last year, I started to panic about our carpet. I pulled up a corner of it to see what was underneath, and we found a horrible secret lurking underfoot! The previous owners had replaced the carpet, but not the pad. Ugh! It was awful... it was crumbling between my fingers. Every time I vacuumed, I was flabbergasted at how much dust I was picking up... turns out, it was likely the pad coming up through the carpet. A friend of ours who works in flooring guessed that the pad was 30-40 years old. Okay, can we all just take a minute and let out a collective sigh of disgust? Thanks. Let's not talk about it anymore.

Onto the good. Underneath that stinky rotting pad were beautiful hardwood floors I never knew were there! We pulled up a corner, then more, then more.. only to find that the floors were in beautiful shape and just needed a little TLC. We decided this would be our summer project. We moved out for 3 weeks (and moved all the contents of our house into our basement and kitchen) and had a friend re-finish them. What a process that was for him. Thanks Shawn for doing such a great job!

We have now been living on them for about a month and we LOVE them. I'm a little bugged at how hard they are to keep clean, but then I remind myself that's why we wanted hard floors in the first place. One minor hiccup was that when we removed the carpet, the baseboard was then floating above the floors by about a half inch. To save time and energy spent moving it and repainting it and the walls, we pulled it all out and bought pretty new 3.5" baseboards for the rooms with hardwood. Love me some moulding! This was quite the time-consuming and pricey project, but it was worth every penny. It might be my imagination, but J seems less wheezy since we've been back home. This is one happy mama!

Pics are coming. I'm just being lazy about taking them.

During our stay away from home, we (me and J) stayed with my parents while Matt was coaching at a camp. The following week we went to St. George (just the 3 of us!), and then stayed with Matt's mom for the remainder of our days. Our trip to St. George was so fantastic. We have some generous friends that let us stay in their vacation home and we were spoiled by the view, the house, the pool, cable TV (!!!!), and eating out. Here are a few pics of our first "family vacation"!

Matt and J loved watching the lawn mowers on the golf course!

You know you recognize that building... High School Musical 2, y'all!

We spent a lot of time in the pool and J started signing 'fish'.. so cute!

Putting his toys on the shelf. Don't worry, Christie, we moved the breakables!