Peace and Serenity

One of my favorite things about our new house is the view out our bedroom window in the mornings. The sun rises on the front of the house, so we have no glaring view of the sun, but instead a great view of the tree tops in our yard. In fact, that's ALL we can see besides the blue skies above. It's like staying in a peaceful b&b in Vermont. Then usually my brain really wakes up and realizes I'm in Needham, not Vermont, and that I have to get the heck up and hustle to work! But it's nice while it lasts.

Should water be coming through the ceiling like that?

So what do you do when you see a constant stream of water coming through your kitchen light fixture in your newly constructed house? YOU PANIC. Let me tell you, it screws up your whole day, right from the start (or right after your morning shower). Concern wiggles into every thought you have throughout the day. "I can't believe Vinatieri signed with the Colts!....I hope we don't have to rip up the shower...", "What did the sales guy sell? Does he even know what we do as a business?....I hope we don't have any electrical problems because of this."




Fortunately, my contractor's right hand man has a keen ear and could hear where the leak seemed to be in the shower floor. Even more fortunate, we could get to that corner of the shower from the backside of my closet! One handsaw and 20 minutes later, we found the issue. A wayward nail that deflected off another found it's way into the copper pan in the shower base. Amazing how much havoc such a small thing can do - less than a 1/4 the size of dime! Once it was found though, the plumbers came and fixed the issue and all is better now. Phew! Panic subsiding now.

Hey Fatso!

Okay, so it is embarrassing, but the key to life is turning lemons into lemonade and laughing at yourself every once in awhile. In this spirit, here is what happens when you eat at McDonald's three times in two weeks! Time to hit the gym.....

Are you a MACHO MAN?!

For everyone who has cable TV and FSN to watch the Celtics-Lakers game Monday night, be sure to tune in for the second half of the game. Why you ask? Are Larry and Magic coming back to battle for old times sake? Well, no. However, my father will be performing to YMCA on the Garden floor between the third and fourth quarters. Yes, you read this correctly. My father will be singing and dancing to the Village People's YMCA, while dressed like a construction worker.





























The Village People in 2005!















YMCA!

Finally!

Eight months almost exactly to the day and we are finally getting a chance to get settled into married life. It's been a whirlwind for us since June 11. After our wedding we headed to Hawaii for our honeymoon which rocked. We loved everything about our stay there and would love to go back. Once we landed back on the mainland though, things picked up speed quickly. First, we moved into temporary living in Needham immediately and began demolition of our house (we'll come back to this). Then we sold Irene's condo since we had a place to live. From there the daily grind of a six month renovation project began. Oh yeah, and we also squeezed in trips to Toronto and Hong Kong too. We are finally complete (on time and on budget!) with our renovation and we really couldn't be much happier with the results.

You always wonder how you will go about living in the house when you are in the design stage of a renovation. We're happy to say that we predicted our lifestyle pretty well and are really enjoying the house (and space). Of course we'll see how good we were at predicting family life when our baby boy arrives in May.

Mucho thanks to Joe for helping us through every step of our renovation. Sanity is tough to maintain with stuff like this and you were a huge help!

Anyway, we hope to have a lot to blog in the future. We'll never be able to post as often as the mad-photo-takers from "Michael and the Enzo" but we'll try to post stuff as it comes. And for anyone that knows me, odd stuff seems to visit me more often than most.....


July 12, 2005 - Our house will never be the same....

...have you ever seen Fargo?

...we gave our garden a reverse mohawk...

Prior to the demolition, our contractor found the original building permit of the house, from 1930 in the attic. Pretty cool!

First came the gutting....

...and the de-roofing.... ...at this point in time you begin to realize what you've done and wonder 'WHAT WAS I THINKING?!'

...and then rebuilding begins and you start to feel better....

...then you're done!....kinda...