Making this house a little more home.

We went finally went and dug out all the pictures we had hanging in the old house and found places for them in this house. We also added a few new pictures and I just ordered some of the girls from walgreens to frame and I’ll be done.

The den.

I’m going to  put the pictures of the girls in this corner.

The rug by the door says “Hair of the Dog. Help yourself it’s everywhere” so so true.

The door has been painted white now. I should have taken another pictures but didn’t realize this one still had the old door.

The dinning  room.

The kitchen.

We bought a crate for Kady and N set it up this morning and she loves it! We threw some toys in there and left the door open and she’s gone in there to sleep a number of times and we’ve closed the door a few times and it doesn’t seem to bother her a bit. I’m really glad because we were a little worried how how it would be to get her used to the thing. Ki and Pooh have no idea what is going on with it though or why she would WANT to be in there. LOL

N got a great pic of Ki and Kady the other night, no one was growling or barking, very unusual!!

This is how Ki feels about everything these days.

Kady is sitting on the sofa right now barking at Ki and she is so loud. I think Ki hates her a little more every day. Poor Ki.

The den makeover.

When we moved into this house I hated the color in den. The walls were this horrible drab tan color and the exposed beams were a darker mud brown. As soon as I had permission from our landlord to paint I was ready to do it. I didn’t think about a few things though like how long it was going to take to paint the room and how much attention a new puppy who loves to chew needs. She made the process quite a bit longer! I wanted to paint the beams and trim white and a light blue for the walls. It took 3 days to get it all done and one of those days N was home so he was on Kady duty and I painted from 9-7:30 that night to finish it all up. It looks so much better and I love it!

Before

In process. The blue was not working with that brown at all.

                                                            

After

 

I still need to put the curtains back up and get some pictures on the walls. I’m just so glad the room doesn’t looks like a dungeon anymore! We will be building an entertainment center soon to hide all the cords so Miss Chews a lot can’t get to them. This room is set up very oddly and cords are in strange places.

The girls are all getting along a little bit better now. Ki actually PLAYED with Kady today! We’ve been waiting all week for her to warm up and stop biting at her and it was so cute watching them play. Kady has been so much fun so far but we really had forgotten how much work a puppy takes! Since this is a rental we can’t leave her out loose while we are gone because she gets into everything her little teeth can fit around. We had been locking her in the tub because we have glass sliding doors and she can’t get out but she HATES it because she can’t see what’s going on in the rest of the house. This morning we needed to run to the store so she needed to be put up and I remembered that we have a pack and play in the basement that I’ve had for years because Erin left it at my house when I would keep Maddie. I didn’t see any point in getting rid of it because it was brand new so we decided to hang onto it for a future baby. N went down and pulled it out and she loves the thing! She stayed in it without screaming when we left and we put her in there when it was dinner time because she gets so distracted she won’t go ahead and eat and she was fine and I put her in there one time while she was sleeping and she stayed in there until the dogs barked and woke her up. I did order a crate for her yesterday but this will work great until the crate gets here.

The girls have all established their spots on the sofa. N and I get to sit in the empty spots! lol

She plays hard and sleeps hard. She knows how to go in and out the dog door and it’s so cute to watch. She actually got up from the sofa and went outside to potty all on her own this afternoon so house training is going well.

Puppy

We have a new puppy. We’ve always been very set in our 2 hands 2 dogs rule but it seems that life had other plans for us. At 1am Sun morning I woke up and heard this really loud screaming/crying sound. My bed sits against the window so I looked out and saw something moving around N’s truck in the driveway. We have a lot of neighborhood cats so I was worried that a couple of them were fighting and we have a cat door in the basement and I didn’t want a hurt or scared cat coming in that door. I went down to the basement to put something infront of the door and when I looked out I realized it wasn’t a cat at all but a tiny puppy. I opened the door and said “come here baby” and she ran straight to me still crying. I went back upstairs and told N to turn on the light and he kept asking me if everything was ok and I said “just turn on the light!” he finally did and the look on his face was priceless! She was clean and smelled good so I thought for sure she had just wondered off and had to belong to a neighbor. We have a yahoo group for our neighborhood so I put up a post right away figuring someone would claim her as soon as they got up and saw she was gone. Wrong. At 8:30 N went around to all the houses within puppy walking distance and no one claimed her. N went to walmart and got some poster board and put up signs and we did get a couple of calls telling us that a neighbor had a new puppy but that is our next door neighbor and we knew this wasn’t their dog. Of course by this point we are starting to get attached to her! By last night when we didn’t have any calls we knew we had a new dog. She is an absolute sweetheart and doing really good with house training so far. She now knows how to go in and out the dog door! She’s a very fast learner. The only problem we have is she still doesn’t have a name! We refused to even think about names until last night when we finally decided we were too attached to take her to a shelter. N and I have very different ideas about names so it might take a while for us to agree on anything. For now we call her Puppy.

She LOVES toys and so far the ducks are her favorites.

The girls are not handling the change very well at all. Pooh is starting to tolerate her a little bit more but Ki is just MAD. She is MAD beyond words actually. She will barely even come near us. Everytime  Puppy goes near her she either growls or just walks away. The night that I found Puppy Ki was so upset she was doing her anxious mouth foaming/drooling thing. Pooh doesn’t seem to be nearly as mad at us and she doesn’t run to avoid Puppy anymore. They still won’t even consider playing with her though which is sad because she wants to play SO bad. Hopefully they will warm up to her soon because this is their life now. I still can’t believe we have 3 dogs. Lord help us. LOL

Oh and right now she’s about 5lbs. The vet thinks she will be a small-medium size dog, we are hoping she doesn’t get any bigger than 30ish lbs.

Yard Crashers

Have you seen that show on HGTV? It’s pretty awesome and if I saw that guy at our local Lowes or Home Depot I would drag him back home with me. Some of the things are a little too crazy for me though so I think I’ll just stick to what we did this week while N was off work. I’ve done a little work in the back yard but it’s been so hot that I just can’t hang out there for long so there was still a ton to get done. I think I’ve mentioned before how overgrown most of the beds were in the yard and we have almost more flower bed than actual yard! Now everything looks great. I spent over an hour on Mon evening cutting limbs down and piling them by the road for the Tues brush pick up and then when N got home from work Tues morning he helped me for a couple more hours and we had a huge pile of big stuff to be picked up.

On Wed we went out and did some exploring and had some fun so no yard work that day. As we were driving home a huge storm rolled in and we had to pull off the road for a while and wait it out because it was raining so hard. When we did start driving again we got into downtown and had to turn around because one road was flooded. We couldn’t believe how much water was standing and it wasn’t worth it to us to try and drive through that mess.

Thurs Nicholas wanted to go out and do some more yard work but it was too hot for me to hang. Lucky for N he has 3 years of hot weather training and the heat doesn’t bother him at all anymore and he did a lot of work that afternoon. He ended up pulling about 10 of the big lawn and garden bags full of weeds, roots, limbs, and grass out of the front yard. Then we worked on the back together because a storm came by just south of us and cooled it down a lot outside. Here’s a look at all the bags in the basement, we didn’t want to leave them out in the rain since they are already so full and heavy adding rain would be very bad!

We put in flowers that would be easy to maintain and didn’t need to be watered a ton. I’m really happy with how it all turned out. Nicholas worked really hard to get it done and now I want to show it off!

Before

After

Before

After with 3 Lantana in the middle of the bed. On each side of the lantana there’s a bunch of irises planted.

We already had 3 day lilies in the bed so we added 4 more to fill it out. I’m not sure what those tall things are but Carla next door told us that they bloom and are really pretty. I guess we’ll see.

The back yard before

We pulled out the bricks and put in 3 hydrangas and 3 azaleas

We moved all the rosemary from the front bed to the back to fill in that corner.

Before

After

Back left corner before

After. We planted portulaca in the bird bath because most of you know how I feel about birds and as it was that thing was just another breeding ground for the mosquitos that tried their best to suck me dry the whole time we worked in the yard. My arms and legs are ate up and that’s with using bug spray.

The deck now with all the pretty flowers. The bird bath will look like these hanging baskets soon, it will be so pretty!

We don’t plan to do anything in the yard for a while now!!

Beach Pictures

I’ve been telling the boy that I want to take some pictures of us on the beach for a while. I was hoping to do it when we were down there for R&R but photographers down there are so expensive! We stayed so busy while we were there that we didn’t make it to the beach until the last night that we stayed. Jessica and Marklin went to the beach with us so that Jessica could be our photographer. The pictures turned out really good I thought! I even got some good ones of the boys together.

We were laughing at Marklin’s rolled up jeans.

Doesn’t matter how old they get, they will always be BOYS!

Next time we are down there during the off season we’ll try to get some of the girls with us. They love the beach but it’s a no no to take dogs out on the beach so we just wait until  it’s empty.

Another fun thing that happened while we were there is the little airshow we were able to watch from the condo balcony. I’ve seen these guys out in their planes before but I got some good pictures this time. On holidays and sometimes just in the summer they go out flying to have some fun and show off for the crowds. I did get some great video but this internet is so slow it won’t load for me right now. I hate the slow internet at this house.

Fish On!!

Last Thursday we found out that everyone was heading to Destin for the weekend so we jumped on the bandwagon and packed our bags. It takes exactly 5 hours to get from our driveway to the condo driveway, that is MUCH better than the 9 that it took from Clarksville! We went out fishing on Fri, Sat, and Sun and had a fantastic time. I love being out on the boat bottom fishing. We caught our limit everyday of snapper and even caught a few other fish that were in season.

Our first day of fishing.

View from the best seats on the boat. I love those bean bag chairs!

It was a LONG day on the boat for Marklin. He couldn’t hang. LOL Next time he’ll drink more water.

The girls were a little scared of all the weird looking fish. lol

We never did take a picture of our catch from the second day so this is the third day.