Stain the cabinet

I got the cabinet sanded down this week and Haley and Brandon came over to look at it last night and loved it! I started on the stain today and it looks so good! Haley asked me to beat up and distress the edges of the drawers so I took a hammer and went to work. It went against everything in me to beat on something I built but I really like the way it looks. It’s not really noticeable unless you know to look for it but it’s a nice touch.

Before stain. We are going to put a piece of board at the bottom so you can’t see the supports and under the cabinet but we are waiting until we cut the 1/4 in plywood for the back and use a strip of that.

After stain.

I have almost as much stain on me as the cabinet has on it.

 

And because I always have to add a few dog pictures. This is what greet me every night when I head to bed. Kady thinks she needs to sleep in the very middle of the bed and Ki always claims the pillow.

Since I disturbed her she needed a good stretch.

And Pooh decided tonight that her new favorite spot to hang out is on top of the crate.

They are so weird.

Kitchen Cabinet

We finished building the cabinet on Monday. We worked on it all day and finally finished the doors a little after 6 right before N went on shift. I had to take pictures of it with my phone but I do have a camera now finally! We decided to take a break completely on Tues since that was his only day off then the cold front hit on Wed and it barely made it out of the 40’s with a strong wind and just dreary all day. I have to sand outside so there was no way I was going to start in all that. Nikki and Steve came into town Thurs afternoon for Steve to have knee surgery this morning so we still haven’t worked on it anymore. The weather should be perfect tomorrow so we’ll work on it then.

I’m hoping we’ll have it finished by this time next week. This thing is sturdy and HEAVY!! Moving it with the drawers in is impossible.

 

Nikki and Steve brought Patches up with them and Kady was in heaven!! At first Patches wasn’t on board with the crazy dog jumping all over her but they became great friends really fast. By the end of the night both dogs were exhausted and Kady slept like a rock and as soon as Patches left this morning around 10 she went in her crate and went straight to sleep! She’s been lazy all day after all her hard playing. Ki and Pooh just stood back and watched them have fun.

Some other pictures of the girls

Kady loves to look out the front door. We think we need to break this though because we don’t want her to scratch up the door or the glass.

It’s almost impossible to get all 3 of them.

And the reason we are always out of food.

He decided to eat cereal.

 

Nicholas worked at the Talladega race track on Thurs while they were practicing or doing time trials or whatever it is they do in the days before the race but he said it was really cool. They have a care center down right beside the track and he stayed in there most of the time. We have tickets to the race on Sun so we figure we’ll go out there for a little while, why not since they were free!  He flew over the house on his way back to the base so we got to see him fly over. That’s pretty cool. His company is working on bringing in new aircraft and they will allow family members to fly along on an aircraft transport so I’m really hoping he’ll get to go pick one of them up from Denver so I can go with him. It would be so awesome to fly back across the mountains and I’ve never had the chance to fly before so fingers crossed! We were hoping Oct would be slower than Sept but so far he’s ended up working a lot of overtime and everyone is stretched thin. He tried to get someone else to work today for him but it wasn’t happening and his boss told him that if he hadn’t known he was tired he would have asked him to work the rest of the weekend and straight into his next shift which would have been 21 days with only 1 day off. Yikes. At least he’ll have Sat and Sun off and will probably end up working on Mon. Maybe Nov will be slower???? I think it will because N needs a break.

I guess that’s about it around here. Oct is flying by just as fast as Sept did and it’s hard to believe we’ve been in Birmingham almost 5 months. We absolutely love it here and we are so thankful for everything in our life. This move was a huge new start for us, new job, new house, new dog, new life together and we are blessed.

Tool Time

I bought a table saw! It was an exciting day for me! A girl that lives in our neighborhood read my blog and saw the projects that I have worked on and asked up to build a cabinet for her kitchen that they are remodeling. After meeting with her and seeing what we had in mind I knew we would be able to get it done and I was excited. On Sat Haley and I went up to Cullman, AL  to Southern Accents and they had some of the coolest stuff! I knew they had a lot of reclaimed wood but I thought it was all off site in a huge gym so we were surprised to see they have a wood shop on site and a bunch of wood in the back. The owner was out at the gym with other customers so we had to wait for him to get back to the store to give us prices and cut the wood down so it would fit in my car. We got a fantastic deal on the wood for the face of the cabinet because Haley wanted rough reclaimed wood. The rest of the frame we built with plywood to save money and make sure it was very sturdy.

The new toy. It matches my miter saw.


Three drawers on each side and doors in the middle.

The wood needs to be cleaned up but it’s really pretty. I can’t wait to see if finished!


And because it’s not a blog post without some dog pictures.
Big, Medium, Small

Kady Bell

She was sleeping with her tongue out like this. I had to take a pic of it.


My camera broke so I’m having to take all the pictures with my phone. I’ll be buying a new camera SOON because I hate not having one!

Busy around here…

I’m not sure where this month went! We’ve been busy but it’s just flown by! Nicholas has been working a lot and went to FL for a week of training so I’ve been in GA visiting everyone. It seems like it’s been forever since I was home but it was around the middle of June so not that long. This is the first big trip for Kady and she’s done really good the whole time. I was worried about the ride so I put her in her crate and she hollered at me for the first 10 mins then slept the whole rest of the trip. I took her to the shop with me 2 full days and she did great up there and slept most of the time. Since Sunday she’s lost 7 of her front teeth and the adult teeth are growing in SO fast! I can’t believe how quickly they’ve come in. I think that’s one reason she was so tired on Mon and Tues, growing teeth is hard work!

We are trying to update mama’s website for her shop so I’ve been busy doing research for the best way to change everything around and add a shopping cart. I finally have things going in the right direction so I’ll be updating everything more often.

For now I’ll leave you with a picture of the last dog bed I made and our long legged baby.

 

SOLD!!

I went up to Clarksville on Thurs afternoon for closing bright and early on Friday. All the papers are signed and we are no longer home owners. It’s very nice! For the first time in almost 7 years we don’t have to worry about being solely responsible for a house! It’s really nice to be able to call the landlord when things need to be fixed around the house and know that if it’s something we can’t take care of he’ll have a repair person out to look at it within a very short amount of time. I think we’ll stick to renting for a while. In this economy buying a house isn’t the “investment” it was years ago and I don’t need the stress of waiting for a house to sell again anytime soon.

While I was gone Nicholas sent me this picture of Kady.

She apparently decided that the deck was feeling a little hard and she wanted a bed out there to lay on. N walked in there because he heard the “sssss   ssssss  ssssss” of it sliding across the floor in the kitchen. lol She is a smart girl. Since we know she’s going to get big I’ve been working to teach her to sit before I feed her and I won’t let her eat until I say she can and she’s been very good at that the last few feedings. I don’t want her to keep rushing to the bowl and knocking the food all over the place when we try to put it down. Ki and Pooh say they are glad they aren’t puppies anymore and don’t have to learn all these crazy manners we are teaching Kady like Sit! haha Spoiled mutts. They are all keeping us very entertained that’s for sure. Pooh is finally running around and playing a lot more with Kady now. I really think it’s because she realized how big Kady is getting and she wants to put her in her place now! However that’s causing fights between Ki and Pooh because as much as Ki doesn’t really like Kady either she doesn’t want Pooh to be dominate.

We have had sooooooo much rain in the last 2 days. Mainly today but it rained on and off all day Sun. The airport a few miles from us is reporting around 7 inches of rain today. There’s a lot of flooding in all of Birmingham and a lot of people without power. We’ve been lucky so far and it’s flickered a number of times but keeps coming back on. N is working tonight and I told him that if it goes off and stays off we’re packing it up and going to stay with him at the base. He didn’t even bother wearing his flight suit to work when he left the house. He took it with him so he could change when the rain moves out but he figured he might as well be comfy for most of the night. Kady doesn’t know what to think about all the rain, she has probably poked her head out the dog door 100 times today she wants to go out so bad. I’m not sure if Pooh as even peed all day. They can’t stand to be wet and I can’t blame them, we’ve had a steady medium to heavy rain the majority of the day.  We really needed it though so I’m not complaining, I just wish there had been a few breaks for the girls to all go out and potty. Now I wish we could send this rain over to TX to help with all the horrible fires they are dealing with right now. So many homes have been lost and it breaks my heart.

We bought a new bed yesterday. We’ve been waiting until the papers were signed on the house to go buy one. We have hated that old bed for a while now. We bought it right before N deployed the second time but it was obviously horrible quality and had a big sag in the middle in no time. I have a number of friends with temperpedic beds and I’ve always liked the feel of memory foam. Mari has one and I’ve slept on it a few times at her house and loved it. We went in there at 1 and the bed was delivered by 4 yesterday! Pretty fast service. And since it is Labor Day weekend we got 2 free pillows since they can’t lower the prices on the Temperpedic brand mattresses. I slept with the new pillow last night and really liked it a lot. It will be so nice to sleep comfortably and not wake up with my lower back and hips aching in the morning. The bed is a few inches shorter than our old one so now the dogs (and I mean Ki because she’s the only one that won’t walk back down the steps but Kady will be to long and big to do that soon! lol) won’t have as far to jump down off the bed. We were worried about them jumping onto the slick hardwood but Ki almost always makes sure to jump down on my side where the rug is with the grippy pad under it so she doesn’t slide.

That’s about all that’s going on around here. I don’t update as often because I really don’t have too much to say. This will be a very busy month for N because he has a week of training in FL for the new company on top of working a few extra days for another pilot ( just looked at the calendar and I think he’ll only have 4 days off this month!) . We keep trying to plan a few days home but it never fails that something comes up that keeps us from being able to do it. I’m hoping after everything calms down and we get into Oct we’ll be able to come home during his week off. All these aircraft shuttles back and forth to TX  really kept our schedule messed up in Aug because things were always so last minute. I’ll probably come home for a few days while he’s either working or in FL. I have to make the drive for the first time with Kady sooner or later and I haven’t been home since June and didn’t have much time to visit at all on that short trip.

Dog Beds and Sewing

Kady needed a bed for her crate and they are so expensive to buy from the store and I wanted particular colors and I wanted it to fit into her crate perfectly. I looked around on Etsy.com to see what kind of beds I could find on there and decided it would be really easy to make a couple so I headed to Fabric.com after looking around at the Joanns and Hobby Lobby here in town. I loved these 3 sets of fabric and I could make a bed for each dog. I started sewing Sun afternoon and got 2 of them made. I had already made 1 bed last week with some fabric I had in the house from the curtains I had made in the old house. The fabric is really thin though so I made sure to buy upholstery grade fabric for the new beds.

I used the zig zag fabric for Kady’s crate and she love her new fluffy bed. I used a water proof mattress pad sewn into the top of the bed incase she has an accident it won’t mess up the padding.

 

She’s getting so long and gangly. lol We’ll still be able to use this crate for a while but we might have to upgrade when she’s grown so she still has plenty of room. She loves to go in there and sleep during the day so we leave the door open all the time. And when this dog sleeps, she sleeps HARD!

I made the pink bed with dogs on it for Pooh. N had laughed at me and said that Pooh was never going to sleep on a bed when she could sleep on the sofa but she’s actually slept on it a good bit already so N had to eat his works! LOL She even went in Kady’s crate and slept for 2 hours the other night, that shocked us! Ki goes in there and sleeps a lot and that’s one reason I decided to make the beds for the other girls.

The top and bottom piece all cut out. How adorable is that fabric!

Ki had to break it in too.

While Pooh went and got on Ki’s bed.

Kady’s favorite place to sleep is still in the big bed though! Usually around 8 or 9 if we don’t see her in her crate we can find her in the bed on a pillow. She loves having the stairs so she can walk on up!

Today our neighbor brought their puppy over for a little play date and they had so much fun together. They have played before but Kady has grown a good bit since then so now she knows she’s bigger than Inu, she will throw herself on the grown and let him climb all over here. It was so funny. By 7:30 she had gone and got in the bed and left her little friend all alone! lol

 

We’ve had a boring week off. N was suppose to go to TX again to pick up an aircraft so we didn’t make any weekend plans and then he got a text at 10:30 the night before a 6:30am flight saying not to get on a plane because the aircraft wasn’t ready. Thank God he got that text otherwise he would have just been sitting in TX doing nothing and then they would have sent him back home and nothing would have been accomplished. Now they are planning to send him back out there sometime this week which messes up my plans for going to TN for closing. I was planning to leave the dogs at home and now I have to take them. I’m praying Kady does ok on the 4 hour drive. Yikes. The good new though is we are closing on the house either Wed or Fri, the bank wanted to move the closing up but they were waiting on a piece of paperwork. I don’t care as long as we get the papers signed this week! The buyers have already moved into the house, at least the wife has. Sharon told me that they have a St. Bernard puppy and the puppy is terrified of Hailey because she keeps barking at her and trying to dig under the fence. My first thought was “hm that dog door isn’t going to be big enough for long!”.

Lazy week

Since N got home from TX on Tues we’ve been pretty lazy. N has played a lot of video games and working out and I’ve been reading and going to the gym. Kady is keeping us entertained with all her silliness and Ki and Pooh still act like they hate her most of the time. One day they will be friends, I hope. LOL She’s still doing GREAT with house training. She hasn’t gone in the house in over a week now, hopefully that will continue when we are in a house without a dog door for her to go out of whenever the urge hits. She figured out the steps in the night stand last night! We were getting ready for bed and we didn’t see her, I though N had locked her outside so I went to check while he walked to the bedroom. He said “um come here, I found her” and when I walked into the room she was curled up one the pillow looking at us like “it’s late and I’m tired!” She went up the steps again this morning so Ki’s days of hiding from her on the bed are over! lol Poor baby. We had our neighbors Brian and Jamie over Fri night, they have a puppy that is a Pomeranian something mix, he’s the color of a cattle dog but the size of Barky with the long hair. He and Kady played SO hard for a solid 3 hours. When they left she laid down and passed out. LOL She got me up at 3 to go potty and before I even had the door closed and locked she was back in the bedroom whining to get back in bed (this was before she figured out the steps) then she got up at 7 when she heard N up and wanted to go eat, then she got back in bed and slept til 10! That is super late for her! Usually 8 is about the latest you can keep her in bed before she is just walking all over my head and chewing my hair.

Look at that face!

This one makes me giggle, just imagine Ki screaming “MOOOMMMM she’s BITING ME”.

No idea why Ki decided to go in the crate but Kady was barking at her.

This picture is so weird to me!

Pooh likes to guard her favorite toys so Kady can’t play with them. She flip flops between Hotdog and Hedge hog as her babies.

Maybe one day we’ll be able to get a picture of all 3 of them together!