Our blogging pace is fairly indicative of our current renovation pace. Lately we have wrapped up a few small projects, none of which have been photo worthy and without photos what is the point of blogging?

Yesterday we spent the entire first half of the day in our front lawn picking weeds which resulted in a large garbage bag full of weeds and significant sunburns. Levi called our weed picking community building, the neighbors driving by where noticeably rubbernecking to check out the new neighbors, we gave lots of waves, two neighbors came to give plants to us, two neighbors offered their trashcan space to us, and another neighbor brought us over tools that would assist us in better removing our weeds. We love our neighborhood!

Recently we discovered Yuma's only wine cellar, a tiny space with an electric welcoming environment. Every Thursday and Friday they have a rotating wine tasting, we enjoyed ourselves so much we plan to make this a once or twice a month occurrence. We also found a fantastic bar with regular live music and $2 anything drinks and a place that offers cigar tastings every Friday. These sort of gems in Yuma are difficult to find but the discovery process has been quite enjoyable!

Radioactive Pool

Our first few months we have had interior remodel tunnel vision, before we knew it the weeds grew waist high, our grass was well not grass at all, and we did the bare minimum to keep our pool sound during this winter non-swimming season. Last week we had many consecutive warm days in the mid nineties and overnight our apparently unbalanced pool went from swim ready to toxic! We clearly do not know what we're doing. We've enlisted the services of a local pool company that drained and cleaned our pool and will be maintaining it from now on. While to pool was empty Levi tried out his hand repair skills and patched a chip in the step, he did such a great job you can't even see the patch in the photo.

Jen's grand plans for landscaping the backyard were foiled by the consequences of last nights poor decision making. A wild wind storm hit Yuma yesterday, the chilly winds were a welcome escape from the previous sweltering heat so Jen opened all the screened windows to let the cool air in. This morning when we woke up there was a thick layer of sand over everything in our main living area, it took two sweep jobs and again twice over with the swiffer wet jet to get us back to clean.

Happy Belated St. Patty's Day

Our previous St Patty's Day was spent in Thailand drinking coronas of all drinks, and Levi's St. Patty's day before that was spent in Hong Kong with our good friend Kirt. We were tempted to keep the international celebration a tradition by grabbing a drink across the border but Levi as a Marine isn't aloud to cross into Mexico without first going through a bunch of red tape. Alas we drank giant green beers in our festive green shirts then grabbed some minty green icecream - aren't we cute.

The guests and festivities have gone and remodel has resumed but at a much slower pace. We currently are struggling with a case of remodel ADD, working just a little bit on each project. Jen's big focus has been getting our yard and pool in shape, we are already experiencing 90 degree weather so our window for outdoor labor is narrowing.

Stay tuned for our completed kitchen photos and our backyard landscape in progress.

Yuma Air Show

s




The Air Show and the county fair tie for Yuma's most exciting events or so we hear. The Air Show was a lazy day of sitting in our camp chairs reading our books in between shows of dazzling air tricks done by civilian planes in the air. We watched 5 guys parachute from an airplane high in the sky and land right in the middle of the crowd, we saw a small plane fly up into the air, cut the engine and tumble artfully back toward the ground before turning on the engine and flying again, we saw a harrier plane (think about the end scene of True Lies when Arnold Schwarzenegger steals the harrier to save his daughter dangling on a crane in NY City) hover 50 feet about the crowd and do a full 360 turn. The big finale was a 10 minute reenactment of the Pearl Harbor bombing followed by a 2 mile long wall of fire. It was the largest display of testosterone I've ever seen!

Mexico, margaritas & yard work

Mexico is just a short 15 minute jaunt from our door to it's border crossing. Aunt Ann, Mom and me crossed, shopped mexican handicrafts, ate an authentic dinner, drank way too strong margaritas, bought super super cheap liquor to stock our bar at home and came back home. During Mom and Aunt Ann's visit we did a lot of just relaxing by the pool and hanging out. Mom also picked all of our weeds all around our house and Levi removed our rose bushes, it's a start!

Yuma Camel Farm

This was actually much better than we expected! It was clean, inexpensive, lots of animals including a ZEE-DONK (its exactly what it sounds like)! AND you could feed the animals for just one dollar - fun! This was intended to be a good clean family outing for the one overlapping day of my sisters and my mom's visit however two camels decided to do some noisy procreating for our ENTIRE visit. When this sort of thing is spotted there is usually some immature comments, chuckles and then you move on but in this case the chewbaca sounding noises coming from the female camel was so loud and non-stop it was unescapable in all parts of the park, I have graciously added a photo to complete this visual.

More....

More photos from our Lake Martinez outing

Catching Up!

I broke down and just bought a new camera cord to keep the blog alive. Now we have photos and a whole month to catch up on. Below are photos of our new rug in the living room (need wall art advice), Adrian, Darlene and Rosellie got into the pool on their first evening here, it was freezing but that didn't stop Adrian from enjoying himself. We drove out to Lake Martinez for an afternoon of boating, along the way we spotted wild donkeys in the desert.

We have had a whirlwind couple of weeks! Jen's family came to visit. Our first set of visitors were her sister Darlene, brother in law Jose, nephew Adrian and Jose's sister Roselie, they drove down from L.A. after visiting Jose's family. Our second set of visitors were Jen's mom Shari and aunt Ann who incorporated Yuma as a stop in their sister's road trip adventure which also included Vegas, Sedona, and Scottsdale.

Our days included a trip to Yuma's very own camel farm, boating on Lake Martinez and out into the Colorado river, a day trip across the border into Mexico for handicrafts and potent margaritas, sun bathing and even a few dips in our freezing pool! I have so many great photos to share but once again our camera cord has gone missing. In our down time Jen's mom insisted on picking our weeds and over the course of her visit she picked ALL of our weeds, and when I say ALL I mean about 4 garbage bags full! Thanks mom!

Our guests have been gone for 2 days now but after our 2 week break from remodel it's been difficult to pick it up again. Our goals for the immediate future are to wrap up the kitchen, buy a kitchen table, install the chandelier, finish painting the house and take measures to ensure all of mom's weeds don't come back.

Photos to come soon (hopefully).

Ahhh - Chairs!

So far this is Jen's favorite purchase. We LOOOOVE these chairs! Most of our shopping hours are allotted for hardware stores, however Jen just happened to stop into Marshall's where she found these fantastic dining chairs for half their retail price. They had just these four, only in this fabric which happens to be a perfect match for our color scheme and are comfortable enough to double as additional guest seating when we have people over. We're thinking these would look sharp around a deep espresso brown table with our capiz chandlier just above.

Plumber Jen

Considering our home was a foreclosure it was in great shape however the previous owners took everything they could possibly detach from the home, like shower heads, kitchen sink pipes, disposal, sink drains, etc. This left us either with a plumbing/electrical project to tackle or a big plumbers bill to swallow.

Typically Jen is of the mind set that no remodel project is too large, however this one was quite intimidating. We needed to install the sink drain on one side of the sink, mount the disposal on the other side, wire the disposal, connect the dishwasher to the discharge on the disposal, connect the faucet and recreate the entire plumb drain system beneath the sink. We have before, during and photos posted here in that order.

Jen is quite proud of herself, Levi is equally impressed, but only because the project seems intimidating, not because it is overly difficult. With the help of Joe & Salina's 123 home improvement book, instructions and a bit of online research we were able to get through this project with out incident. You too can do your own plumbing and add these fun new words to your vocabulary - flange, tailpipe, P Trap and channel lock :)