Front Door Facelift

This post has been a long time in the making. As you can see in the photos above, the front doors on our house were in pretty sad shape on the outside, and very golden on the inside. We wanted to do something about that for quite a while, but replacing them would be very expensive and refinishing them would be very unpleasant, so for a long time we did nothing. That changed in March of 2015 when I finally pulled the doors off the hinges and started sanding.

Kitchen Construction Conclusion (Part 9)

Before - This is the photo from the listing when we bought the house.

Our kitchen renovation is finally complete! This post will be a summary of everything we've done to the kitchen since buying the house, along with a cost breakdown of the recent major renovation.

Kitchen Construction, Part 8 - Coating Cabinets

Before

The final step in our kitchen renovation was revamping the cabinets. They were covered in the original 70's lacquer and were showing their age. It didn't help that the cabinets had no handles, so they've been touched by dirty hands for the past ~40 years.

Since the cabinets themselves were in relatively good shape, and we didn't want to spend a fortune, we decided to just paint them and add new hardware. It took quite a bit of doing, but they came out very nicely.

Kitchen Construction, Part 7 - One Wonderful Window

Before

Most of the windows in our house are the original black (why?) aluminum, single pane units from the late 70's, including the kitchen window. They also have no frames or real sills of any kind, making them look pretty sad. However, they still function acceptably as windows, so it's hard to justify replacing them, especially here in temperate SoCal where the insulating properties of double pane windows aren't so important.
Since we were updating everything else in the kitchen, we figured we should go ahead and replace that window now.

Kitchen Construction, Part 6 - Fabulous Flooring

Before

Our kitchen had terrible tile floors. It was a crappy design with a super glossy finish that showed every speck of dirt. It had to go.

Our First Year

Getting ready to ride a water taxi into NY

It is the last day of 2016 and all I can think about is how tomorrow morning I will wake up in my baby's birth-month. My little, tiny, swear I just had her, baby is turning one soon. I have been trying to wrap my brain around it since we entered the end of the year Holiday rush but it just won't sink in, so I woke up inspired to share a little about this first year hoping it would somehow slow time down just a smidgen.

Boobies Please

When I was younger I wasn't exposed to people breastfeeding, I don't think I ever saw anyone breastfeed in person. I knew women did it but my lack of first hand exposure set me up for a big shock when I finally educated myself on the subject while pregnant with little miss.
I took the breastfeeding class offered by Kaiser (3hrs of nothing!), I read the literature, and I even checked out websites so I could get some idea of what I was in for. Unfortunately, NONE of that prepared me even a little bit. All I heard a billion times was how good for my baby it was, which clearly I knew, I was in the freaking class trying to learn HOW not WHY.  They droned on and on saying "breastfeeding shouldn't hurt" and "latch" but without any in-person demonstration the pictures and talks didn't help me understand. I should have hit up YouTube, I'm sure they have helpful tutorials, I just didn't think of it at the time. They also failed to mention anything remotely useful:
1. Tips
2. Problem Solving
3. Funny anecdotes about what it is really like
4. Time commitment (I asked questions about this repeatedly and was only given vague answers)