Christmas 2008 Vancouver Island

Nate and I on our xmas morning walk along the beach. You can tell we just rolled out of bed!

My brother the giant wearing my grams apron while making whipped cream

Dinner table...hehe Sam at the kids table in the back..I guess I am old enough to be at the grown up table this year :-)

Xmas 2008 at my Grams house

That is a whole lot of the Smith clan!!

My gram had the ultimate charlie brown Christmas tree. I think she plucked it from the side of the road at the last minute and Nate and I could only fit about 10 ornaments on it...and that was probably 5 too many! ha ha

A seagull enjoying xmas morning

Snow on the beach in front of my grams house

Tree island, directly across from my grams house. Nate and I took the kayaks over there last summer

The coastal range got a huge dump of snow. I grew up with this awesome view!

View off my grams deck

The tide had come up and washed away the snow and was on its way back out

My grams house covered in snow, more than they have had in a long time!!

snow, snow go away....and stay away!!

Nate and I went snow shoeing around town tonight...They really have no snow plows since it rarely snows here in Portland, so you can see the condition of the roads in the background. We helped pull/push about 4 people just in our trek up to Mt Tabor and one of them was the tow truck :-) The roads have been really bad and we got about another 10 inches along with some freezing rain so people are getting stuck left and right around here. Good thing we have my trusty old 4 wheel drive jeep...it has been doing great! They say this is the most snow they have had since the 60's here!!

Picture of the snow drifts of our neighbours...we dug her out today
Bethany making snow angels and no longer believing me when I told her before she moved here that "We don't really get snow in Portland" ha ha oops... I think she brought this weather from Michigan though!

I added these last two pics because just a week ago I put up some pictures I had taken of the beach in our bathroom from being at the coast and thinking it had been a really warm November.....ha!!
Hopefully we will be able to make it up to the Ferry in Port Angeles to get to my see my family for Xmas!!

snow day

We woke up to a snow day today...only a few inches but it rarely snows down here in the valley so it basically shuts everything down. Also, don't get me started on the drivers here!! Especially that dumb lady pulling her toddler on a sled behind her car...while other cars were driving behind her!!

Molly loved the snow, she kept running along and dragging her nose in it to pick up some in her mouth. You can see it on her nose below.

The fountain at the college across the street from our house looked cool all frozen

I let the cats out to see the snow but they decided to crawl around the porch instead of having walk through it :-)
We got a cool rain chain for xmas so we hung it up....it will be good for when the snow melts

Bella was not impressed with the snow :-)

more back room updates

I decided to use the same chocolate paint (called Belgium sweet) for the back room that we used in the upper wall in our bathroom. Not only does it look warm and inviting for our back door area but we also had leftovers from the bathroom makeover

(please excuse the windows, I have not scraped the paint off the glass yet)

I actually found this cute light cheap at Target and I love the way it looks lit up at night

We still have to build trim around the doors and wire the light into the ceiling permanently

As you can see I still have some patching to do along the base and then figure out flooring

We are thinking about doing some type of plank flooring since the back stairs and then basement are a combination of sub flooring and cement. We found this neat looking vinyl plank flooring that resembles engineered wood planks pretty good. It would be easy to lay out and keep clean for the laundry area and bathroom down there too.. check out a sample of the type:

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&productId=100522792&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&cm_sp=BazVoice-_-RLP-_-100522792-_-x
Here is a few pics of the flooring in rooms....I think it looks like pergo really...I saw it in person and they did a great job of making it look like real wood with grain textures and all! What do you all think?

Projects in the works...

This is a picture of our back door looking from the kitchen stairs
The stairs down to the basement

To the left is where I took down the nasty closet (and killed like 100 spiders with the shop vac). You can see into our kitchen from here

So basically we had yet to touch the basement and the back room and stairs leading down to the basement from the kitchen. Today I tore down the gross old shelf and painted the window trims and will be patching up the missing wood pieces and then trying to pick a light color to paint in there to light up the area. We will then be picking out some type of flooring...but I will keep you in suspense until we do it so I can take pictures of it.

Here is a quick sneak peak at the basement. This picture is actually the closet in the bedroom. We have framed out a bedroom and the shelving area so far, and still have the bathroom and laundry room to go and then mud and sand and paint it all! ha!

It's hard to see everything but I will update as we progress. Above you can see where we will be chipping out some of the brick to put in an egress window to be bale to get out of basement in case of emergency.

insomnia....and cookies

Since I am having trouble sleeping, and woke up at 4am this morning and couldn't sleep yet again. If anyone has any good tips to fall asleep and stay asleep, I would really appreciate them. I have already tried a few things, chamomile tea sometimes helps but my major problem is that as soon as I wake up, be it a noise or something, I simply cannot fall back asleep!

I decided to get a jump on making the holiday cookies and chocolate dipped pretzels we are making for gifts to our neighbours etc..

I forgot to take a picture of all the dark chocolate pretzels but you can see the white chocolate covered ones with candy cane crunch pieces on top.

I made sugar cookies to decorate...I wasn't paying attention and burnt the first batch but managed to salvage the next batch

Decorated cookies