Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Summertime in Sparta!

My plan was to update my faithful readers with frequent improvements and changes to our new house. Well As you can tell that has not happened but maybe sometime soon. The house is coming along really good. Of course from our last blog we have a new dining room table with China Hutch but also we have added a snazzy living room Suit that has got us set for furniture for awhile. I must say it looks pretty good. The cats have had to live with adjusting to life in the garage while we are not home in attempts to keep the furniture scratch free. So far it has gone pretty good but they are starting to learn to run from us because they know we are coming to lock them in the garage. In other house news, after about 150 bucks in fertilizer and lots of TLC our yard is looking more like a yard. It still has some spots that are barren but the back yard has become the new Home for Heady National Golf Club. Over the last month or so Tara has been freakishly busy with a two week compacted summer class and now in a more conventional month long summer class. Both of these with the goal of finishing next spring. My life tends to vary very little...People are still sick and complain alot. But my home life has brought on a new addiction. Gunbroker.com has brought me and ryan much happiness over the last few weeks. Ever since we got our gun carry permit we have been using the line "now i just need a gun to carry" We both have had our eyes on the Ruger LCP for a few months but after calls to Bass pro, gander mountain, academy and the Outdoor Junction we realized that we were on the trail of the hottest gun on the market. We quickly turned to our friend Gunbroker which is basically an Ebay for guns. The sight had an amazingly large amount of Rugers and then the chase was on. Last Friday we bite the bullet ( "rimshot" where are you at smitty?) and ordered two of the little Jewels. To our delight they came in today and we ventured over to the Outdoor Junction which I highly recommend if you live in the Cookeville/Sparta area. After a quick background check and checking of the father/baby arm bands we were able to take our new loved one home. The ride home to sparta quickly took us down to Hutchings College to try out our new purchace. We were certainly not dissappointed and also took this time to fire off some much cheaper .22 LR rounds. I have attached a few photos I snapped tonight to give you an idea of how small this gun really is. The second picture is of my regular 9mm pistol. I will leave you with these pictures and promise to update our blog with new house pics or to our flicker page.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Dining room table + china cabinet= Backache and possible Hernia

There are certain days in your life that leave identifiable marks on you forever. The inevitable's are your wedding day, the birth of your children and family vacations. Some leave a mark on you for other reasons... some are physical marks. Today was one of those days for myself, Rhino and the Don. As you know from previous blogs and word of mouth we purchased our house the beginning of January. We brought with us only a few articles of furniture to the new house. Over the last few weeks we have been searching for a Sofa/loveseat combo as well as dining room table. Strangely enough i think we have settled on them both but today was the homecoming for our dining room table and china cabinet. Over the weekend we went to D.T. McCall and found a really nice table that was onsale but we had to buy the china cabinet as well. They would not break up the set. So the weekend consisted of measuring from every angle and it was finally decided that the way our dining room was set up that it just wouldn't look right with the china cabinet in the same room as the table because the cabinet was just way to big. With both in the room there was essentially no room to get the table centered under the light and still have room to get chairs in on one side of the table. Well this weekend we learned that this particular set was a close out and they only had 9 sets left. It was going in their sale paper which covered about 4 D.T. McCall stores across middle TN. Flash forward to today where I called the Carthage store and they said they only had one left and it was on the showroom floor. So I had to make a split second decision to drive down to Carthage around 230 this afternoon to get our beloved table. Me and the Don saddle up the red mule and head down to Carthage. As it turns out we get to Carthage and my sales rep gave me some false information and turned out they still had some in the warehouse which turned out to be good because they were still boxed up and made it easier for transport. We arrived at the heady ranch around 530pm and then the real fun began. Table, chairs, lower section of china cabinet were a breeze. Unfortunately, the top part of the hutch must be lined with gold or concrete. To make a long story short the beast weighed about 270lbs. So me, don, and ryan grunt,cry, waddle and finally get this thing in the door with only one minor scratch on the front. As we near the end of set up we discover that we made one fatal flaw in our moving decision. Tucked inside the top part of china cabinet are the glass shelves for the cabinet. With the help of our friendly scale we discovered that each one of these weigh a little over 10lbs. So you do the math 10.5 x 6= ~63 lbs. Needles to say it would have still been a beast but we could have carried it with 65 pounds less weight which would have been nice. So all in all we survived a Don Nose bleed, a dent/scratch on the front and many strained low back muscles. I have attached a few pictures for your viewing pleasures. As you may notice, we ended up putting the china cabinet in our kitchen in a little knook. It ended up looking pretty good since we couldnt fit all in one room.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

New House Pictures













Front yard











Side view of Garage












Side View of House












View of our back yard, You can see the established grass and then the new grass that has been sowed recently.












Front yard from cul-de-sac. Getting some green fuzz.










Another Shot of Front yard.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

House Update...

Hello friends! The last 3 months have been a wild and crazy ride. As Most of you know we closed on our new house in early January and started moving in only minutes after we signed the papers. It definitely was a fun adventure looking at different houses but we new what we were looking for so that process was fairly short. I guess we have hit the market at a pretty good time for us but bad for most other Americans. We have locked ourselves into a really great Interest rate. One that is around 2 points lower than we started looking only a few months earlier. As most of you home owners know...some of the excitement started to fade when we started making our first payments. The cats have made the adjustment well with no major seizures or spasoid episodes. We knew that they were out of their element the first night cause they both slept in our bed for the first time ever and an event that has only happened a few times since then. They will be a year old in the middle of April and still have many crazy kitten moments. There have been multiple small jobs along the way and now we always seem to make a trip to Lowes for many $$$. Our last adventure has been watching grass grow...Yep. One of our Achilles heel with the new house has been our Yard. For the first 2.5 months it has been a large mud slide as we have been slowly been losing our front yard into the cul-de-sac. Finally about 2 weeks ago the day had finally come where we would start watching the seeds develop into little sprouts. We are actually starting to see a good amount of green now and a small part of me is dreading mowing the 1.13 acres that is now the Heady Estates. As most of you know my birthday is next month and I will gladly accept a 50in Zero Turn mower or accept donations to go toward one. hehe.. I accept cash, Money orders or i'm sure with some help from my IT department we could do Direct Deposit. We Promise to upload some pictures of the new crib soon hopefully with a growing yard.