New Floors: Day 3 (and the last day)

Our floors are now done! What a great feeling it is too. We couldn't be any happier with how they turned out, everything looks just great. As of tomorrow we are able to move around as normal (including the dogs who are the ones really that aren't allowed to be out there due to the grout drying). And so will the cleaning effort begin. It is going to take a good chunk of time to get back to normal but it was worth it. In addition to the inside of the house being worked on, Ben has begun working on fixing the landscaping on the outside. He started to re-work the island in the front yard and that is already looking 20 times better. We will have to get some pictures of that up when it is completed as well.

Below are some pictures of the tile as completed, we still don't have any of our stuff back out and hopefully the lighting is good enough to get at least an idea.

Hope all is well.

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

New Floors: Day 2

We now have tile all in the house! However, we will be followed by day 3 tomorrow. So far we are beyond happy with how it looks, they have done such an incredible job. Tomorrow is going to be putting in the borders in a couple areas and then doing the grout. They told us today that they will be done tomorrow. We were only able to take a couple of pictures due to not being able to walk on it and are in a "lock down" in the bedroom till tomorrow morning. Here are the ones that we were able to take this evening from our room. Hopefully they show up a bit.

Till tomorrow...

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

New Floors: Day 1

The day has finally come for our floors to be replaced! As most of you know we couldn't be any more excited. The installers got here around 8 this morning and started with the ripping up of the carpet and then getting up the old tile that we had in the foyer, kitchen, and dining room. We thought we would take some pictures through the week as things progress...so as of lunch time on Day 1 we are posting the current status. We will try and take more later today and then throughout the week as things progress as well. Can't wait till it is complete.

We hope that everyone had a wonderful Holiday!! We had a lovely time spending it with our immediate families. We have our final Holiday party tonight at mom's annual cookie party- Yummy!!

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle

Happy Holidays..

Before we get too busy with the upcoming Christmas Holiday we wanted to make sure we were able to wish you all a wonderful Holiday and Happy New Year.

We hope that this time of the year finds everyone well and we look ahead to another great year with such wonderful family. We feel truly blessed to have each other and the extended family that we have each gained.

Thank you everyone for your support and love!

Best wishes always, we love you all!

Ben and Gabrielle

Alas, floors will be coming!

It looks like we are good to go with the flooring!! We are both extremely excited for it as we are slightly tired of looking at the carpet. We are getting all the carpet removed from the halls, living room, and family room. Then we are also removing the current tile in the dining room, kitchen, and foyer and replacing that with the new tile. After much thought (and I mean A LOT) we have decided to go with the third picture from our last post. It should really fit in the house nicely. I have gone ahead and put in another picture of what it looks like with more than one tile (though it is still really hard to get a good picture to show-its the darker of the two showing). We are scheduled to have the installers start on the 28th of this month and they should be done that week!

So as can be imagined Merry Christmas to us! We were looking forward to decorating the house for the holidays, however, since the floors are going to be done immediately after, we are not going to put anything up....and will most likely actually start to move stuff down and out of the affected rooms. So next year we will get the house in the spirit.

We have also begun fixing the landscaping outside, but that is going to take us a bit, we need to move a little past the tiles and then the Holidays. We have an idea of what we want to do and have some of the materials so we can start but probably won't finish till after the new year.

So that seems to be about it for now. We hope this finds you each well.

Love and miss you all,
Ben and Gabrielle

Happy Thanksgiving and happy decorating...

We hope that each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We are very sorry we couldn't make it up to North Carolina to spend it with some of you, but had a wonderful time hosting our first married Thanksgiving in our house for those local family members on both sides of the family. We really enjoyed it and hope that this is a new tradition for us to start.

Hosting Thanksgiving helped kick us in a bit of gear of getting things on our To-Do list done. We finally finished our main painting work!! All doors, baseboards and walls are now complete. The one thing we have left is one of the extra rooms...but that is to come.

This weekend has also allowed us to start looking at new flooring for the house! We can't explain how excited we are to get this done, we are ready for the carpet to be removed as soon as possible. We think we have it down to two tiles, both pretty similar to each other yet, one is slightly darker then the other. We also did decide on the accent piece we want on some corners of the tiles. So hopefully soon enough we can get this decided on and get them in here to do this. So you can see what we are looking at, we have included a couple pictures of what we are looking at. The first picture shows the little square of our "design" we are going to add... then the second picture shows the two tiles we are debating between on the floor (pay no mind to the other tile under our design).Third picture is a close up of the darker tile and then the fourth one is the close up of the lighter one.

So that is about it for now. We are still recovering from our huge Thanksgiving dinner and all the leftovers we are still eating through!

Hope all is well with everyone and we will be in touch soon!

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Busy Bees...

So we are definitely keeping ourselves quite busy over here. Work has been crazy for us both, Ben was practically gone all of October traveling for work, and even already one week so far. I have been slammed with work, that has rarely had me coming home to relax but rather continue working. While it has caused some hectic schedules and tired days, we are still both extremely grateful for having work.

In between all this, we are still really trying to get things taken care of with the house. I am going to include a couple pictures of what we have done so far...always a work in progress. One of the biggest things is we sold the pool table. We are going to be re-doing our floors early in the next year (it is way overdue) and eventually the pool table was going to have to move to do so. For those of you who have never dealt with one before, basically it isn't something you want to just move around to get out of your way like you can with a table or chairs. It takes a while to take down and even longer to put back up. We didn't really use it much so we figured why not. It was amazing, we put it up for sale on Craigslist on Saturday at 9 am and had an email at 10 am...showed it at 2 and it was sold! So now we have to start figuring out what to do with all that extra space (though we have some ideas).

We have also gotten new furniture for our family room (thanks Aunt Diane & Uncle Russell!). It is a beautiful couch and loveseat that match the house perfectly. In that room we also put up some more art to help with our large walls. More is to come here.

Painting is almost done, I know we have to be the absolute two slowest painters out there. But we are down to just two doors and they are the closet ones. We are really hoping to get it taken care of this weekend.

Well, that is a quick update of what we have been doing. More to come again and soon, promise!

We hope everyone is doing well.

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Oops!

Our apologies!! We aren't keeping up with our end of the blog :) Things have just been all over the place and there isn't a whole bunch to update at this time. We will definitely have more to update soon though!

So please stay tuned, we promise to write more soon.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween. We had over 135 kids!! It was great, the goodie bags were a hit and the kids looked absolutely adorable! We carved Gabrielle's first pumpkin and it looked great, however, it died before Halloween. Oh well we learned for next year :)

Well, that is all for now.

Talk soon.

Love always,
Ben and Gabrielle

We have slacked...

There is no excuse, we have just been slacking a bit with this. Though you can trust us when we say there isn't much you are missing!

Gabrielle has been very busy at work. Her new role has started, in addition to her starting up her first of two projects at work for her Green Belt (Six Sigma), and then she is, starting this week, co-teaching a certification class for her field. The next couple months are probably going to be rather hectic for her.

Ben's work has also been rather crazy. He has recently started traveling again and after a week long trip a week ago, he is now going to be traveling again for the next 3 straight weeks (at least 3 that we know about).

So between us both , trying to get things done around the house and just function normally has taken a bit out of us. We have at least made a couple trips down to visit the Rivera side of family and were even able to visit with Aunt Susan again down there. We are planning another trip down there in a couple weeks to see Kyle play baseball- we can't wait!

Other than that, we are fine, dogs are fine and both homes are holding up. We will be adding the Palm Bay house to list of things we need to do soon though as the current tenants we have in there will most likely be moving out at the end of November and we are really going to have to have someone in there again ASAP. Wish us luck! We have begun the hunt for a new realtor.

We hope this finds you all very well and we will post again soon.

Love,

Ben and Gabriellle

Martha Stewart can move over :)

So we decided to finally do something with the living room and finish it up. It has a great wall and potential but that was just it, potential. The wall was bare and when you looked in the room it was just a pool table and a couch. Now, though the pool table is still there (but usable for it is finally cleared and ready to actually play pool on again) the room looks cozy and like a real room. We moved out an end table from the master bedroom with some bamboo in a vase out next to the couch and then got really creative and decided to "make our own art." We went to Olde Time Pottery and bought three 23x23 pictures that were on sale. Then went to Joann Fabrics and found some material that we really liked, three different types. We then recovered the ugly pictures with the fabric and now have three great wall pieces that finish the room off! We are really happy with how they turned out, especially for our first project like that. Great thing too is that they were very economical and if we ever decide to change up the room we can the fabric and have a whole new look.

We have included some pictures of what we did :)

Got to admit that not all the doors are painted yet, I think we got a little burnt out on paint, however as you see in this picture to the right, that door is painted properly.

Tomorrow we will be delivering meals for the Meals on Wheels program and then having one of our awesome married couple friends come over to watch the Gators and have some dinner. For the game we have some munchies, Gabrielle already pre-made the Buffalo Chicken Dip (Kyle, your favorite!!) and made a batch of brownie-cookies. Yum can't wait!! Then it is looking like Sunday may be a day for outside work.

In other news, after a lot of hard work (that could be a blog in itself) Gabrielle has finally been given a Lead position at her job. The formal announcement is going to be made on Tuesday next week but it is a good opportunity for her and she is looking forward to kicking butt and moving on :) The even better part of it is that usually this is the next step for a full promotion and she is going to be the youngest person in this position for her organization.

Ben has decided that he wants to study for the Patent Bar exam to become a Patent Agent. He has been doing a lot of research on it and has a great desire to learn and try it out. We have started to look for study material and then as soon as we find it he will begin to study for the exam. Once he has done that, he is allowed to be an Agent and see how he likes it. He still plans on staying at GE during this and starting out by doing it on the side. If he really enjoys the agent side of it, who knows what that may bring....we may see law school in the future (well not we, Ben :-) ). It is a really great chance for him though, so we will be keeping our fingers crossed that it all works out!

That just about covers it for now. Everything is going well (dogs as well- they are great) and we hope it is the same for you all.

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

Back to Reality

As with all good trips, our time in NC ended when we found ourselves on the road again Monday afternoon. We got back home late Monday/early Tuesday and fortunately for us we both took it easy with work on Tuesday so we had time to sleep in and then ended up doing errands all day. It was such a wonderful trip, we had a great time!! Thank you to the Graingers for inviting us to join them and sharing a wonderful cabin and then Aunt Susan, Uncle Lenny, and Grandma and Papa Darden for spending a wonderful day with us as well. We hope to do it again adn for a longer period of time.

We aren't quite sure if the dogs have recovered from the trip yet, they had such a great time playing with Cayman and Turbo the whole time. We haven't seen Rory rest this much since we got her. They loved the weather and the land that they had available to run in while there. Speaking of the dogs, Rory has been losing her baby teeth! It will definitely be nice to have the teething part done, as I am sure she is looking forward to it as well.

There is not too much else planned for this weekend. We are going to go to Orlando and get a new desk for the office. This will allow us to finally finish up the office and getting it all set up. We will post new pictures when we finish it up! Getting so close :)

Well we don't have much else to report. All is well here. We hope everyone is doing well as well.

Love always,
Ben and Gabrielle

R & R in the Mountains

As we mentioned in our last post, we left for the mountains of NC Thursday evening after work. We drove for about 6 and a half hours and stopped in St George, SC for the night. We got back on the road by about 7 am and made it to Gabrielle's parent's cabin in Hendersonville around 10 am. We forgot how beautiful it is up there. The mountains are absolutely gorgeous and the air just feels clean. The trip was definitely well needed and all of stress seemed to slip in the back of our minds.

It turns out that this weekend Hendersonville is having their annual Apple Festival downtown. We decided to go and check it out. The food there was extremely yummy and if you can make it with apples, they had it there. Ben enjoyed a nice piece of fried apple pie, Gabrielle had some ice cream (shocker we know!). Robin, Gabrielle's mom, also shared some sliced apples with caramel dip (that was so warm and beyond good). Gabrielle also was able to sample some apple bbq sauce and loved it so she bought a bottle. Can't wait to try it on some food back home. She loves her bbq very much, to a point where the next blog we set up may be for her to do on bbq places and food she has tried, so stay tuned you may see that apple bbq sauce on it soon! We had a great time, so good, Ben is planning on making another trip there while we are here in order to try some more food (next time apple bread pudding pie).

Today we spent the day with Ben's family in Waynesville and had such a wonderful time. We really enjoyed ourselves and are so glad that we were able to see them. Thank you guys so much for visiting with us today. The dogs had an absolute blast meeting everyone and visiting with the other dogs. Hopefully, we will be back again soon!

The weather has been perfect here, we really don't have any complaints. The dogs are having a wonderful time and getting plenty of exercise. They have a great amount of yard here to run around and are loving the weather.

Well, we must go and finish our Gator game (go GATORS!!!). So good to see football back on TV :-)

We hope this finds you all well.

We love and miss you all,

Ben and Gabrielle

Mountains here we come!

That's right, we will be heading up north this week to the mountains of North Carolina. Gabrielle's parents have rented up a place for the month and we have decided to take a couple days to get away and visit. That also allows us a great opportunity to visit Ben's grandparents and his Aunt Susan and Uncle Lenny (can't wait to see you guys!!). We are very excited for the trip to see family and get a change of scenery as well as everything we know we could be doing here with the house :)

The place Gabrielle's parents got allows dogs, so we will be bringing the two pups with us and then her parents have two dobermans. Rigby has been around the dobermans for about 2 years and knows them well, but this will be Rory's first time hanging out with them. Should be pretty interesting, it gives Rigby a slight break from being the only target :)

It has been so nice to come home lately and know that we don't have to worry about the baseboards (well until we redo the flooring). Ben was able to work on switching out all of the electrical receptacles and the plates. He did a great job and another project is now completed. The doors should be pretty soon. It sucks to look at them knowing that everything else is nicely painted and complete except for them. Guess we can worry about tackling them upon our return :)

We will try and update while we are away but if not, we will continue upon our return. We hope to take some pictures and will share!

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Pups and Paint!

Rory and Rigby have definitely been keeping us busy! Knock on wood but so far we have only really had one item casulty due to Rory's teething and that was part of Gabrielle's laptop cord (thankfully not plugged in) and that has now been replaced. We still have about an accident a day in the house but she has definitely started to learn going to the door when she needs to go. Rigby has his moments where we think he wants to pack up and move away but then he also does enjoy playing with her. Rory also loves being outside a lot (just about too much), we may have a gardener helper with us :)

News I am sure everyone will probably be glad to hear is that we finally finished painting the basebaords!! Yes, that is correct, they are done and we couldn't be happier. We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of our painting escapades. All that is left are 4 doors and two closests...at this rate we may be done by the end of the year :)

Our current plan is to try and get the office finished soon as well, if we can get that room finished we can get going on the fourth room that has been our free for all for the most part. The biggest project will probably be around the February/March time frame when we hope to get new floors throughout the house. I think 3 dogs and 5 people living here at one point can put a little wear and tear on any floor.

Well I think that is all for now. Hopefully everyone is doing well.

We love and miss you all!

Love- Ben and Gabrielle

4 days in...

So we are four days in to having our new addition, Rory. She has definitely brought in a lot of energy and has kept everyone on their toes. We are absolutely in love with her though. Rigby may still have the jury out on his opinion but that's the age difference talking. They are doing really well together but there is a difference between 4 months old and almost 4 years old. Rigby definitely tires out a lot quicker than Rory.

Our first night with Rory was a little rough. We were up a LOT with her crying and barking in her crate. However, we definitely got smart the second night. She slept through the whole night and didn't wake up till it was time for Gabrielle to get ready for work! Success! Last night wasn't too bad, she woke up at 2 to go to the bathroom. We let her out and then put her back to bed and she slept great till we got up. We will see what tonight holds but it is going well. She loves her crate and falls asleep in there for the heck of it and barely makes a peep (knock on wood :-)).

This weekend we are really hoping to get some painting done to finish the baseboards. As many probably know that has caused us some slight issues. We will be so glad to get that done. Not sure how painting and Rory will go together but we shall find out :)

Nothing much else to report here. We will try to get more pictures up and maybe even a video of the two dogs playing.

Hope everyone is doing well and we will be in touch again soon.

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

Here's Rory!!

Just a quick post to share some pictures of Rory! We have only had her at the house for about an hour or so and she has already made herself at home. I think Rigby is definitely going to be getting his work out from her!! She is loving all of her new toys and her new friend. We will be posting more of her and Rigby playing down the road!

An intro to our new addition...

Well we can honestly say that things still don't feel the same without Baxter. Each day gets a little easier though daily routine items still remind us (i.e. eating dinner, feeding just Rigby dinner now, not getting slobbered upon coming home, etc). We know it will all take its time. We thank the kind thoughts from friends and family, it does help.

When we first found out about Baxter's cancer we had discussed getting a new addition to the family by rescuing another dog. We knew the house would be empty and that Rigby has grown so used to having his buddy with him, so as time went out we started to keep the idea open. It was kind of ironic that on our appointment with Baxter on Friday that the vet techs asked us to stay after our appointment because they wanted to introduce us to someone. We were a little confused but soon understood.

After waiting a minute, we see them bring out this adorable puppy. She is a 3 1/2 month old Catahoula puppy. She was abandoned by her previous owners because they learned she was deaf. The vet's office was fostering her while they were looking for her forever home and they thought that we would be excellent parents and interested. She really stole our hearts. Baxter even got to meet her! She has the bluest eyes we have ever seen and just a heart of gold. We told them we would definitely consider it and let them know. We talked about her the whole way home and started to lean toward getting her.

After everything that happened that Sunday, we knew that we needed to get her. It was almost as if she was shown to us for a reason. She may not fill the void from Baxter in the same way but she would be a great addition to our family. We called the vet's office on Monday to follow up and confirmed we wanted her. Both parties were extremely excited.

We have plans this weekend in Orlando for both Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon that we had made a while ago. We really didn't want to bring in our new pup and then take off on her leaving her and Rigby alone for a while, so we said we could move her in on Sunday. So it is now official, we will be getting our new buddy, Rory (that's what we are naming her) Sunday afternoon!! We are so excited. We think she will bring a new "energy" to the house! We promise to be posting pictures of her as soon as we can so stay posted!!

In the meantime we are trying to start puppy proofing the house and getting things done now while we can. We thought we finished the baseboards but as luck would have it the paint is peeling all over, so we will have to work at it with another angle. It is a slight setback :( We will get there. I think we will continue with Plan B tomorrow....we had to quit this evening due to frustration. Oh well, so it goes.

Well, we look forward to formally introducing you all to Rory!

Take care.

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Sad Day...

So we debated a little bit as to when we would post this and we think it will be a little easier for us to just go ahead and share the sad news. As you know from our post on Saturday things with Baxter had gotten a little worse. We didn't find a whole lot of improvement by Saturday evening and found ourselves with a pretty long night while Baxter had a lot of trouble getting comfortable for any length of time. We brought him on the bed with us and he still only felt discomfort. It was to the point where we couldn't even pet him like we used to, it made him fidgit even more. We decided we would bring him to the vet on Monday.

As we woke up this morning, he once again refused his morning treat. He began pacing all throughout the day moving about every two minutes from one position to another, from one room to another, never finding any comfort. After seeing this become a pattern we decided if we could have the vet meet us today that we needed to put him at ease today and we did. Dr. Kehoe truly treated us and Baxter with only the finest treatment. We couldn't have imagined him being cared for by any other vet (we have plans on changing Rigby over to her as well). Baxter went very peacefully and while we miss him more than we can ever explain (its amazing how big this house feels) we know we did what he needed and know he is no longer hurting. Hopefully he is back to being his usual self out chasing frogs :-)

The picture we have posted with this entry is from more work that we did today in the office. Gabrielle had bought Ben the picture as one of her weddings gifts to him. We took the collar and hung it near the picture and Ben took his name tag and glued it on the picture. He was truly one of a kind and so loved by everyone that met him, especially his family and it will be a nice reminder of him. We miss him!

Hope this finds everyone well. We love you all.

Love-
Ben and Gabrielle

Another Room Almost Done!

Hello again! While this is going to be pretty short,we wanted to post pictures of what we worked on this weekend. We decided to get back to working on the office as we had shelves and sports collectibles building on the pool table. We have hung the shelves that used to be in the living room and put all the sports items nicely in one area. Under where the shelves are we are going to put a desk for Ben that will cover that whole area of the wall. We think it has added a great touch to the room. Included you will find a picture! We will have more up soon as we start to hang more pictures on the wall and get that room done. Hope this finds you well!

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Baxter's Monthly Check Up

Yesterday we had Baxter's (now) regular monthly check up with the vet. Since his last visit, which was an "emergency" one 2 weeks ago, he has lost at least 5 pounds. He has lost a lot of muscle and you can start to see some areas of bone a little more. You could say we agreed on a "plan" but the vet was definitely not sure on how long to say we still have. We will just be taking it a day at a time.

Baxter's spirits were definitely up yesterday and then we even go to take the dogs over to the Grandma and Grandpa Graingers, where we got dinner and the dogs got highly spoiled. I know they both enjoyed themselves and as usual Baxter found himself the center of attention :)

This morning things were definitely a lot rougher. After the dogs usually go out in the morning they like to have their morning treats, Baxter especially! As Ben went to give them out, Baxter had no desire or interest in having any. If you know Baxter, you know that this is NOT the norm. To help his hunger and weight loss we have also been feeding him two meals twice a day, which Baxter has enjoyed. This morning as Ben went to give Baxter his food, he didn't want it right away. It took a lot of convincing to finally get him to eat. After that he had slight hesistation to get on the couch (another difference) and laid with Ben breathing quite heavily. I can honestly say it was tough trying to decide what exactly to do today. He laid there for a while but finally got up when he got some fresh water and then excitedly waited for treats. Not sure if he is just having a bad day or not but we will definitely be keeping a close eye on him. We will see how he does through the weekend. The last thing we want is for him to suffer. As of now he seems to have calmed down some and is just laying near momma's feet as we are writing this. We hope for only the best, we love that guy!

In other news, some work was started about a week ago on the baseboards. We are really hoping to finish them this weekend.....time will tell :)

Well we hope that this finds you all well.

Till next time,

Love- Ben and Gabrielle

Honeymoon Pictures

Hello everyone!

After getting the wedding pictures posted we thought it was a good time to get the honeymoon pictures uploaded. We added 1 album in Snapfish under the group account. Password 41009.

There are a lot so heads up! We had such a wonderful time and enjoyed every minute of the trip.

We hope you enjoy looking through them.

Love,

Ben and Gabrielle

Professional Pictures Are Up!

Hello family and friends,

We are excited to announce that our professional wedding pictures have now been posted! I know it has been a while but we think the time the photographer took on each picture made it worth it. She did a great job and we would highly recommend them to others. We have placed them all in three different albums on our Snapfish Group Room. The password again is 41009. If you run into any problems let us know.

We hope you enjoy them. We had such a wonderful day and feel very fortunate to have family and friends like you all!

Thank you all for everything.

Love-

Ben and Gabrielle

A little update

Sorry it has been a little while since we last updated (sorry Aunt Susan). There hasn't been too many things to go and report but we will see what we have.

There is some more news to update on Baxter. Around 730 last night, we were dealing with an another scary episode (very similar to the one he had back in May that brought us to the emergency vet to learn of the tumor). We called his vet's on call system immediately and were able to speak to our vet. We gave him a couple Gas-X's and per her direction another prednisone. We were able to keep him calm and eventually the Gas-X kicked in and he stopped "gagging." We scheduled an appointment to bring him in this morning. With an X-Ray we have learned that the tumor has grown again. Not sure if it is exactly the size it was in the beginning but it has definitely increased. Somehow these incidences seem to be related with the tumor size though it seems as though noboby can really explain why. The Dr did mention that there is a chance he may have another tumor in his intestines. There wouldn't be much of a difference of what we are doing now for one tumor to more than one so she didn't see a point in trying to do an x-ray of everything. We have increased his prenisone up to 40mg a day and we will at least do that for the next two weeks though it looks like we are pretty sure we will be keeping it high for the rest of his life. There is no guarantee at this point that the prednisone will help re-shrink the tumor again (or to any similar affect that it did the first time) but we will try all we can. We will have to be taking things as they come with him. Other than all this, he once again looks like a perfectly normal and healthy dog. The vet was amazed about how great he was looking and how he was still good ole Baxter. As things happen, we promise to keep you updated with all of this, among everything else. We will be hoping for the best, he is definitely part of our family and very loved.

To some as no surprise, we have still not finished our painting. I think one of our goals this weekend is to start taping so we can finish up the baseboards. So close yet it seems like we have a ways to go. We just need to get back in there.

I must say that the garage is looking MUCH better. Ben and Kyle (who is visiting us for the summer and has been a great help) worked on cleaning that up since it was starting to be our holding place for stuff (that is a fairly appropriate word). They had everything out of it, pulled up the old carpet, and of course it was about to rain. So we had to get everything back in there, but they were able to get some order of some of the stuff. So I think at this point we are at least safe to go in there without tripping over something. It is definitely starting to come together.

Last weekend we went down to Fort Pierce/PSL for good friends' of ours wedding (Gab was a bridesmaid as well). We had a great time and really enjoyed ourselves. We wish Heather and Chris only the very best!!!

For the most part we have just been hanging out around the house and trying to get it in order (guess you never finish). We will update again soon. Hope this finds you all well.

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

More pictures of the house

It's been a little while since our last post. Work has been keeping us pretty busy as well as house stuff.

So here we are. Baxter has his (now) monthly appointment on Friday. We are to do this once a month just so our vet can keep an eye out on him and we can make sure everything is in check. He has been doing pretty well lately though. Acting like there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with him. His activity seems to be back to normal and that has made Rigby happy as well :)

Even though we stll aren't complete, we wanted to share some more pictures of what has been completed in the house. All we have left to paint are baseboards and doors. Not too bad! We must thank the Riveras for their help with the painting. We had pretty much lost our motivation when they came up to help us. I think we have a consensus in the house that we will not be painting anytime soon so hopefully everyone likes the colors :)

As you see these, please note that we haven't finished putting up everything on the walls so they look a little bare and we are still figuring out where we want things to go! So wtihout any further delay, here we go! Hope this finds everyone well.

BEFORE and AFTER

From wedding to home! Dining Room

view into living room from kitchen.

Teaser Pictures Are Up!

On Friday, we were able to go and pick up our wedding picture prints. We received nearly 300 of them and are happy with how they turned out! The only thing is we haven't received the CD with all of them so we can share them with family and friends yet. However, today, our photographer posted up some sneak peeks on several of our photos. If you want to view them, you can do so here. We hope you enjoy them and we will be posting the rest on Snapfish when we get the CD.

On another note, thanks to much help from the Rivera's we are done with our wall painting and even have some items hung on the walls. We only have our doors and baseboards to paint. Never thought we would get through all of this painting. The house looks great!! We will post some pictures soon on the new looks!

Well that is all from here right now.

Happy Fathers Day to all Fathers and a special one to our Dads.

-Ben and Gabrielle

Baxter Update

Today, we had Baxter's one month follow up with his vet after learning about his lymphoma.  We weren't really sure what to expect and had been pretty nervous about this visit.  As we mentioned earlier, we put him on a very high dosage of prednisone in order to try and help shrink the tumor.  We had x-rays taken and it looks like our wish came true-the tumor did shrink!!  Our vet said that if she hadn't seen his x-rays from before she would not even be sure of what she was looking at now!  This is great news in the sense that it will hopefully allow him to breathe better as well as being more comfortable.  Unfortunately we know that this is not going to be the cure for his cancer but it will make things a little better for him.  Baxter has shown significant weight loss since last month, he weighed in 10 pounds less than just 4 weeks ago...and trust us when I say we haven't eased up at all on any of his food.  The vet says that the loss is most likely just the cancer and that we can increase his food a bit.  His current weight is actually not too bad for him, he looks good, it is just a lot to lose in a short period of time.  We are now able to reduce the prednisone down a little bit and will reduce it one more time and that will be our final dose amount to carry out with him.  So all in all, we need to keep our eyes on him and just make sure he is living the best and most comfortable life he can.  While nothing is ever promised or guaranteed, our vet said she wouldn't be surprised if we have another 6 months with him (and living comfortably).  So we will be taking it a day at a time, but we felt that our decision in handling his cancer was confirmed that it was the proper route to go.  We do love him dearly and want to make sure he has the best quality of life while we have him.  

So that is the update!  Thanks to everyone who has been asking about him and thinking about us.  Baxter is a beast and the cancer definitely doesn't know who they are dealing with :-)  

Hope you all enjoy your weekend!!  I suppose we will try and get some more painting done (or finish some of what we started I should say).

Love, Ben and Gabrielle

Wedding Pictures Update

I would love to say that we have our professional wedding pictures to share, however, at this point we don't have them yet, but it shouldn't be much longer.  I know that we are anxiously awaiting (as a sidenote: they take so long because they edit every picture, give us the full rights to each of them, print a copy of every picture, make a couple CDs for us and then I think we get a book).  

We will definitely post on here when we get them.  Also, the photographer will have some "teasers" on their site (Elegant Imagery) sometime before hand as well, so you can always check in there too.

In the meantime, we have a couple albums on our snapfish account that family and friends have posted.  If you have some and haven't shared them on our site, we would really appreciate it if you will.  The site is here on Snapfish.  The password is 41009.  If you have any problems please just let us know.  We will be posting all of our professional pictures on there as well when we get them!

Tomorrow is our follow up appointment for Baxter at the vet's office.  We will definitely keep you all posted.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Love- Ben and Gabrielle

Home Decorating Pictures

Before the painting starts back up later today, we took some time to take a couple pictures of the work we have completed (as promised in yesterday's blog).  Bare with us as we still try and figure out how to post pictures and lay things out nicely on here :)

Guest room pictures:        

             

Guest Bathroom Pictures:  This was a little harder to take, but it at least gives you an idea.

           

That is all for now.  Will update with more pictures as we continue to make our way through the house.

Up and Running

So I think that we finally got this site up and running.  It took us a bit to figure out the best site to use and we think this is going to work the best.  Guess time will tell :)  Hopefully you all found it easily!

As a lot of you know, since our return from the honeymoon things have been pretty crazy. Getting settled into one house has been our biggest and longest project so far.  With that said it is still in the works and will be for who knows how long (though we hope not too much longer).  We have at least accomplished finishing the guest room and guest bathroom.  We are quite proud of how they both look.  We have also painted the office (which if any of you saw it before-WOW its a million times better- no more Jets fans stuff all over the walls).  The office should be done as soon as we run up to IKEA and get another desk in there so Ben can work in there when he is home.  We did start painting the walls in the family room.  I think we have about 2 walls completed.  Painting is going to pretty much be our plan for the weekend, our goal is to finish the family room.  I will make sure we take some pictures of the rooms and get some posted up here.  I wish we would have taken some before and after ones, but we are a little late with that...oops!

Some of you may know that about 3 weeks ago (3 tomorrow actually) we found out that Baxter had a large tumor (lymphoma) on his lungs.  We curretnly have him on perenisone trying to shrink it some so it doesn't cause him problems swallowing, breathing, etc.  We go next Friday for another x-ray to follow up and see how it is doing.  Hopefully some shrinkage has occured, we will definitely keep you posted.  He has been doing really well though.  Overall, Baxter seems to still be his normal self.  He still tries to scare us by trying to bring frogs in the house and hunting when he goes out.  He still enjoys barking with Rigby at passerbys...and he still absolutely LOVES his food, well any food for that matter.  So we are taking it a day at a time and will see how that goes.  

Well I think that is all for now.  Hope all is well with everyone.  Time to watch the basketball game....Go Magic!!

Welcome to our Family Blog!

Hello family and friends!  

Since this  is the age of technology, we figured what better way to try and keep connected with our family and friends than through a blog.  While we can't promise things over here to always be super exciting, we promise to use this as our way of keeping everyone updated with the what's happening and will even include pictures as we can.  

We hope you enjoy it and we look forward to sharing our lives with you all!

We love you all.

-Ben and Gabrielle