Brrrr!!!

Wow is it cold here! I guess it is about right being January, but seriously for Florida!? Hopefully everyone is staying warm, we know that if we are super cold then those of you that don't live in Florida must be frozen.

Happy New Year to everyone! We hope that you all had a wonderful end of 2009 and are so far having a great 2010. We had a wonderful 2009 and have you each to thank for helping to make it so special and we are hoping to a have a very exciting and even better 2010!!

The house is put back together for the most part. Still don't have everything back together, we need to wait till after this weekend when we seal up the grout. In the process of moving things back though we have had a chance to really make this house look almost brand new and really ours. Once we get things back together we will take more pictures to share.

Well I think that covers it for now. We hope that you are all staying warm!!

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle

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