Our Home is for Rent!

Feb20

Hello All! Aaron and I are looking to rent our current house in Troy Hill. This post is really just to supplement the Craigslist ad so it’s just pictures of our house.

Kitchen (Renovated in 2011):

Bathroom (renovated in 2010):

Living Room (comes with the rug which was purchased in 2010):

Dining Room: Very large room. Even with two additional leaves in the table, there is lots of room. Newly painted in 2011.

No pictures of the bedrooms but they’re both upstairs. Master bedroom has a large walk-in closet. There is a full basement with a non-coin op washer and dryer included. New, high-efficiency furnace was installed in 2011. It also has a fenced in backyard with two raised garden beds that we built this past Summer.

Thanks!

Subway Tile!

Feb8

Hello! Just a few house updates today. I haven’t taken any new belly pictures because I’m pretty sure I look exactly the same as I did at 12 weeks. People keep telling me I’ll soon “pop.” We will see. I’ll be 15 weeks on Saturday!

Aaron spent last weekend working on building out the window wall in the bathroom. There is a pipe in the wall that sticks out and so he had to build out the wall a bit so we can drywall. (I say we loosely) He also put in the new insulation. No formaldehyde! The new window came in yesterday too so I think we’re going to install that this weekend.

The pipe is in the picture below and the old window.

He also reinforced the floor boards:

And then started laying the subfloor! Yay! We now have two layers of subfloor in the bathroom. Next step is working on the shower faucet plumbing and then installing the tub. I’m supposed to be ordering the shower and sink faucets today but I’m having a really hard time finding something I like for the shower. I think I just need to order something and be done with it. I went to Lowe’s last weekend and looked at their stuff but didn’t like any of it.

Here is Aaron cutting the toilet hole out of the subfloor.

And here is where I was sitting while this happened. I didn’t contribute much to this weekend’s work…

I did go to Lowe’s and check out tile for the bathroom. I think we might use marble tile for the floor and then white subway tile around the tub. I also want to add a little accent line of blue glass subway tile around the tub to break up all the white.

We’ll probably go with these ones:

And then the regular white for most of it. Yay for $0.26 each!

I also went on an appliance shopping spree online this weekend and bought a refrigerator, dishwasher and dryer for the new house and a new oven for our current house. The double oven is coming with us so we had to replace it with another one. I ordered everything from AJ Madison because they had the best prices. Plus I ordered through Ebates and will be getting $50 cash back! I’ve never ordered from AJ Madison so we’ll see how it goes but definitely way better prices than Lowes, Home Depot, and Sears. We checked out the scratch and dent store too but I’m pretty sure that place is a huge ripoff.

Sunday was spent resting. Aaron’s parents dropped by for a bit then we decided to skip church, buy a bunch of junk food and watch movies the rest of the day. This was a good decision. We ate so many cheese puffs and watched V for Vendetta. Wooo

13 Week Update

Feb1

Hello! Pregnancy has brought back the almost sort of frequent blogging!

13 weeks.jpg

Sorry about the weird shadow. I’m not sure what the problem was.

So not too much different from 12 weeks though I feel bigger. I took this idea below from another blog that I read and I’m going to try to include it in the weekly(ish) posts.

How far along? 13 weeks, 4 days
Total weight gain: 3 lbs as of 12 weeks, 6 days
Maternity clothes? Not yet but I wore the belly band one time
Sleep: very good
Miss Anything? not worrying about falling down stairs
Movement: zero yet
Food cravings: barbecue sauce, meat, milk, shrimp curry from Taste of India
Food aversions: hummus, salsa, Mexican food
Gender: No idea but will find out March 5th!
Symptoms: Not too much, pants getting tight, hungry a lot
Looking forward to: Finding out the sex

On Sunday I tried out another chocolate chip cookie recipe for potluck Sunday at church. I’m trying to find my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe so every time I make them, I’ve been trying a new recipe. I used this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker (who is a big time Pittsburgh blogger) which is originally from America’s Test Kitchen.

I liked this recipe. The cookies didn’t come out too flat which is my issue with a lot of cookies like the Nestle recipe. I like that you use melted butter so no need to remember to let the butter get to room temperature. I also liked that it required no unusual ingredients and did not call for nuts. I did not like that you are supposed to let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets. This resulted in me dirtying every single cookie sheet I have and required me waiting around one or two times for a cookie sheet to cool. I doubled the recipe so I had A LOT of dough to make into cookies.

The cookies did turn out very soft and chewy but I thought they were a bit too sweet. Maybe a tiny bit more salt would help or use bittersweet chips rather than semi-sweet. I’m not sure. I used Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chips for these. My doubled batch made about 55 cookies. I didn’t make them quite as large as the recipe suggests.

And another new recipe that I tried out last week was a pork chop recipe. That was the first time I ever made pork chops. They were good! I used this recipe for Pork Chops with Country Gravy from My Recipes. I followed the recipe exactly except used Trader Joe’s 21 Seasoning Salute in place of the poultry seasoning.

Lastly, Aaron got his diploma in the mail this week! Exciting! Here are some pictures of it.

Yay!

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