Christmas Barf

As you can see Christmas threw up all over my house.

29 weeks

But maybe more interesting than Christmas vomit is the size of Nicole's belly?

21 weeks

11 Hours Later

Saturday was a big day in the Van Orman house.

We finally started the basement.  Warren was nice enough to deliver a borrowed framing nailer and he also stayed to help use it.  He was a HUGE help.  

11 hours lated we finished framing the walls and boxing in the soffit.  

There is probably a little bit left to do, but mostly the framing is finished.  Also there was no blood (and if you know the Van Orman boys this is a pretty big deal).  There was only one trip to the hardware store.  And there were only 2 mistakes made.  The first mistake was thinking a rough door opening was too small.  So we made it bigger, only to find out it was right the first time.  So maybe that`s really only one mistake twice.

Hunter was also around and got to help out a little.  He cut a few pieces of wood with the mitre saw, and also punch a few nails with the Ramset.

Afterwards he was overheard telling people we were shooting guns in the basement.  I guess that`s close enough?

We have the plumber scheduled to come next Friday then Denis and Martine are coming down the weekend after for the electrical. I have to get the HVAC guys in quickly and also someone to move a central vacuum line.

Also you can see Nicole was hard at work with the camera.  Here is her artistic photo for the day.  She also made sure that we didn't miss any meals and were well fed.

Birthday in Edmonton

I have been patiently waiting to go to Edmoton and meet my niece, Madeleine, since she was born October 18th.  This weekend, we finally made it and our visit happened to fall on my birthday, which made it that much more special.  We stayed at Dan and Tina's house so we could get in as much Madeleine time as possible.  She is so tiny and precious!  Our visit made me that much more excited for Scooter to arrive.  In just a few short months, we will be holding one of our own.  I can't wait!                                          

Saturday, we spent the day at my mom and dad's house.  I got to spend some time with Julien before he headed to work.  Ryan, Mom, Dad and I played cards for a bit.  Then we had a family dinner with Mamie and Pepere.  For my birthday, Mamie made me sauerkraut, which is one of my favorite dinners.  It was delicious!  And we had angel food cake for dessert, which is also one of my favorites.  I felt I deserved a song so I started singing "Happy Birthday" and I got the desired effect, everyone joined it.  We had a great time.

This morning, Dan made me birthday breakfast and we headed home.  All in all, a memorable weekend!

Hurray

Can you see anything different?

I'm so sorry

It's been a while since we've updated our blog.  I blame it on the disaster that is the basement.  Plus I've been on the road a bit, and this all gets in the way of typing on the Internet.

Today I'm working from home so thought I could throw up a couple words for everyone.  Just so you know working from home looks a little different for different people.

For me it looks like this.

For Baron it looks like this.

You'll notice his eyes are open, but just barely.

I think I can almost see the end .. or is that the start

I was so close to getting started.  I thought everything was in order, I just had to measure my windows for the plan.  I didn't bother with this earlier because I just assumed people put windows in that would be to code.  Seems I was incorrect in that.  So more changes to the plan and a bunch of calls out to get estimates on cutting in new larger windows to the basement.  It'll be interesting to see how much sunshine you can buy for $3000.

So we'll see if we can start next weekend or not.  We need to get home to Medicine Hat to visit and make spaghetti sauce, and we need to get to Edmonton to visit our new niece Madeline (arrived Oct 18 at around 6:30p), and Nicole wants the baby's room painted.

Side note:  I've been Edmonton free for almost two weeks.

And it starts

And so it has started.  After an entire summer of not doing it.  Then a couple months of planning it.  Now I have probably gotten really close to starting to get ready to develop the basement.

I got the plans finalized and drawn up on Friday.  Purchased the, what I hope is the correct amount of, wood and moved most of the basement into the garage. Now I can started looking at my schedule to figure out when I can spend half a day at city hall getting my building permit.

The plan was to have Warren and family join us this weekend.  Averley and Nicole were going to take the girls to the zoo and Warren and I were going to start the framing.  Unfortunately both Warren and Nicole weren't feeling well plus the girls were just getting over a cold as well.  So in the end, it didn't really matter that I didn't have my permits yet.  So we pushed the work weekend off a week.  I think we're ready now though.  It should be a good time (or something).

Here are your before pictures, because that's always fun.  

You'll also notice the nice new shelving that made for a lot of extra room.  This side of the basement isn't getting developed.  The ceiling is too low to really make it worth while.  It sounds like a fooseball table is going here now.  Seems you don't need a tall ceiling for foose.