no pic available

but boy i wish there was....

Terry came over yesterday so he & nacho could work on the electrical redo after our window install.  they ran some wire for outdoor lights and outlets & drilled holes for pot lights in front of the new windows. nacho spent the rest of the day running wire to said pot lights and interior outlets.  so this morning as i was getting ready to leave for work, i look into the kitchen & there's nacho, up on a step ladder, running some wire for the outdoor light....wearing only his boxers. yep, nothing else! straight out of bed, and straight to work. that's commitment people!

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let the sun shine in

and how! we got lucky & had a window of opportunity this week to have our windows installed. so nacho began by tearing out the dry wall for the East wall last Sunday.  Terry's guys came over Wed & Thurs to do the install and replace our siding.  we made yet another trip to Ikea yesterday and we think we have the kitchen finalized. no, not ordered but all planned out. it will be another 3 weeks before we get back up there to place the actual order. sounds like we're moving right along? not so fast. i'm still trying to make a decision on flooring. more on that later! let's enjoy this sliver of progress though!

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a call for help

hey look who's posting made it onto Apartment Therapy!
we're down to the final flooring choices but thought i'd ask some the AT readers as well. you never know what you'll find.
i'll post pics of the new windows tomorrow when i can get some day photos. as Terry put it, Dramatic!

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pRemodel

we are finally doing IT!  after 10 years of living in this dump and 6+ of talking about it, the kitchen has spoken! i guess today would mark the official start of our kitchen remodel.  we have always hated the layout of our kitchen & knew it needed an overhaul, but then the cabinet doors started falling off, we'd had enough.
we have the bulk of the layout done & the cabinets are coming from IKEA. we knew we wanted (1) an island and (2) to open up the view to the river. here's the before

so everything on the right will be torn out and replaced with windows. to see how that would look, and to test the idea of an island out, Nacho began dismantling the entire right side.

and now they're our temporary island

with an OSB countertop

so this is what we'll be living with for the next month easily. the sad thing is, i like it much better already. the only thing that is not an accurate reflection of our future layout is the fridge & pantry on the left. those will move to the location of the current sink. the sink will move to the island. where you see the pantry & fridge now will be a built-in banquet dining area.
i highly  recommend doing a test layout like this! we already resized the island based on what we've done today. the only thing holding us up at this point is flooring. that's been a 10-year odyssey for me! so somehow i have to do in 30 days what i have not been able to do in 10 years...find flooring for this project. wish me luck!

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some things never change

a much belated holiday wish!  2011 is starting off much the same way 2010 went....late!

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Finis

well it only took a year but we finally finished it. and we managed to use all the concrete we'd collected. it was only fitting that i threw my back out at the end. but it was worth it! wait, no it wasn't! so here's to all the new beach we gained!  nacho couldn't be prouder. and that's 28 for those of you curious. 45 in all between the beach, the berm and the sitting wall. we figured, this is the equivalent of building your own sea wall BY HAND!!!

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how do you make a gabion?

Step1:
buy a lot of hog confinement wire from Tractor Supply. some times, just buy them out completely. they come in 16ft sections so you might want to cut them in half at TS so you can haul them in the back of THAT NEW TRUCK THAT YOU NEVER ASKED YOUR WIFE IF YOU COULD BUY!!! no photo needed cuz said wife is so over that truck!
Step2:
hire some hot chick (hey maybe that wife) to man the John Deere so you can bend them into place. drive the JD over plywood set to create the bend.

said truck can be seen in the background. that's all the coverage it's every getting here! but said wife is so over it.

Step3:

Take another piece of plywood, and, from the front, bend the front of the panel up to a 90.

and you're done! one of 2 sides

Step4:

wash rinse repeat 80 SOMETHING MORE TIMES!

or until you run through the most recent batch that you bought TS out of. in that case proceed to the other TS and buy them out too until you've made like 50 of these! tops and bottoms are made from additional panels and it's all just wired into place with a roll of heavy gauge wire like they use for securing chain-link fencing to posts. at this level, it was actually cheaper for us just to buy the big roll of wire and cut it into strips for securing the panels & tops/bottoms together.  we went through 3-4 rolls of the stuff, but we never seem to run out of uses for it (some of you saw the Bug's Life costumes several years ago)
Why Would You Build Them Yourself?
as i said in my previous post, it really is cheaper and you can customize these to any size you want. most of ours were something like 6ft long, 4ft deep/high, and 2.5ft wide (i'm sure i'm off on that and nacho will quickly correct me). but the ones we used for the Sitting Wall, were half that height. so it really gave us some flexibility that we either wouldn't have had or would have paid out the nose for. nacho's research came up to about $80 a gabion (i have no idea the size) and this was WAY cheaper - plus it was kinda fun to keep buying TS out of this stuff.

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flintstones meet them flintstones

as usual, late posting this but i think i have an acceptable excuse this time:  EXHAUSTION!!!  3 weekends ago we decided to give the beach wall a break and move our attention to the north end of our property, where the yard meets the beach. over the years, i've done 2 things here: planted a vegetable garden on the end closest to/against our patio/sea wall and planted tons of lillies on the other end (aka transition area). the idea has primarily been that the lillies would be a hold for when we flood. the truth of the matter is, they take a heck of a beating when we have beach floods - floods that don't make it over the berm and surround the house. we had 2 of those this spring/summer and my lillies did their job but they really started to suffer. at one point, i had to go next door to Ray's and pull some from the water. they'd been dislodged by the wave action we get when we have a beach flood.
so many weeks ago, on one of the design blogs i stalk follow, i found a family that had dedicated a section of their yard to a tortoise habitat. their goal was to not only provide a great living space for their pet but to make it architecturally interesting. and what did they use to make this possible? say it with me people:  GABIONS! guess who has a little experience in this area? i ran this by nacho as a great solution to the transition area and added it would make for a neat sitting wall just as the Tortoise Family had done. nacho agreed and so it was done.  we spent 2 weekends making this happen.
Sitting Wall
this is the best Before picture i have. you have to focus on the area to the left where you see the lillies and rock.

and now

Garden Wall

but we didn't stop there! after creating something that nice, it was hard to look at this

and say, "eh, just leave it". so we didn't. the 2nd weekend was spent pulling these temporary gabions out and redoing this section of the wall. it was well worth it don't 'cha think?

and so overall, we now have this!

i'd love to tell you we are all done, but remember, i said at the beginning that we decided to take a break. this past weekend while I was in The Motherland, nacho built the remaining 4 gabions to complete the Beach Wall. i'll post that work in it's entirety when it's done. 

and the last thing i'd like someone to figure out, is how much concrete do you think we've moved in all of this? we estimate, when done, we will have filled 49 gabions, give or take. the "Sitting Wall" ones are not as tall as the Berm or Beach ones, but i'd actually hate to know the exact amount of concrete we've moved, cuz you have to realize we've done most of it by hand. yes, we're crazy.

oh and the innevitable question that always comes up: can't you just buy those things? yeah, no telling what it would cost us to fill them, but nacho said it'd run us $80 minimum just to buy the cages pre-made and the wire is not near as sturdy as the wire we used in ours. perhaps he's embellishing so i don't kill him for making me do all this work!

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hose head

i've decided to start my midlife crisis, so i went on my first motorcycle ride ever on Sat. big thanks to Tucker and Moser for taking me along.  and thanks to Dykstra for putting us in the loop on this one. it's a really interesting story how the Road Apples came to be.

so this was the welcome sign at Stop1 in Tiskilwa.

and this was my escort for the day

when life hands you lemons, find a hose clamp!

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heart and sol

only Nacho will know what that title means (and maybe SilentG) but congrats to us for surviving yet another year together.  and what a year it's been.  i couldn't be more grateful for the words i said 9 years ago.  and they mean just as much to me now as they did then.  some would expect them to mean more, but that's kinda hard when they always meant everything.  i could of course sit here and go on and on, but that's not really me when it comes to this. i'm not rainbows and unicorns and i'm not so certain feelings are that big of a deal (i'm more of an intent girl myself). and my intentions today are the same as they were 12 years ago.  LM/TM/I+4

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