Happy Wednesday!

This is so cute. Make sure to watch it all the way through.

Rainy Day

It's a rainy day today in Boise. The sky is dark gray and everything is wet. Whenever I think about how great springtime weather is, I always forget about the rainyness. I love a good rain when the sun is shining, but when we have this gray sky...it makes me feel like grabbing a cup of coffee (i never drink coffee) and sitting with a blanket & a book (i never read) by a window.

We're still struggling to recover from our flooding disaster this weekend. The hardwood floor guys yesterday said that it was going to take 4-6 months for the wood to dry and that we can't officially fix the damage until then. This doesn't work out very well for our house selling plans. All day yesterday, the fridge guy struggled to fix our fridge. He ended up leaving last night crossing his fingers that our fridge would be fixed by the morning. The fridge is not even slightly cool this morning. So yesterday I had to work from home and now Craig has to work from home today so that someone can be there to let the fridge guy in. Yesterday our fridge bill was looking like $350.00, so who knows what the bill will be once the fridge guy spends another day at our house. The fridge was only $900 to begin with!

So the weather today is accurately reflecting how I am feeling. I am so excited for our new house, for the sunny warm weather on my back porch...but in the meantime it's going to be a struggle and a lot of work to make it there. Maybe I'll go to the break room and get myself some coffee. :)

Bad Timing

While we are SO excited that we are only a month away from moving, we're really bummed about our little disaster this weekend. This morning we woke up to find that our fridge was flooding our kitchen. The hose for the water/ice maker was loose and water was just pouring out of the thing. The hardwood floor was already warped and we found lots of water in our crawl space. Another problem, the fridge & freezer are not operational. So tomorrow, I'll be working from home so that I can be available for the fix it guys to come and fix our little flooding disaster and fix our fridge before all of our food spoils. To make matters worse, I did taxes this weekend and we owe this year...ugh! So at a time when we need to come up with a down payment/closing costs, we're finding ourselves incurring some unexpected expenses...what bad timing! Its okay though, whenever I feel the stress rising, I just keep thinking...less than a month I'll be sitting on my back porch with an iced tea enjoying the nice spring weather and my new house.

WE - HAUL

After an amazing week and lots of stressful anticipation, we found out an hour ago that we did in fact get our house on Stone Creek Way! We're so excited.

I'm already planning where to put our furniture and thinking about all of the things that I now have to do within only 30 days!

I've got a big long list of about 15 things that absolutely must be done and soon....

Please forgive the blog content for the following month as I'm sure you'll hear every excruciating detail of how we are getting ready for the big move! Anyone interested in a house in Meridian? :)

Our INCREDIBLE Week

Wow, this has been quite the extraordinary week. For nearly two years now, CJ & I have discussed the possibility of moving to Boise, specifically the 'North End'. We have really gotten tired of our 35 minute daily commutes and not being close to all of the things we like to do. When CJ took a job at Wirestone (which is downtown Boise), we both knew that we were going to definitely move forward on our house plans. We talked a lot about our options and I casually surfed the MLS to see what kind of deals were out there.

Then last Friday, I found a house located on the coolest street in town, Harrison blvd. We began to discuss our options and I talked CJ into touring the house with me. I also had scheduled an appointment to view a second home later that day. Well, we toured the first house and determined immediately that it was going to be too much of a 'fixer upper'. The floor plan on this house was CRAZY. CJ had to duck as he entered doorways and it was just very very old. So, we decided to check out that second house and when we did.....I fell in love with this house! It felt like home immediately when we stepped through the doorways. It has a real uniqueness about it and it is sitting in the Boise foothills. CJ has always wanted to move closer to where he grew up as a kid, and coincidentally, I grew up in this same area. We loved the floor plan, the unique & quirky touches...everything about this house was awesome. So we talked to the sellers agent and have spent the last week making offer/counter-offers on this home. Last night, the sellers agreed to our offer, so its looking like the Sweigarts are moving to Stone Creek Way! There is one last thing though that could prevent this from going through. The sellers had a contingent sale offer on this house where this other lady had offered to buy it when one of her two houses had sold. She has 36 hours (which ends tomorrow evening) to agree to buying the home. We think the possibility of this happening is super small because she'll have to jump through quite a bit of hoops to get her house sold and meet that contingency...but that possibility is still out there.

So, if the next 36 hours go right, here are some pictures of our new home:

This is the front of the house.

This is what you see when you come through the front door. Look at that cute little doggie peering in from the kitchen. I asked the agent a few times if he would include this little guy in the sale, but to no avail.

This is the main floor....well sort of. The living room area pictured above is about 5 steps up from the entryway level. On the entryway level there is a bedroom, bathroom, and entry closets. This floor has the living room area, dining room, and kitchen.

This is a view of the living room from the upstairs landing area. This area is like a little loft and is spacious enough to hold a couple pieces of furniture.

Right off of the upper landing, you'll find the master bedroom. This bedroom faces the front of the house, and has a patio.

This is the master bathroom.

Here's the family room in the basement. This basement is completely underground. It has a bedroom, bathroom, and a wet bar.





This is a side-view of the backyard. Those steps to the left there lead you up to a garden area with a gazebo.





And this is what you see from the gazebo. Our house backs up to the foothills where there are acres & acres of biking paths and trails for Bachelor to explore.
So cross your fingers with us for the next 36 hours as we hope that this house is our next home! We can't wait!

St. Patricks Day Weekend

Kiss Him....he's English

We had an excellent St. Patty's weekend. Saturday morning, we got up and ate some eggs and potato's O'Brien and Bachelor celebrated by enduring another pose for the camera. The weather has been gorgeous...upper 70's on Saturday. We took a drive in the north end (where we are hoping to live someday) and enjoyed the beautiful sunny weather. We also stopped by our favorite little icecream shop and split a coconut dipped cone.

Sunday was all about Spring cleaning and work. Craig went into work to get some progress done on his Check-a-biz project and I spent the entire day cleaning the garage. This was quite the undertaking. Our garage has been our storage pit for the previous 5 years. Post cleaning, we have at least 10 giant black garbage bags full of stuff to throw away and 6 big bags to go to Goodwill. But now we can now park two cars in the garage again, so it was worth the hassle. I'm afraid I have a list of about 12 things that need to be done for Spring cleaning....ugh!

Welcome Spring!

What a gorgeous day it was outside today! CJ & I are LOVING our new life of working together. Today we went out for lunch together and decided to eat our sandwiches at the Old Boise Train Depot. This is the best place ever and is so beautiful. We parked in our bug, rolled down the windows, and listened to talk radio. This is the view that we saw while we were eating our lunch...and it was so beautiful out today. We sat there for about 30 minutes with our seats reclined and our feet hanging out the window just chatting and 'dreaming' about moving to downtown Boise. We can't wait for summer and we're really looking forward to house hunting eventually closer to work. But first, we have a garage to clean and a house to spruce up to get ready to put on the market. Welcome Spring...not so welcome the spring cleaning!

Mondays - Our Favorite Night of the Week

Mondays are our favorite day of the week, next to Fridays. Today we are waiting in eager anticipation for tonight's episode of 24. Every Monday night, we head on over to the Senior Sweigart's house to see what new predicament Jack Bauer gets himself into. One of the most entertaining parts of this show is laughing/joking about some of the unbelievable aspects of what they do from a technical perspective. I love this image, because we're always commenting on how his phone is able to do EVERYTHING. Who knows, maybe tonight we'll see him use his phone as a defibrillator to save some poor dying victim.

TUESDAY UPDATE: Concidentally Jack Bauer was hiding inside of the Russian consulate last night, which had all interior communications shut down and was unable to find an unabandoned cell phone to use. So we were unable to see any kind of miraculous phone tricks. We did however witness Jack Bauer steal a gun and kill a guy while in handcuffs.

Our Boring Weekend

Today we were driving in the car and talking about how in only 10 years, the two of us will be approaching 40 and it will be 2017! Wow, we can't believe how much time has flown by over the past 10 years. It seems as though someone has stolen 10 years from us and that we should really just be turning 20 now :) Perhaps our life is flying by because of weekends like this weekend.

We seriously went to bed at 7:30pm on friday night! That is early even for retirement home people! We recently took our box spring out from under our mattress which made our bed super soft. We also put up some black-out curtains so that we literally cannot see a foot in front of us at night. Then we sent the dog to his kennell at night instead of sleeping with us. Now we've become sleep addicts. We love it, but we can't seem to get enough of this newly found great sleep.

So Saturday morning I woke up at 5am and forced myself to sleep until 8am. Around 8am I got up and felt extremely useless for having just slept for 12 hours. After some homemade breakfast, CJ hopped on the computer to do some Checkabiz work and I cleaned up the house and did some laundry. We spent the entire day cleaning/working.

Saturday evening we cuddled in front of the TV for our favorite... COPS. We had a great evening...very relaxing. We saw a special episode that took place in Boise. We were disappointed that the 'action' that made national tv was just a boy who had wandered away from his Mom and got a cop car ride back home again. Way to represent Boise! We need to have a COPS Caldwell episode....probably tons more action going on there.

Sunday we got up early, went to the gym, and came home & made breakfast. We're totally missing the hour that we lost today for daylight savings time but we're excited that it is going to stay light later. We did lots of work today, but did take a break to re-watch the movie Rounders.

So that is it folks...a boring weekend with the Sweigarts. I think we both feel like we accomplished a lot this weekend and we're both well rested...so we'll call it a success...but not exciting and barely blog-worthy.

Rammed Earth Debut

Last Sunday night, CJ & I saw his best friend live in concert for the first time here in Boise at a local bar, Terrapin Station. The band is called Rammed Earth and is incredible. The music sounded great, definitely too good to be local :). We really enjoyed watching Sean get to live out his dream. Sean's musical ability is fantastic and it was a treat to hear some cool guitar and drums. One of the songs we heard sounded a lot like a Smashing Pumpkin's song. Which, if you don't already know, is the highest complement we could pay. Here are some more pictures of our soon to be famous friend Sean & the rest of Rammed Earth....

Scott Goes Down!

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us got together from work to play a 'friendly' game of Texas Hold' Em. (see post Texas Fold'Em) Anyway, the winner was Scott. Scott is also the guy who is in the lead for our 'Biggest Loser' contest. And as I have said before, this guy just RUNS his mouth all of the time about how we are not going to win, how he won poker, how he jogs 6+ miles...it goes on and on and on. One day we were out having lunch and the guy pulls out a $20 bill with my name written on it! He actually wrote my name on the money he had won from the game and then proceeds to tell me that I am 'buying him lunch'. UGH! The nerve of this guy! So tonight I had an opportunity to redeem myself. A bunch of us got together again to play cards and I was on a mission. I didn't care what happened, just as long as Scott didn't win. Amazingly enough, Scott was the first to go out in only 3 hands! So once I felt that I had been vindicated, I concentrated on doing my best in the competition. There were about 12 people total and I was the only lady. It was tons of fun and the games lasted all evening. All night long I was not even close to the chip leader, but I played some conservative hands and ended up in the final three. After some amazing luck, the underdog took over and I got first prize = $120.00! Hurray! I was so excited. So excited that the second I got home I wrote Scott's name on his $20 that I won from him and took this GREAT picture. Today is a day where not only the woman takes the pot, but Scott gets knocked back down to size. I can sleep a happy girl. Oh, and Ciege is thrilled as well :)