Jamie's little baby bump!

Today I spent the day with my good pal Jamie, shooting a few maternity pictures of her beautiful glowing self.  We had a lot of fun walking the trails, enjoying the 50 degree weather and playing with her pup, Drake.  Hopefully our next shoot will include her handsome hubby!

 

 

 

Majestic Wonders of Winter!!

Today I decided to try out my new lens by exploring Minnehaha waterfall, which was said to be a majestic winter wonderland!!  I grabbed my camera, threw on my boots, hat and down vest and headed out to check out the falls. There were lots of people out enjoying the 38 degree sunshine filled day! And majestic winter wonderland they were indeed!! The frozen falls were beautiful, with hues of blue, red and yellow peeking out behind the sides. I couldn't resist the urge to climb over the locked gate, which put me up close and personal with the frozen wonders.  Then I scrambled up the hill and behind the falls to get a better view. Man I'm glad that I did. It was amazing!! If you don't believe me you can see for yourself....enjoy the pics!

 

The Time (Dirty Bit)....

Yippee skippee! It's finally time for a little CONstruction...versus the massive amounts of DEstruction we've been doing to This Old House!  My last stretch of time off of work was spent removing the last of the outer walls. Can you say remove plaster, then lath, then  insulation, now repeat?  Now repeat again until it's all gone. We dumped over 6,000 pounds of This Old House when it was all said and done!  Phew...it was an all over body workout! And dusty filthy too. But it felt good to have the house stripped down to it's bare bones. Like we're moving in the right direction anyway.

Here's a little of what our work zone looked like...

(from the view of our camera phones)

Yep, that's me getting ready to rip off  some lath.
(Sorry the pictures won't upload correctly, blogger needs to fix it)

John's tearing off lath and insulation from the attic 

Recognize that beautiful wall color? That's our dining room!! No more mauve plaster :) 

The mounds of insulation were endless...I felt like I shoveled 5000 barrels full! 

These are the upstairs walls when we were finished
(I wish they would upload correctly!) 

The ceiling

Our second floor framing when it we were done removing all the plaster, lath and insulation! Whoo hoo!
Ready for framing and moving walls...pretty much anyway.

Now John's been working at framing up the downstairs little by little. It's not as easy and fast a process as new construction so we'll see how things progress. We're hoping to finish up our concrete mess in the basement this weekend and be finished with the basement floor for a while! For now we're just happy to be done with most of the deconstruction portion of the project and making some progress forward building.  I can't wait for warmer weather to get here so my fingers don't freeze and my nose doesn't constantly drip while I work in my mask.  And in general, we continue to have the time of our lives while we muttle through this house project together...and I must say it's definitely a dirty bit.