Good News: Puppy Update!

I just emailed the breeder last night for an update about the pregnancy and turns out that everything is going swimmingly! The puppies are expected to be born around April 1! Which is, as you know 12 days away! Less than two weeks! I'm not sure how many puppies she's pregnant with, nor how many are males and females, but it's so very close! Just around the corner!

I can't believe it! We're going to be new mommies very soon, everyone! I'm so very excited. In other news, our redecorating and puppy prepping the house is going rather well.

Yesterday, my Duckie with a help from her dad moved out and donated a large hutch (that was in our room) as well as one of our couches (that was in our living room). We mounted the tv in our room up, and set up the puppy crate!

We're still working on rangling those pesky cords in. We'll end up moving the crate forward away from under the tv. But for now, that's where it will stay. As for our living room, everything opened up much more which is really nice.

I feel like I keep saying this but we are in the final stretches of perfecting everything. This week has been quite a whirlwind of events, and I've been hired as an after school library assistant at a high school as well as a cataloger at a historical society. I'm continuing work at my retail job for now, and am hoping to get a call back from another Library Assistant position. I'm going to be a very busy girl, but I want to make sure that we have that much more financial cushion should anything happen. 

Big news for me and for my girlfriend as well! She's going to her orientation today for her beauty school! She got a call last minute yesterday to see If she was still interested in starting this month - if not, she would have had to wait until May! So this is really great news! I am so proud of her and so excited that she gets to do something she loves. She says that she's very nervous because of how much she's invested into this school, but I hope she makes a lot of new friends and really enjoys herself! 

We're almost there! 

We're in the final stretch of preparation.

Hey everyone!

So I'm not sure if you remember, one of the last posts in July was what resulted in a game changer and stopped us from redecorating our house: The fact that it would cost A LOT of money to redo our backyard. And on top of that, turf was out of the question. So what ever are we going to do about our puppy going potty?

Well, thank goodness for the patio we have upstairs, because we went ahead and bought her a Porch Potty!

I read different articles about potty training your puppy and there seemed to be a problem with using potty pads indoors as it'll teach the dog to go inside. And we really wanted to eliminate that. We did get her some potty pads for the inside of her crate JUST in case. But we mainly wanted to focus on her going outside. So this was a perfect opportunity - since our backyard is, basically, not going to work out - we found something that was the next best thing.

So we will be on puppy potty duty almost every hour for the first couple of weeks and then we will work to ween her will train her to give us some kind of a queue. Needless to say, I am quite excited to start setting this up as well as her crate. 

I'm sure, as you guys all saw in the previous posts, we've set up some of the gates up so our cat will get used to having to use them. We're trying to make this process as painless for her as possible. We've set up very strict rules - Dogs aren't allowed on the bed or the couch. The guest room (soon to be our closet) is HER room and she has a tower in every single major room of our house. We're making sure that she doesn't feel like she's getting ALL of her territories confiscated. She has places to escape to. 

We're easing her into the process and we're trying very hard to set thing up prior to the puppy coming so that she will get used to the weird new things. 

I know, I know - this blog is rather dull and only someone like myself would get excited about the set up part, but like I said, we're in the final stretch - we've got a couple more months and the puppy will be ours!

Of Nautical Storms and Changes in the tides Pt.2

While we have a very long way to go - an arduous road to organization, we decided to give our upstairs a rest and do some really fun things, such as begin redecorating our living room! This of course is proving to be difficult....

In December, right around Christmastime, my girlfriend realized that there was a leak, which of course was warping our ceiling downstairs. We had to get that fixed, and what you would imagine to be a smooth sailing of recovery became a hellish ride of too many visits from the same people for not getting it right in the first time. Long story short - we've had a hole in our ceiling in our dining room since the beginning of January and it wasn't until yesterday that our leak was fixed. With this in mind, we've pretty much had everything shoved into the living room - which meant that we couldn't possibly take down anything from Christmas or clean anything from the holidays. That was until this past week where my girlfriend and I decided to say "forget it. We're moving everything back into the dining room and decorating" - we had gone shopping at home goods (which, by the way is my mothership now) and target to get some stuff to furnish our very very cold living room. It was all just piled up in our kitchen, because we had no place for it, but after a lot of consideration, we've managed to pull something together

We decided to go with a nautical theme to really brighten up our home. Using pastel and a lot of colours. 

Here's a look at our mantle where we've decided to add a touch of Disney with our Pin collection. 

And we've decided to get rid of all of the ash in our fireplace to decorate it with this beautiful piece here. 

We also even went and added some greenery by decorating Moose's new cat tree in the nautical theme!  This cat tower was $70 at Petsmart - on sale. Then, we went to Beverly's and bought some greenery, which we stapled onto the wood post. We also hot glued some nautical rope onto the post, and then glued some succulents, starfish and shells onto the rope and post itself. The red plant looked kind of like coral and so we tucked those into the greenery. (close up photos below)

So, instead of spending $600~$1000 on a cat tree that kind of sort of looks like a tree, 

We spent a little over $100 to make our own custom tree that goes with our decor. 

 Which, I think Moose is quite fond of... 

We needed to put a cat tree in our living room as a place for Moose to escape to when we have a puppy. 

Feel free to tell me what you think about this. We're thinking of getting rid of one of our bigger couches and replacing it with two armchairs instead. Just to open up the room more. We've got so much to do, and so little time! 

Of Nautical Storms and Changes in the tides pt.1

Hi, everyone! It's been so long since I've posted. A lot of things have happened in the last several months, as far as nesting goes, it's been on halt - until the past several weeks. We received the news on February 9th that Abby had been bred with Huxley. My girlfriend and are awaiting to hear the news if the breeding went swimmingly - it should only be a couple more days. If everything goes according to plan, the puppies should be born in the beginning of April, and we should be welcoming our's home in the end of May.

This exciting news of course prompted us to decide on redecorating our house and really getting our house to finally feel like a home. We were in for a complete redo - our whole house was in for a complete redo. Over the past five years or so, we've unknowingly accumulated a hoarding collection that could have been a precursor to "Buried Alive". This of course resulted in us hauling things to goodwill just to get rid of them: three very old televisions, multiple lamps, boxes and boxes full of gookers that we have collected throughout the years, clothes, books, paintings, frames, and so much more. We've made about three trips so far, and have several more to go.

We essentially started with our guest room and the hallway closets upstairs. We're looking to convert our guest room into a walk in closet/Moose's room. One of the biggest thing was cleaning out one of our closets so we can put Moose's litter box in there instead of it being in our room. Mainly for safety reasons when the puppy gets here.

Here is a photo of me in moose's new Potty Closet Organizing things

Moose's Potty Closet will have her litter box (automatic cleaning litter box) on the floor, while we have the girlfriend's Crafts on the bottom shelf, Christmas Decorations in the second shelf and the girlfriend's previous art projects/canvases/sketch books in the top shelf. As you can see in that photo, we've still got a long way to go 

Photo of the closet in our guest room. We had transferred all of the clothes and shoes that were in the closet in our room to the closet in the guest room 

We still have A LOT of stuff to sort through and throw away, but this room used to be filled with stuff. We're slowly making progress. 

This is the closet opposite Moose's Potty closet. We've dubbed this closet our linen closet and we've also put a box of memorabilia on the bottom. 

We opened up a lot of closet space in our room and we've decided to make this one our Holiday Decor closet. Oh, how it feels great to be organized.

I will definitely be adding more photos and keeping you guys all updated a we progress on this project. I'll continue on with the home decor in Part 2 of this post.

Home redecorating reality check!

Hi all!

So Duck and I decided to begin our redecorating extravaganza yesterday by starting off with our backyard and upstairs patio. The patio needed a bit of a sweep down and a rise.

We've neglected it for so long that it accumulated a lot of spiders, bugs and leaves from the recently removed tree in our backyard. We want to put an outdoor rug with a little sitting area and table. A patch of grass, maybe so that Moose will be able to enjoy the outdoors with us. So we got to work...

Power spraying the backyard sounds easier than it actually is. Especially on such a small area that's overflowing with yucky bugs. After letting Duck have a reign on the patio for about ten or fifteen minutes, we've decided to let the patio dry before we apply bug spray.


 On to the backyard we trekked. We have BIG plans for our backyard: Installing a tile patio with hopefully some lawn for our future puppy and to add some greenery to the area. Perhaps a gazebo and a sectional for our friends to enjoy. In order to begin this whole process however, we had to get rid of the rock/gravel that is currently cozying it up back there.It makes our backyard look like a barren wasteland!

Our backyard, like everything else in our house, has a lot of potential. Not to mention, I'm renting this place from a dear friend of mine, and really want to help her raise the value of this property! It's such a great home, really, and with the right touch, it can be the coziest place! I can admit that we have been quite neglectful what with school and jobs, but I hope now that I have a bit of extra time before my Master's program starts and between looking for a job,  I'll be able to give our home the right kind of TLC that it deserves.


So with all of that motivation in mind, it was full steam ahead. We get to work. In the 90°F heat, we began shoveling gravel into a bag only 1/3 of the way because we lack the proper tools to haul the bags out conveniently.  We start in one of the corners, scraping the top layer away And then, after two or three scoops, all of the sudden, TING. ....W...what was that? Our shovel literally stopped after the first layer. Can't go any further and we feel like we're going to break our shovel. Why can't we get into the soil?

If we had done more research into this, we would have known, but the land that this is built on is adobe. It is rock hard and we can't get through it. Thanks to Duck's dad, who informed us of the state of the land and continued to tell us that our backyard is absolutely inconvenient for us to really do anything besides gravel and tile. Mainly because there is no gate opening and will not be able to get the proper tools into our yard.

sigh. Can't a girl with creative energy and nesting craze get a break around here? What do I have to do to channel this creative energy?

Completely disheartened and slightly irritated, something that happens extremely easily for me these days, we trudged our way back upstairs to reel it in and discuss our options.

1. We could continue with the tile and add nicer gravel where we were going to add grass and have some plants to add colour.
2. We could make our entire back yard tile.
3. Hire a landscaper.

We went with option number three and are awaiting a landscaper to come and look at our backyard and give us an estimate on the cost of fixing it up.

So all in all, our plans to do this all on our own to save some money has gone down the drain. I'm just hoping that my motivation doesn't go down with it.

Thanks for reading!

Much love,

Lily