casey and anna

Continuing the updates…

We tore our bedroom walls out upon moving in as well. This room had strange curvatures along the ceiling-to-wall joining point. We had to do some reframing, but now the corners are square. This room also contains a huge wall of closet space (this will be my closet), as well as a tiny closet (Casey’s closet :-p). Old homes typically don’t have that much storage space, so we lucked out in our bedroom.

This room remained wall free until my parents visited over Thanksgiving and helped put the walls (and ceiling) up . Casey and I spent Jan-Feb mudding the walls/ceiling, painting and then laying a new hardwood floor. We ‘moved into’ our bedroom in early March. We are not quite done with the room–we still need molding and closet doors.

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I am finally getting around to the Honolulu portion of our Hawaii ‘06 trip. We spent July 14-19th at a small hotel called the Aqua Palms. The hotel is recently renovated, well-priced, and within walking distance of most everything.

While in Honolulu, we spent a day visiting the aquarium and zoo. From the outside, the aquarium looks outdated, but once inside, we had a spectacular time. The animals were fun to view and learn about. The zoo was fairly small, but managed to keep us entertained for a few hours.

We also spent a day at Diamond Head. Our concierge informed us that it would be no problem to walk to Diamond head from our hotel, but we were a bit concerned with this as it seemed to be quite the distance on a map. So we decided to take a bus to a closer area and walk from there and were told that the walk would be “about 10 minutes”. Well, 4o minutes later we arrived…. at the entrance to the park. From there we had to walk 15 more minutes into the park to the beginning of the trail. Thankfully the Diamond Head hike is pretty easy. It didn’t take us very long to make it to the top (less time than it took for us to make it to the park). The view was definitely worth the hike–gorgeous!

Our last day there was spent driving around the island. We had a leisurely drive and enjoyed stopping at different beaches and towns to take in the sights.

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It will not suffice for Maggie to simply sit beside us on the couch or in a chair. She absolutely must climb atop any pillows in the area and ’smoosh’ them. We have had a constant battle of me trying to keep the pillows fluffy while she just tries to flatten them.

I’m attaching evidence of the pillow smooshing, as well as some other recent cute shots of the dogs.

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It’s been a little over a year since we moved into our home and started renovations. I plan to update the site with pictures of where we currently are with each room. As a reminder, we have had to completely gut each room (we’re talking wall removal, rewiring, insulating, putting up fresh drywall, etc). We are doing the work ourselves, with the great help of our parents every few months. We primarily work on weekends, so things go fairly slowly. But, I am proud of where we are today.

The first room I want to start with is the kitchen. We started work on this room immediately upon moving in. The floors were covered in a grass green and patterned carpet. After removing the carpet, we discovered another layer of carpet, then layers of linoleum. We finally hit the original hardwoods, but they were in too poor of shape to fix (lots of water damage). We opted to repair the weak spots in the original hardwood and then put our own hardwoods down. Eventually we will resand the other hardwoods in the house and try to match the stain of the hardwoods in the kitchen.

We took the original walls down and put up new walls. We also closed off the entry from the kitchen to the half bath (on the right side of the kitchen to the left of the fridge). New windows were installed as well. Eventually we got the room into shape for painting, but made a poor paint choice. We have recently repainted (Castleton Mist by Benjamin Moore) and think the room looks great.

There are still a few things left to do in this room (moldings and toe kicks for the base cabinets for starters), but we’re almost there…

-Anna

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Last weekend, Casey and I visited Heritage Farm with some of his labmates. The leaves are changing colors here in middle Vermont/NH, so the drive to the farm was quite beautiful. The farm itself is located in Sanbornton, NH (about 1.5 hours away from our home).

Once there, we visited their petting zoo, played on the playground (I greatly enjoyed the swings, although the seats were a bit uncomfortable now that I’ve hit my 20s…) and then were served a fantastic breakfast for supper. There were platters of homemade pancakes (blueberry, apple cinnamon, pumpkin, and regular), eggs, hashbrowns, and bacon. Mmm. After supper, we were taken on a “hay ride”, although I say this loosely since there actually wasn’t any hay involved. Fine by me–hay can be itchy.

The high point of our evening was the corn maze. We went into the maze with a plan– a no fail plan– but to our dismay, we still came out of the maze in one of the last clusters.

To end the evening, we enjoyed fresh, homemade ice cream. I am a sucker for homemade ice cream, so this was certainly a delight. I had the chocolate, while Casey tried the blueberry maple. I must say the chocolate was truly amazing–just perfect for that chocolate craving.

-Anna

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While in Honolulu we got the chance to dine at Alan Wong’s. We found the food quite tasty and the presentation excellent (with an amazing attention to detail). We snapped quite a few pictures of the food.

Of the food that we had I can share a few comments.
The appetizers were quite good. The special appetizer that night was a tomato soup (two colors, in the shape of a Taijitu, served in a Margarita glass and topped with a parmesean crisp). Anna loved the parmesean crisp (according to her it’s the best cheese-it ever). The entrees that our group got were all excellent. The Ginger Crusted Onaga was clearly the best entree, however. The mushrooms and corn complemented the fish wonderfully. I would highly suggest that people try this entree. I’ve put up some pictures of our food. Bon Appétit!

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We vacationed in Hawaii from July 10-20 and had a splendid time! About 4 days were spent on Kauai, and the other time spent in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. This post contains the pictures from Kauai.

On Kauai we visited the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, specifically the Allerton Gardens, where we enjoyed the lovely vista shown below. It was an interesting tour, as the Allerton Gardens are skillfully designed. In these gardens, each “room” is directed towards making visitors to the gardens feel a certain way. This is often accomplished with water and noise. The bamboo portion, which you enter first as you get to the gardens, is an excellent example of this.

We also visited the Napali (Na Pali) coast again. Once more the views were amazing. We took a much smaller boat this time. The trip was slightly rougher (ok, quite a lot rougher). As we got to the Napali, rain was falling over the cliffs. The rain kept it’s distance as we never encountered it during our trip though it did make for some impressive views of the cliffs. The smaller boats are nice because they are able to both enter caves and snorkel in areas that the larger boats must avoid. Also, on our return we saw hovercraft leaving the Pacific Missile Range and heading to a larger navy ship off the coast. We managed to get a few distant pictures of them, though unfortunately the pictures can’t show the noise that the fans on these vehicles make.

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