Random updates with a side of panda

This post will be a bit all over the place but I wanted to give a few updates about what we've been up to lately. My parents, sister & nephew came to visit a few weeks ago for 10 days and we had an amazing time! We kept it a secret from our kids that my sister & nephew were also coming. Our oldest son & my nephew are 6 weeks apart and they have all grown up together and the look on our kids faces when they saw him was priceless! We took those 10 days off from doing any work on the property to be able to spend as much time as possible with my family while they were here. Saying "see ya later" was really hard for all of us, but especially the kids who are super close to their Mimi & Pappy.
After they left Atom & I sat down & made a game plan for the next couple of months. We're going to push back starting to build the kitchen from scratch on the second floor until mid September. This will give us time to work on & (hopefully) finish up several other smaller projects that are all going on simultaneously. Story of any homeowners life right?! This is just on a much larger scale. Oooooof.

Bathroom
We're close to *finally* being completely done. It's fully functional at this point. The shower, sinks etc are all in place & working great! The walls & ceiling are painted and all of the new fixtures are installed. The hold up now is the floor. Atom had to patch some of the concrete where there were holes from where the old radiator pipes were. That has to set for 28 days before he can stain/paint/seal the floor. In the meantime he's going to work on building the wall cabinets and towel racks etc & I'll work on making curtains for the window to match the one in the shower. Once all of that is finally done I'll do a separate reveal post with photos etc. Promise. In the mean time, here's a bathroom photo from this morning when Stewart got a much needed bath.

Roof
Atom busted through the old roof access from a room up on the 4th floor last week. It had previously been sealed off when the new roof was put on and the only access to the roof was up the fire escape. No way in heck was I brave enough to climb that sucker to get up there. No thanks. In all honesty, the 100 year old original wooden ladder on the 4th floor probably wasn't a single bit safer but at least it was only one story to climb & not four.





The view from the top is breathtaking. We're clearly the tallest building in the neighborhood! Atom hopes to eventually have a roof top patio up there with VERY high railings all the way around.

Beer!
Last weekend Atom brewed beer for the first time since moving here. Our neighbor came over & Atom showed him the ropes when it comes to beer making. He was so happy to be finally brewing again as he used to brew all the time before moving here & he will be doing a lot more brewing in the future (hint, hint.) 😉

Pandas caught on camera
The week we arrived in Huntington we ordered a 16 channel high definition infrared security camera system. We had one (on a much smaller scale) for our house back in San Diego and we knew we wanted a system on this property as well. Not necessarily because of crime or anything like that (there isn't much of that here thankfully) but more so to have eyes on all sides of the building at all times.

After attending a birthday party for a friend this past Friday evening, Atom & I had to swing by Walmart to buy cat food since our cats are basically teenage boys & we weren't planning on going to Costco for another week. While in the store we stumbled across this:

Feeling silly mixed with pure exhaustion, we bought 2 giant panda heads and hatched a plan. We drove home and tip-toed over to our neighbors house who we knew were also home since we were all at the same party & left at similar times to get home to relieve our babysitters. We donned our panda heads, climbed through bushes & tapped on their windows. A few moments later their front door opened and we jumped out and hysterical laughter was had by all. They are seriously the best neighbors ever & we have so much fun with them. Still feeling silly, Atom & I pranced through both of our parking lots back to our front door and wouldn't you know, it was caught on our cameras.

After throughly embarrassing our kids (and our amazing babysitter) as we danced into the living room they were quick to claim the panda heads as their own.

3rd floor movie theatre
Our boys have become extra Star Wars obsessed lately (more so than usual) and we've been watching the series all the way through again. This afternoon, Atom & the boys decided to set up our projector and Harmon Kardon surround sound system up on the third floor (the giant former secret meeting room) and the result was amazing. For now our "screen" is a 15 foot wrinkly drop cloth but it gets the job done. I'm sure every neighbor within a mile radius heard the opening credits to episode 4. The entire house shook from the sound system and it was AWESOME! You'd never know it was the middle of the afternoon- with the windows covered & doors shut it was pitch black in there.

We're talking about taking down the arch & turning the entire wall into a giant movie screen/wall. We used the high definition fleck paint on a wall at our house in San Diego for the projector & it turned out amazing so we'll do the same here. It will just require A LOT more paint.

That's all for now. I could go on for several more pages, but it's late and we are heading to bed. I'll be sure to write up another post this week about some really neat symbolism we have been noticing around the building.

Hope y'all had a fabulous weekend! Make a point to do something FUN this week! You're never too old to be silly & laugh until you can't breathe.

Theresa