Wives Unscripted

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When we bought our house last June, we fell in love immediately with it. Well, almost every part of it! The only thing we knew we wanted to change immediately was the master bathroom. The bathroom obviously was never updated and was original to when the home was bought by the original owners. It had a VERY small shower, 3×3 enough room to move around in and nothing else.  There was an ugly countertop, a horrible waste of space floor to ceiling shelf, that couldn’t even be reached because the shelves were SO high! And the worst part of all, the horrible looking, black and white checkered tile, everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. Here are the before pics:

Horrible shower, no space. The shower was so high too And the previously mentioned horrible black and white tile.

A picture of the shelf I was talking about, do you see how high those shelves are? We couldn’t even reach them! And such a waste of space!

Not so pretty countertop.  Horrible, tile wall again.

Horrible, old, looking exhaust fan!

We actually had to stop using the shower soon after we moved in. We noticed in the living room, which is directly below the master suite, there was a dent in the ceiling, where they obviously had a leak before and got it patched.  So no matter if we were planning to remodel or not, we would have had to do so because of this leak.

We came to another issue when we went to explore in the attic, the exhaust fan wasn’t hooked up to anything outside, it just went into the attic. So my husband had to fix that as well.

We started by removing all of the tile.  That took about two days.  Taking tile down is no joke! Then we removed the old shower base and all the shelving.

Our plan is to have a 3×5 shower, with a regular shower head and a rain shower head, a recycled granite shower pan, poreclin tile on the shower ceiling, wall and bathroom floor, a quartz countertop and a framless glass door. I’m also going to repaint the bathroom vanity from it’s like oak color to a darker color.

So, we started demolition of the bathroom back in November, and unfortunately, 5 months later, we still are working on it! It’s getting there though, stay tuned for updates!

 

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When you live in Western, NY or really anywhere where winter lasts from November through April, by this time of the year you are really itching for winter to be over.  I do like winter, the beautiful snow falling, building snowmen, sledding, and all the winter sports.  Snow around Christmas is a must for me.  In fact the year we lived in PA, we didn’t get much snow, and it felt SOOO weird to not have snow on the ground most of the winter. But by this time of the year, everything is just cold, gray, dirty and dull.  I’m ready for sun and some warmer temperatures!

This year winter seems to have an extra long hold on us, even though it’s not too abnormal for us to still have snow this time of the year.  In fact, just 22 years ago on March 3rd, we had a horrible ice storm.  We were without power for over a week.  But this year, it just seems so LONG.  I’m looking forward to this weekend when we are expected to finally get up to the mid 40s.  I have so many projects that I want to do that require me to do some work outside, or spray paint which requires me to work in a certain temperature.  I’m ready for it to be warm (and light enough) for me to take our dog for a walk when I get home without bundling up and pulling out a flashlight to bring with me.  And it’s not just us, all over the country everyone seems to have an extended winter this year.

I’m looking forward to Daylight Saving time this weekend.  Though it will be darking in the morning for a while, it will be much lighter when I get home every day.  That definitely helps me deal with the last gasps of winter mother nature is throwing us.

What are you looking forward to once winter is finally over this year?

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If you have followed all my other posts, you know that I am a sucker for all holidays. A few weeks before Valentine’s Day, I set to work on my St Patrick’s Day decorations.

I traced and cut out 90 shamrocks from three different colors of felt. I sewed together a variety of lengths to make some garlands to hang around the house. This one is over our bookshelf with some green lights (which of course did not show up in the picture).

I hung this one up as a banner and made a rainbow pom pom garland to accent it. The pom pom garland was super easy as well. I used some embroidery floss and needle to string these together with knots on either side to hold them in place. I have more with dark and  light green pom poms on our banisters.

For this banner, I made rainbows from overlaying the different colors of felt on top of each other. I would sew together the shamrocks and then into the red of the rainbow. I would stop and pick up in the other side of the red.

With all of the felt that I had used, I had these random remnants of scrap felt. They were too small to do much with but too big for me to just throw away. I started cutting out small circles from them. Then I went through and stitched them together. This one took a while to get the hang of because I had to go through and pin them all together. It sort of looks like a snake hanging up there but it was not where I intended it to go. I just needed something to decorate my dining room with.

I am going to begin work on my Easter decor but since St. Patrick’s Day is only two weeks before this year, I am going to try  to make them more spring decor so I can leave them up longer. Time to get back to the drawing board!

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I love nutella,  I love brownies, and I LOOOOVE easy directions with simple ingredients so it was a no brainer to repin a recipe for 3 ingredient Nutella brownies onto my Pinterest board. In case you haven’t experienced the heaven that is Nutella it is a chocolate and hazelnut spread. Almost two years ago I had never even tried Nutella preferring my chocolate in bar form.  After my daughter was born I was dropping weight fast, having a hard time keeping my calories up and since I was nursing I was also panicking that breast feeding would be affected. Since Nutella holds a lot of calories in one little spoonful (of course) it was added to my husband’s calorie packed grocery list. I found many things to be quite tasty dipped into nutella, strawberries, bananas, graham crackers, any crackers, chocolate chip cookies, a spoon, you get the picture I am sure.

The directions for the brownies were extremely straight forward:

Ingredients:

1 cup Nutella, 10 Tbs of flour, 2 Eggs

1) Mash ingredients

2) Pour into pan

3) Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes(less time for muffins) or when center is done.

Yup pretty simple. This is what I did and how it worked for me. I did find the above directions pretty lacking.

I gathered my ingredients and tried to decide how I would mix. Typically I like to slowly add my dry ingredients to my ‘wet’ ingredients but I knew in this case the nutella and egg were not going to blend well so I began by mixing my egg and flour then slowly adding in my Nutella.

It was kind of a pain (to say the least)

For every gob of nutella I scraped into my mixture I thought “please don’t let me be wasting this entire cup of nutella on bad brownies.

I grabbed my mini muffin pan and very lightly coated with shortening followed up by dropping about a tablespoon and a half of mixture into each cup. I tend to fill my muffin tins level I don’t mind an overfilled muffin as much as I do an under-filled one though and so many baking directions tell you to fill  a muffin tin about 2/3 of the way I did not do that here and they came out perfectly fine size-wise, I did end up not filling my entire pan though.

I set my timer for 20 minutes  since I knew the muffins would bake quicker than a pan of brownie mix would and popped the pan into the center of my oven.  Around the 15 minute mark I decided to take a peek which immediately led me to testing out the center with a toothpick since they looked so done already.

The tootpick did not come out clean but I decided I would not leave them baking for much longer before testing again. I then lost track of time and just before the timer ran out I pulled the muffins out, tested and they were done. They do look pretty good, don’t they?

I did find them to be a bit on the dry side so  if I were to make them again I would set the timer for 15 minutes and test them more often or just make them in a 9 x 9 pan. Since they did not end up tasting all that chocolatey I have to wonder if some of the nutella I measured out was lost in the transition. I had  a hard time getting it all into mix and used three or four utensils to get it all in leaving quite a bit of nutella residue on each utensil. I also wonder if I should not have coated my pan since one of ingredients of nutella is a nut after all and perhaps it wasn’t necessary. They did pop out extremely easy.

Overall they were okay but nothing mind blowing (considering they were made out of Nutella). I will probably stick to using Nutella as a spread and using a box or from scratch for my brownies.