Decking the Halls!

I absolutely love decorating our house for Christmas!  Plus every year I joke about "decking the Halls" because our last name is Hall…get it?!  Christmas is my favorite holiday, but of course here in Minnesota, that means lots of snow and freeeeezing temperatures (yesterday it got all the way up to 3 degrees), so decorating the house and celebrating the season is the only way to get through! 

I apologize for the terrible quality of these pictures.  I actually do own a nice camera, but I can't get to it at the moments.  We are getting new carpet in 5 rooms this weekend, so our house is in shambles in every other place you don't see pictured.  

The Tree: No fake trees around here!  I just can't do it!

A few favorite ornaments.  We always buy Christmas ornaments when we go on vacation, even if we've been there before, so here are a few from our travels this year!

New this year:

Ireland

Germany

Austria

Colorado

California

The living room:

I always use this card holder, we only have 2 cards so far though!  Usually I have to stuff them in there by Christmas!

Dining room:  I have a thing for Scandinavian Christmas decor, so this garland always goes up!

Weekend (or lack thereof)

Oh hey, Monday morning.  While the rest of the world is heading to work I am finally enjoying a day off!  I've been working for the past week and 2 weekends, so I really don't have a ton of fun weekend updates to report on. We had dinner on Friday night with our good friends Brenna and Tate at their townhouse.  The storm that rolled through was so crazy and the lights were flickering as we ate, but we didn't lose power.  Apparently we lost power at our house at some point, but it was back on by the time we were home.  I guess we were lucky because there are still people in the Twin Cities without power!

We went out for a couple beers after I got home on Saturday, but I turned in pretty early that night.  I had to go to a yoga thing right after work last night, so when I got home at 7:30 I was almost in tears I was so tired!  I poured myself a tall vodka tonic, watched some tv, and went to bed.

The big news of the weekend is that the plumbing and tile work is all done in our bathroom!  That means we have a working shower, tub, faucet, and toilet upstairs! Woo hoo!

Our bathtub hasn't worked ever since we moved into our house 1.5 years ago.  The part of the tub that switches the water from the shower head to the tub filler wasn't working, so I have never ever taken a bath in this house!  I don't really take leisurely baths, but I did regularly take ice baths and epsom baths after long runs while training for my last marathons, so this is just in time!

Hope everyone else had a nice weekend and that the storms here didn't cause you any damage!

Bathroom Remodel

Never have I ever been so thankful that we have 2 bathrooms in our house.  I probably said that sometime around March, when our upstairs shower became unusable, but now I really mean it.  Yesterday our sink and toilet were ripped out of the upstairs bathroom also, and I really can't imagine what we would do if we didn't have a bathroom in the basement.

Let me back up a bit...

A few months ago I was walking through our downstairs guest room and noticed that the ceiling was wet.  I panicked and yelled for Mark, who proceeding to touch the ceiling and cause part of it to crumble.  We ended up with a gaping hole in the ceiling and lots of water dripping down.  Originally we thought the culprit was ice dams, but eventually we had a plumber tell us that the bathtub was leaking into the basement!  Eeek!  So we have been showering in our basement ever since and getting lots of quotes on a remodel.  Our trip to Europe put this project on hold for a bit, but now we are finally on the way to a new bathroom!

We toyed with expanding the bathroom or adding a master bath while we were already in there, but ended up deciding on just retiling, putting in new fixtures, new plumbing, and repainting.  Most of it will get done this week, but the painting won't happen until July.

Here is a "before" picture of the bathroom...

I really can't wait to post an "after" picture soon!!