Hello everyone. Hope this finds you all well. Last week was a really productive week for us. We met with the Hardwood floor man last Tuesday. He is awesome!!! Says he has seen worse than what we have and has been in his line of work for over 20 years. He's a total hippie, older, and knows what he is doing. Here is his before and after gallery so you can see some of his beautiful work. http://www.zenhardwood.com/Gallery.html

I painted more cabinet doors for the rental side throughout the week. I just put on music I can sing my heart out to and paint away for hours.

This is how the cabinets looked before.

This is with the cabinet doors off.

Painted Cabinets!!!!!!!

So Gross. This is what was behind the cabinet on the Rental side.

On Saturday, our friend Nate came over to look at all the walls. He does really great drywall work and gave us the run down on what needs to be done before he can come in and do his magic:) It was fun talking about which walls we could keep that are in good shape and the other ones that we would have to beat the hell out of.

This is Nate and Daniel talking about the walls.

The wall in the living room on "Our Side"-Before

Walls in the Kitchen on "Our Side"- Before

Ready to DEMO!!!! This was today:)

Kitchen Wall- After Pic

Daniel's wall in the Living Room- After Pic

Oh YEAH!!!!!!!!!!

Ceiling Time.

Crazy huh????

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~Before~

~After~

Today, we (Daniel and I) got to really get after those walls that needed to be removed. We worked from 2:00 PM to 6:45PM and feel GREAT!!!! Man I love working hard and seeing the instant results. "Our side", that will be our future home looks like a scene of destruction. Oh YEAH!!!!!!!!! It looks amazing:) So crazy, to see the before and after from just today. We were so dusty and gross, but oh is was so fulfilling. We came back to our other home, took nice long showers, and talked about how very thankful we are that we can come to a 2nd home and have the privilege to bath in a hot shower. Just think of all the people that work in rock quarries, or mines, or any hard labor job and can't go home and take a simple hot bath... warm bath... even cold bath. How much we have to be thankful for in our day to day lives. Nothing is small. So, as Daniel and I sit here on the couch all nice and clean, we look forward to the many days ahead where we can work hard for what we have been given and always be reminded how we can never take that for granted.

Cheers to the rest of your week.

~A~

The Rush Family Bought a Duplex~

Alright. Lets see how this goes. I am not a blogger, but I'm sure going to try.

Daniel and I moved to Portland almost a year ago. We had talked about buying a place, but not until we had lived here for a year at least. Well, as we began exploring areas of Portland that we loved we decided to go ahead and look into some of the homes we were seeing. Just to look...

Daniel being the amazing researcher that he is, found our Fantastic Realtor Alia Hazen with Keller Williams. My 1st impression of Alia was that she was cute, confident, and very honest. That's what I realised I needed and wanted in the Realtor we were going to have:) The 1st home we looked at we bonded pretty quickly, when she told me not to look into random sheds out in the back of any of the empty homes we may view, because you never know what you may find in them.
Well... being Adrienne, what do I do, I look.

And there was a FOOT!!!!!!!

And then it MOVED!!!!!

Thankfully, I guess... but you should have seen how quickly I moved to Alia and said, "There's a person in there". She said, "I told you!".

The rest is history. She has been such a gem and a true picture of what every Realtor should be like. We looked at some pretty awful places and never once did she make comments or give opinions unless we asked and then it was always helpful honesty.

So, after our many TN and TX travels throughout the summer and fall we got back and were ready to really pursue finding our place. I think it was three or four days after we got back from our last trip that Daniel found this Duplex. He immediately contacted Alia and we went and saw it. We loved it and decided to go ahead and put down an offer. There were only two offers and the bank accepted ours!!!!!!! When we heard this news, Daniel and I kept on looking at each other and saying, "Hey, we own a Duplex:)"

As of November 30th we received our keys and oficially closed on our new home. We celebrated with champagne, Mellow Mushroom pizza, and little heater to keep us warm while we ate on the floor in one of the bedrooms.

Now the renovations have begun. We will be moving out of our apartment that we have been living in the last year at the end of February. We will move into the left side of the duplex (which will be the rental side eventually), while working on the right side that will be our real home for next many years:)

I will try to post things when I can and will probably send more pictures than anything. Hope you enjoy it. It's a really exciting time in our lives and look forward to sharing the Venture with you all!

~A~