SLC Vacation?

OK so I'm going back a couple of months in the next couple of blogs cuz I really wanted to write all about our last month in the states. We got a lot done during that month and had tons of fun with so many people I didn't want to skip it all. While we were able to visit with a lot of friends and family before we left, with everything going on, we didn't have near enough time to visit everyone we wanted. We officially moved out of our St. George place at the beginning of July and were off to stay with Ender's parents in SLC. Our main goal while there was to visit everyone we hadn't seen in our last couple of short visits, with a side goal of getting our condo fixed up. We have a condo we purchased as a rental property about 6 years ago. Our renter moved out just in time for our visit up north so we thought we'd fix a couple of things before renting it out again. We figured it would take a week and since we would be there for two we'd have plenty of time to visit with people. Wow! We were wrong. The place was worse than we remembered. Every room had ugly wall paper in it. We remembered one room having it but was told our first renter had taken it down, which was not the case. We knew we needed a new tub but once we were there we decided to update the whole bathroom so that was pretty much gutted. We replaced all the fixtures, door knobs, kitchen cabinet knobs, outlets and covers, and light fixtures. The worst, by far, was the wall paper. I can't even guess as to how long the stuff had been up and underneath were more layers of wall paper that had been painted over. Ender found a small piece of shiny gold wall paper that, at one point, must have covered the hall/entrance. The wall paper came down pretty easily in one bedroom and the living room, although the walls still needed some work before painting. The master bedroom wall paper had other plans. The paper itself came off fairly easily but the glue stayed put. Days were spent wetting the walls and then scraping the glue off. It was such a slow, messy, irritating process. Luckily we had some help with the entire project. Thankfully my brother was unemployed and able to help us. (Sarcasm people but we did appreciate the help and he went back to work soon after all the scraping and painting was done.) Scott and Ender spent one whole day in that room scraping glue as I had done the day before and it still wasn't done. We did eventually get all walls, trim, and doors painted, the bathroom re-done, new fireplace mantel put on, and a new backsplash for the kitchen. We love the way it all turned out and what's really important is our new renter loves the place. We had lots of help from Ender's dad and mom, his sister and my brother. Even Jen, Jacob's birth mom, came one Sat and watched Jacob for us while we worked. So now for some before and after pictures. We didn't get as many before pictures as we wanted. We kept forgetting to bring the camera.

Before of the 2nd bedroom (all that grey is wallpaper )

After of 2nd room

Bathroom before

Bathroom gutted

Bathroom Finished

Old fireplace mantel

Mantel and living room mid renovation

Ender warming his hands to show off the new mantel

Before Kitchen (that border was a pain to get down)

After kitchen (I loved the way the kitchen came out!)

Our little helper

In all it took three weeks of long days working on the place. We got to see only a couple of the many friends we wanted to. Because everyone was working during the day we had Jacob with us almost everyday we were there. He had just started crawling and wanted to get into everything; paint, screws, nails, hardware, outlets, you know all baby friendly things. He hated most of the loud noises we made and had a hard time taking naps while we tried to work. To say he slowed us down would be a huge understatement. At the same time it became a huge family project that Ender and I will always remember. On a side note we found an amazing fast food Mexican place around the corner that we had for lunch as often as I could get Ender to eat there and we reintroduced ourselves to slurplees which we had many of.