Cheers

Finally it's...

    

AND IT'S DELICIOUS!!

so we decided to share :)

Photo taken by Ally at her and Sam's Bayside testing

Verdict = TWO THUMBS UP

We are LOVING our new hobby!

A Family Affair

Our blog is a little behind as most of you have probably figured out since we've been living at the condo since June 1st. But its coming down to working on the house verse blogging about the house...and we know which one trumps.

Chris and I are very family oriented and are lucky that we live close to most of our family. We are also extremely lucky that our family is as pumped about our new place and fixing it up as we are. So a condo project for us has turned into a condo project for all!

The first weekend we had a full team ready for anything!! Our goals for the weekend:
 Paint:
* Ceilings
* Medallions
* Wainscoting - and for those of you who don't know what wainscoting is (as I didn't) it's the bottom panels of the walls in our dinning room

With our project manager dishing out orders (in the most pleasant way of course) 

we were good to go!

Ceilings were broken into two tag teams:

Tag Team A - Whitney and Nicole

  

Side note this picture looks a lot like a picture of us from 2007 doing Habitat for Humanity in Springfield...guess we were destined to do home repairs together :) 

Tag Team B - Chris and Alex 

(Louisa was kind of enough to loan us her fiance while she ran wedding errands)

      

When repainting any room you always want to start with the ceiling. It allows you to be a less careful when it comes to the edges that meet the walls but it also splatters EVERYWHERE and would be a nightmare if you got it all over your freshly painted walls. **Note it is really important to put drop cloths (old sheets or painters paper) down to cover all the floors to prevent paint splatter which is a pain to try to remove from wood floors (lesson learned). 

Next steps - you want team member 1 to paint about 1- 2 inches out from where the ceiling meets the the wall (also known as cutting) this makes the rolling process easier. Then person 2 is right behind ready with the roller.

Since we had such rock star ceiling painters and Louisa joined our paining crew we were able to split the master into ceiling and crown molding painters.

    

We had Uncle Joey on Medallions and Living room Ceiling

 

and Dad and Grandy on the Wainscoting 

      

Then Jill showed up and the fun really began :)

Let the cleaning begin

The first thing we did when we got in the condo was clean clean clean. This of course you think would be quick and easy...but like everything with this condo it turned out to be more of an adventure than we planned for.  Chris' mom Jill decided to start with windows and man was that an awesome decision. Such an immediate improvement...we could finally see out of windows which probably hadn't been cleaned since the renters moved in years ago. My mom picked the bathroom to make it usable and Chris picked taking down all the shades, nails, other leftover hardware. I picked the kitchen hoping to get the cabinets cleaned quickly to move things in....quickly turned into about a combined 6 hour session and help from Jill.

Smiling in this one because I just started the cabinets

All of the cabinets were covered in a thick layer of pure cooking grease that did not just wipe away. Started with fantastic and ended with industrial goo be gone. I had to use a puddy knife to scrape it all off. It was on top, on the outside and inside of all the cabinets. After hours of cabinet cleaning Jill put the finishing touches on making the cabinets pretty and usable by adding contact paper to all the shelves and badly stained cabinet walls.

Jill's masterpiece

The importance of this post is what we discovered when the new appliances came (future post).  Chris and I bought a recirculating over the range microwave because the other side of the wall is the back hallway not outside, therefore we couldn't do an externally vented micro. No brainer right? Well apparently not. When the new appliances were installed we were told that they had incorrectly vented the previous micro as if it was an external vent which means the microwave had been filtering into the walls, cabinets and counters. SO take it from me, you want the microwave to be venting the way it should be or you're going to have a nasty mess to clean up.

Bayside Blondie

A little bit out of order but only by 1 post. The way we kept our sanity during the whole waiting process was deciding to brew our own beer!! As some of you know Chris and I are HUGE beer fans...no girlie drinks for this girl just straight craft beer. So when I got a Groupon email for an Introductory Home Beer Brewing Class at Beer & Wine Hobby I of course HAD to buy it. Chris and I went, loved it and bought our starter kit that day. We decided to do the Blonde Ale...named it Bayside Blondie...AND it was going to be ready to drink the official first weekend we would have the place. We used the instructions this time around but are looking forward to experimenting with different flavors and come up with the next Sam Adams Boston Lager :)

    

 The Home Brewing bible and all the brewing gear

       

Creating the Wort by adding the muslin bag full of grain and then the malt extract

Adding the Wort to the primary fermenter, checking the specific gravity and we're good to start the fermentation process!!

10 days later... 

 

      

Our beer reached the necessary specific gravity and we moved to the secondary fermenter

About a week later...

 We are ready to bottle!!

 Bottle Number 1

 2 weeks and counting til we get to taste our masterpiece!!