Wedding Fun

We are taking a little break from the house tour to share some pictures from my cousin's wedding. Raquel and Tim got married yesterday in a beautiful ceremony in Phoenix. I didn't have a chance to to take to many photos since I was a bridesmaid in the wedding, but here are a few.

The bride and groom dancing
Here I am with the two cutest flower girls. Reyna (on the right) is Raquel's niece and Eva (on the left) is Tim's daughter.
Here is my sister Lisa and her fiancee Jim.
My brother Roy, don't worry he turned 21 last week .

The bride and groom played a little game where they switch shoes and have to answer questions and raise the shoe corresponding to their answer. I believe this question was who is the cleaner of the two and they both thought the answer to this question was Tim.The bride's mother and father with their grandson Tyler.

Cross Collection

One challenge in this house has been finding enough decorations and art work to fill all of the walls. In our prior home, we could only put up decorations on the interior walls, since the exterior walls were solid block and it made huge holes in the walls when we would try to hang anything. So needless to say we filled up the available walls in that house pretty easily. With the huge vaulted ceilings in this house, even our large artwork can get dwarfed.
We have begun to collect crosses when we go to new places and decided to put them all on a wall to display them. I really love how the sunlight hits that portion of the wall in the morning.

The lower red cross on the right is a cross that we picked up last year when we visited Tepotzlan in Mexico. The cross on the upper left is a cross Lowell bought on our first trip to Sedona in law school.

Welcome to our home

I thought the front door would be a good place to start the house tour. From the front door you enter a nice sized entry where Lowell recently finished laying the wood floors.
Though the area is only about 80 square feet it turned out to be a difficult project. First he had to remove the small tiles; then he proceeded to smooth and level the concrete subfloor before he could start actually laying the wood floors.(Riley admiring the floors)


(View from the second floor)(View of the entrance, stairs and top landing)
At the top of the stairs is a little landing that we had no idea what to do with. We decided to stick an extra chair and table there and it became a cute reading area.

Here is a close up of the chandelier that Lowell hung up above the entryway.
Under the stairs is a bookshelf where we store all of our cookbooks and photo albums. We actually have a fair amount of cookbooks for people our age, which is probably due to the fact that we both love to cook and bake. Although our two small shelves don't compare to to Lowell's grandmother, Blanche, who has more cookbooks than most people have books! Lowell has already started bookmarking recipes for this year's Thanksgiving.

Team L and L

Lowell and I joined a bowling league through our Church. We play three sets (I don't really know what they are called) every Monday night at a bowling alley close to our house. We had to come up with a name and could not think of anything original so we settled on Team L and L. We are really happy we joined the league and really look forward to Mondays.
(they have our names spelled wrong )

I have always been a pretty terrible bowler and would rarely break into the 100s, but I can already see myself improving in the second week of the league. Today my high score was 140 and I even beat Lowell in one set.

At the beginning of each week they print out the scores from the previous week and it turned out Lowell and I were the top team last week. We were both pretty surprised, but it turns out that our consistent mediocre scores made us come out on top. We started out slow this week, but had a stronger second and third set. We will keep you guys posted with the scores each week.

With the upcoming posts we plan to do a tour of the house with a daily picture of a completed room/project in our house.

Also if anyone is interested in the very exciting lives of our dogs check out their blog at Baudouinpack@blogspot.com

Northern Arizona Weekend

Hey Everybody! Our blogging is back after a long hiatus. Lorraine and I apologize for the lack of recent posting. Today, I wanted to fill everyone on this past weekend. To celebrate Lorraine's birthday, we left this past Friday to spend a couple nights in Flagstaff, Arizona. We got in Friday night and enjoyed a tasty Japanese restaurant inside our hotel. On Saturday, we took off for the Grand Canyon in the morning.

The Grand Canyon is about a 1 1/2 hour drive from Flagstaff. We went in to the South Rim in search of a trail to hike. It is true that the Grand Canyon is crowded for a National Park, but the experience we had is well worth it for any person to see during their life.

After finding a place to park, we decided to hike the Bright Angel Trail down into the Canyon itself. The round trip is a little over 7 miles. Going down is not that hard, but coming back up is physically demanding. Despite sore and dusty legs, the views are breathtaking. During the entire hike, you can just look over and see out in the Grand Canyon. We even met a squirrel friend along the way. By the time we got to the top, we were pretty exhausted. However, the feeling is really exhilirating. Lorraine and I plan to go back and spend more time at the Grand Canyon.

Following the hike, we drove back to Flagstaff. That evening, we went out into the historic downtown for dinner. We found a local brewery that had excellent food. Flagstaff is a great place to stay for exploring Northern Arizona. It's a high elevation city, so the nights were cold during our stay. It's a very easy drive from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and other great outdoor activities. Plus during the winter, you can even go snow skiing or snowboarding.

On Sunday, we took the Arizona Skyride up to 11,500 feet. It's a ski lift around Flagstaff that you can ride during the warm months. The views all over Arizona were amazing. After our ride to the "top" of the state, we drove back to the Valley and made a stop in Sedona. The scenery around Sedona is amazing.

Well that's everything for now. We took a lot more pictures, but these give everyone an idea at least. Look for our upcoming posts.

Picture Day

On Tuesday it was picture day at work for all of the staff. Here is one of my favorites.

More House Work

Just when we are almost finished with one project, Lowell and I usually jump into something else around the house. Above is a photo of our almost completed family room. Lowell just needs to put up the baseboards and I need to add a few more decorations and it should be completed.

But instead of finishing an easy project we decided to jump back into the kitchen. We were not to happy with the way the paint job turned out on the cabinets so we spent the past two weekends stripping and sanding them. First, we removed all of the items from the cabinets, which is why our living room and dining room looks like we are having a rummage sale.
Last night Lowell had to finish up his CLE (Continuing Legal Education) credits on the online. So we set up the laptop with some speakers in the kitchen and went to work staining the cabinets. The CLE was 2 1/2 hours long so needless to say we got a lot done for a Monday night.

Before
After
It is hard to get the full effect without the cabinet doors hung up, but we hope to get to those this weekend. Here is a closer look of the stain on the cabinet.