Whee! It's a house!

We finally got our home! It's small, and broken, but good. Yes, good.

Ok, not really broken. Just needs a few issues taken care of.

We did get a brand new roof out of it, after all.

The front, of course.

We got the keys early this month, and we've been planning our angle of attack for getting it ready to move in to. As such, we spent most of this weekend ripping up the carpet in the living room and laying down laminate in both the living room and dining/kitchen. Initially we had planned on just making sure everything was clean, but then got a really good look at the carpet and it went a bit like "nooooooope!"

As Isabeau points out, the color of the carpet tends to hide the horror in pictures.

After we had pulled up the carpet and found this,

We have tentatively decided to redo all the floors!

And so, we spent all of Friday and Saturday laying down underlayment and laminate flooring!
It was pretty hard work and my knees still haven't forgiven me (I even used kneepads...), but the end result looks great! We rented a big saw from Home Depot for making cuts and now I want one. >.>
Unfortunately, Makita's tend to be very pricey, and it's going to be a while before we can buy a 500 dollar saw...I am however, buying myself a nice Dewalt drill!

Dining room, complete with teh Isabeau!

We didn't take a lot of pictures while we were working, mainly because we were focused on working...So mainly I'm posting the finished (or mostly finished) project. We still need to do the baseboards, dividers, and do some trimming on the underlayment.

Kitchen, duh.

Living room, complete with bored to tears children...

It rained pretty good on Friday, so the kids were cooped up all day, without much of anything to do.
Saturday it cleared up a lot, and was sunny and almost warm, so I cleaned up broken glass (mostly bottles in a firepit...) and we let the kids play for a while. The kids LOVE the backyard, which I don't have any pictures of...I will take some next time I'm there (which should be tomorrow, I need to replace the wax seal on the toilet).

That's all for now! Going to try to keep things a little more updated.

Work and Life!

Got a lot going on these days...

Last week I transferred to the newly established Swing shift at work, which came with a small promotion. I am now a Working Team Lead which is essentially a field promotion while they see how I handle it.
So far, not difficult. The entire swing shift is myself and two other gentlemen. Our shift runs from 3:30pm to Midnight, though one of the gents only stays till 9:30 Mondays through Thursdays.

Originally, the plan was that I would be running the Shipping department, but instead I am being trained for most of the different departments on the production floor! Currently I spend most of my nights working as a technician at the test benches, primarily thermal testing units. I do spend some time bouncing around the place throughout the night. Do a few hours in the test area, run over to shipping and drive the forklift around, run back to test...repeat.

The expectation, however, is that the swing shift will be growing to a full fledged shift with all departments running. When that happens I will have a head start towards getting a serious promotion. I've managed to impress a number of people in the building, so I have reasonably high hopes for the future.

So this and more have kept me very busy. I haven't had much time for a lot of hobbies, but  I have painted a number of mechs that I recently purchased.
I picked up the Bounty Hunters Companion Lance (which includes a Phoenix Hawk, Primitive Shadow Hawk, Cauldron Born A, and a Javelin), a Locust, and a Toro.
I've managed to pain the two hawks, the locust, and the Toro.

First the Hawks!

The Locust

And lastly, the Toro! Which I'm pretty proud of!

Lastly, one of my co-workers is a pretty big geek. His particular passion however, is for Legos!
He called me back to the maintenance shop a couple days ago to show me this.

No banana for scale, but the Brute garbage can in the background should give you an idea...
The thing is remote control, and has an engine in the back with working pistons.
Ran him somewhere around 250 bucks!