Today's Very Special Episode

I don't know if anyone but me remembers, but growing up nearly every show I watched would occasionally have a "Very Special Episode" dealing with some sensitive topic related to the age group the show was aimed at. Well, today we are taking a break from the regularly scheduled home posts for our own "Very Special Blog Post."  What has prompted this, you might ask?  Our wedding.

Yup, the wedding is now only about 6 weeks away (Yikes!) and we are trying out best to balance getting the house (mostly) done before then and getting a few DIY projects for the wedding done.  Currently we have 95 ribbon wands (out of 150) done, one half finished cupcake tree, and the inner workings of a photo booth.  The only completed project is the favors.  That is all well and good (and I might even share a few of the DIY projects with you all here) but what I want to talk about today is the etiquette surrounding weddings.

Let me be the first to say that I think some of the traditions around weddings are just silly.  I didn't spend countless hours hand addressing each invitation so that every guest would feel special.  We printed out labels on the computer and it saved us massive amounts of time.  We aren't printing wedding programs since I don't have the time to put them together and our ceremony is so short that it seems silly.  And we aren't doing a bouquet toss or garter toss or cake cutting ceremony since I've always hated those parts of weddings (esp. the bouquet toss) and so I'm not including them in our wedding.

But other parts of wedding etiquette are there for a reason--like RSVP cards.  Not everyone chooses to have cards that you mail back in order to RSVP, but every wedding has some sort of RSVP procedure. And, I'll be the first to admit that in the past I haven't always returned my cards on time.  But after being on the other end, I will never not mail that little card back ever again.  Our RSVP date is April 10--ten days from today.  We sent out 100 invitations inviting 216 guests.  Currently we have heard from 28 people accounting for 59 people.

One thing that I've noticed is that people around my age (30) are the worst at RSVPing.  Most of our respondents (other than our wedding party) are old enough to be members of AARP while most of our guest list is under 50.  For whatever reason, the younger generation just isn't as worried about letting people know if they are coming.

But we need to know.  We have to give our caterer and the bar a head count one month from the wedding date and that's the amount of food we are paying for and the amount of food that will be available.  If we have lots more people show up that we are planning for, we won't have enough food.  Conversely, if we plan for way more than we have, we'll end up paying for massive amounts of food that won't get eaten.  So we need to know who is coming.

My second gripe has to do with people who don't understand how an invitation works--specifically, the invite their own guests to the wedding.  Let me preface this by saying that we have room for 150 people at the wedding and my family alone could account for close to 100 people.  Because of that (and the fact that Landon has family too, and we have friends), we had to carefully edit our guest list to make sure that we could invite as many people as possible.  This also means that we didn't give hardly anyone a +1 on their invitation.  In fact, there are quite a few people invited to the wedding that could have gotten a "and guest" but didn't.  We tried to limit our "and guests" to people who had been dating someone long term and were very serious (and we knew about the "other").  In fact, when I counted it up, we sent out 4 +1s in 100 invitations.

However, that hasn't stopped several people from replying that they will be bringing their own guest to the wedding.  Now, we did our best to indicate on both the invitations and the save the dates who was invited to the wedding.  We even put in a bit on the website about that.  But people still insist on bringing guests to the wedding when we hadn't planned for them.  We'll make due, but it blows my mind that people would just assume they could bring a guest when there was no indication that it was okay.

So, all that being said, here are a couple of tips for anyone out there who gets invited to a wedding and isn't sure of what to do:

• If you are asked to RSVP, please do so by the date they ask--even if you are saying "NO".  It's probably for a purpose and they probably need to know.   So mail back that cards, send an email, call them on the phone, or tell them in person.  If you don't, don't be surprised if they call you--or if you show up and they say you can't eat or drink.  

• When replying to the invitation, don't assume you can bring your own guests.  Generally speaking, only the people who's names are on the invitation are invited.  If it doesn't say "and Guest" don't assume you can bring an extra person.  The hosts probably have a limited guest list and I can almost guarantee that they made some tough choices on who to invite and who to leave off, so respect their choices and don't just bring your own guest.  I can also guarantee that they would have rather invited someone else they know and love to their wedding than your random guest that they have probably never met.  But more than likely they will not say anything to you since they don't want to be rude.  

Walking on the Ceiling

This is a post that I've been meaning to write for a few days, but we've been so busy that I just haven't gotten around to it.  You'd think that being on Spring Break would give me more time to do things like blog, but I had more homework to do over Spring Break than I've had all year.

Anyway, not this past weekend, but the weekend before we decided to start working on the ceiling in the family room.  It had some pretty nasty "patches" on it and had pillowed pretty badly so we knew we needed to bring it all down and put new drywall back up.  But first we had to pull down all the old.  Saturday morning we started pulling down the ceiling.  It was dusty and dirty and we found a huge mouse nests in one corner....complete with more mouse poop, so that was fun.  But we finally got it all down.

We also had to lay down quite the path to get the old drywall out to the garage and the new drywall in.  We wanted to protect the floors, but it involved tearing my living room apart.

Then, we had an issue to work on.  Because the ceiling joists weren't close enough (they were 24" instead of 16") we also needed to fix that, but we didn't want to have to replace all the ceiling joists.  Instead we put up some metal channels running perpendicular to the original joists that were 16" apart. And, because that room with it's vaulted ceilings is always cold, we also decided to put up some additional foam insulation between the channels for some additional R value.  That took a good part of the day.

FInally, we were ready to hang some drywall.  Thankfully our friend Jason came over to help and we had rented a drywall lift from Home Depot (it was the best $35 we could have spent).  It was a slow process, and we needed the extra hands.  By the time we got finished, it was nearly midnight and we were all exhausted.  But, we had hung all the drywall except for the last row--it was the highest point, but it was also only about 1/3 of a sheet, so Landon and Alan took care of it the next day by themselves.

Anyway, there is now a whole new ceiling in the family room.  It's been taped and mudded and sanded.  At this point, it needs just a little more work and it will be ready for paint.  And it looks so much better than the old ceiling.  Even if it did nearly kill us.

I Lost an Hour, How About You?

This weekend was another busy one, but not at the house.  Landon and I took the weekend off and went back to Lexington for a quick visit.  We had a blast catching up with some of our friends there, taking in a Kentucky Basketball game (the Wildcats beat Florida), and getting some wedding stuff done--we finally registered at Kohl's.

When we got back yesterday afternoon, we spent the evening doing our taxes.  It was our first time filing as a married couple and we had enough "major life events" happen in 2012 to make things complicated.  We got married, both of us lived in two states, and I went back to school.  We finally got it all sorted out (and we'll get a nice refund) but it took awhile to figure out how to do it all correctly.

Because not much went on at the house this weekend, I don't really have much to share with you.  I did finally take down the Valentine's Day Table decorations and replaced them with some Easter Decorations, but that was about it.  I can't wait to get a new table and finally be able to make some fun tables runners, but I'm not going to spend time on that now since I have no idea what the dimensions of the final table will be.  Still, I think it turned out okay.

And, yes, I went with balls of yarn again as part of the center piece.  I just like that I've finally found a use for all the tiny bits of yarn that I dyed with Kool-Aid a few years ago.  There isn't really enough of any of the colors to do anything with, but they make pretty little center-pull balls that look good in my white bowl.  Maybe one day I'll use the yarn for something, but for now, they can decorate my table.

Also, since this is kind of not a real post, I figured I'll end with a picture of Malcolm enjoying the new cat hut that we brought back from Lexington in order to try and relieve some of the congestion at the old cat pyramid.  So far, it seems to be working.

It's Getting Hot in Here

So I told you on Tuesday that we had replaced all the insulation in the attic above the main room (where we had to replace the ceiling).  I've had the pictures forever, but I haven't showed them to you yet.  They aren't super exciting since I had to stay away (we discovered doing the baffles that I'm super allergic to fiberglass insulation), but I did get a few.

The insulation in our attic is all blown in, which is different that what I'm used to.  The house I grew up in had insulation that came in big rolls, so this blown in stuff is new.  It was also very messy when they took the ceiling down.

But we got the new ceilings up, and rehung the walls.  It was right before we moved in that we decided to go ahead and replace the insulation that had come down because it was getting cold in the main room, especially at night.  So we bought what seemed like a ton of packages of insulation, picked up the blower machine from Home Depot, and went to work.

Landon got to go up into the attic to blow it in, which meant he got to suit up.

The blower was actually outside the Master bedroom window, and we ran the hose in the window, out into the hallway, and then up into the attic.

I tried to get a picture of the insulation being blow in, but the attic was dark and I didn't want to get too close, so this was about all you could see.

It also didn't help that the main room was at the other end of the house from the attic access, hence the never ending pink snake.  Landon is down there somewhere blowing the insulation in while Alan was outside feeding the packages into the machine.  Overall, it didn't take too long to do the entire main room.  We still have to put some back over the Master suite where we had to replace some of the ceiling, but that won't be too bad.  We actually discovered that this insulation isn't as itchy as the old stuff, and it settles pretty quickly.

But it is nice that the main room stays warm now, and we are always one of the last houses in the neighborhood to have snow on the roof when it does snow (which it has done a lot this winter).

Ceiling Feelings

I promised you yesterday an update on the Family Room, so here it is.  First, a look at where we were.

The fireplace with the sad mantel and no surround.  

And a very sad, rotted three panel door.

The crown molding is interesting.
We found out it was covering up drywall issues between the ceiling and the wall.

And the other end of the room.  

Now, not much has gone on in this room so far.   It was kind of on the back burner until we got most of the rest of the house done.  We did replace the three panel door with a nice big slider back in the fall.

But other than that, not much has gone one.  A little bit of drywall work where we move the two doorways around a little bit (to give us a little more useable wall space) and to close up the hole where we put the new door in.

We've also taken down the "mantel" and cleaned up the drywall around the fireplace--after we got it cleaned and inspected to make sure it wouldn't burn down the house if we used it.

But the biggest remaining issue is the ceiling.  It has some old damage from where they once had faux beams and then took them down.  Like everything else in the house that was fixed, it looks awful.  It's hard to see in pictures, but it has to get fixed.

The other issue is that the rest of the ceiling is pillowed a little bit, which is noticeable if you get it under the right light.  The guys have decided that the best thing to do is to just cover it up with more drywall, but that is going to require "furring" it down a few inches, and then hanging new drywall over the whole ceiling.  It's vaulted to 12 ft, so that will be a job.  We might need a few extra hands.  But it's the easiest way to fix all the major issues going on with the ceiling.  Every ceiling in this house has been an issue, but this one might be the worst.