Tomorrow, May 16th, I will be heading into Portland to attend the #Safewayj4U blogger event. I’ll be given the opportunity to get a sneak peek at a new savings program which Safeway is rolling out in addition to meeting other fabulously frugal local bloggers. It’s going to be a blast! Once I get back, I’ll be sharing a full recap of the event as well as information on the new savings program – so stay tuned!

I’m kidding with the title of this post…a little. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been in the middle of a total home renovation for years. I became a homeowner very suddenly at 19 when my mom passed away. The home needed a little bit of maintenance done to it, and we also embarked on a slew of improvements to make the home “Our own” and more usable for our needs – we need to install a driveway for our cars, for example. Because hiring contractors is way outside of our budget for most of these projects, most of this has been a DIY project. Fortunately for me, Jai is extremely handy and can fix or build just about anything, so that’s been a definite point in our favor! However, anyone who has embarked on a renovation themselves realize that it goes at a snail’s pace comparatively; between work and other life commitments, blocking out a whole day to tear out a wall or install new pipes is not always feasible. Add on top of this the fact that I’ve been clearing out and dealing with my mom’s estate simultaneously, and you’ve got a monster project, which is why I gave this post such a tongue-in-cheek title. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful just to have a home, but I am sure you can imagine the stress of becoming a teenage homeowner under very difficult circumstances and starting such a massive project.

I’m 28 now, and we’ve done so much to the home, but there’s still plenty left to do. I’ve lost a lot of time over the last two years with my debilitating health issues, so it’s frustrating to have lost momentum on so many fronts. Once I am back to 100% – hopefully by the end of this summer – I am chomping at the bit to pick up where I left off. Still, I have to remind myself how many vast changes we’ve made. We’ve built an entire deck, completely renovated every part of the bathoom, converted attic areas from crawlspace to lighted, usable storage areas, painted, built furniture and cabinets, fixed doors, doorframes, and windows, and done a million other little bits of maintenance that I can’t even begin to list – like fixing the furnace, for example.

We’ve taken a ton of photos of the construction over the years, but I couldn’t seem to find some of the “Before and after” shots I took of the big projects, such as the deck and bathroom. So, here’s a few smaller examples:

This is a photo of some attic storage in 2008, mid-renovation. I climbed up to have a look (While eating potato chips, apparently!) and Jai came up with a camera to get some photos of the work he had done that day, so I ended up being a construction model. This crawlspace had previously been completely dark and hard to navigate or store items in – notice the large nails sticking out of the roof? You definitely didn’t want to snag yourself on one of those!

Here’s a photo of the construction as it progressed. As I recall, Jai stuck this bottle of A-1 sauce here for scale! You can already see a big difference – and now that it’s finished, we have smooth drywall on the walls, boards on the floors, and florescent lighting. This has opened up a huge storage area for us!

Our next big renovation will be the kitchen. It needs a new paint job and some repairs to the cabinets; we also want to add more counterspace, and a dishwasher. I have never owned a dishwasher in my life, so I am beyond excited at the idea of not needing to handwash every single dish – not to mention the space it will free up in the sink while I’m baking! I have extremely cramped counter space, and considering how much time I spend in the kitchen, it makes sense to invest in countertops and other improvements so that I can have more efficiency and enjoyment in my kitchen. We’ve already gotten a bit of a headstart on a portion of the kitchen remodel, as Jai has built several new cabinets to expand the storage space.

Are you working on any home renovations? Have you had those “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home” moments, too?

I’ve been reading a lot about the topic of setting goals recently. It’s a subject that I see discussed frequently – between the new year and an ever-changing world, I think many people are feeling the urgency to make a change and improve their situation. Some individuals seeking to shake things up in a big way will even hire a “Life coach”. What, exactly, is a life coach? According to Wikipedia, this term refers to a practice where an individual is hired to give you advice and help you to set and achieve goals. They are not a counselor – as I understand it, they’re more like your own personal advice columnist, someone who is meant to guide you in time management and setting achievable goals. A life coach is not to be confused with a “Performance coach”, although there are many professionals who offer both services. Remember the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster? The man they hired to work with the band referred to himself a performance coach. Confused? Me too!

As you can tell, I’ve never had any experience with this type of professional. Although I have a healthy skepticism about any self-help practice, I can see where a life coach or motivational book could be really helpful for people in identifying how to make the changes they want. I’m not sure if there are even any life coaches practicing in Seaside, although I could easily find a life coach in Portland and make the hour and a half drive if I was so inclined. I just don’t know that it would be a fit for me. While I actively seek out and welcome new ideas, my problem at the moment isn’t that I don’t have goals, or a manageable plan of action, or motivation. My issue is simply that I’ve been slowed down for a long time by my health issues. I’ve done everything to rework my schedule to make time for the 1-2 hours of physiotherapy that is required each day, and I’ve outsourced the tasks that I can’t do at the moment. I will admit, I do feel frustrated sometimes when I hear some self-help experts say that if you’re overwhelmed, you’re likely doing something wrong in managing your time. I understand that for some that may be the case, but you know what? Sometimes, when you’re overwhelmed, it’s because life can be difficult, not because you’re spending your time poorly. I’m very efficient and focused in using my time, but the reality is, I’m physically limited in what I can do and I lose a chunk of my time each day just doing rehabilitation exercises. Come to think of it, if there is a life coach that has experience in helping people with temporarily disabling injuries, they might actually be an encouragement to me.

While we were preparing for a garage sale last year, I came across a long to-do list from when I was 12. It struck me as funny because I suddenly realized what a “Type-A” personality I must be to have been keeping all these lists and fretting over to-dos since then! The list was pretty awesome, because it included things like “Sew dresses for Barbie’s wedding”. Ha!! So what are your goals for 2012? Obviously for me, my #1 goal is to continue my physio until I regain all of my mobility. I also have a number of business goals that I’m currently working towards. As my health gets better, I scale my goals up accordingly. When my knees are recovered my major goals are to resume wedding planning in earnest, working out (Not on the stair machine!), and working on our home renovations. Above all, my goal is to not lose my mind while I’m cooped up!

What do you hope to achieve in 2012? Is there anything that you feel is holding you back, like me, or are you just not sure where to start? Have you ever seen a life coach?

Ah, working out. I have a love-hate relationship with it at the moment, but not for the reasons you might think. I actually get a lot of enjoyment from exercising – it feels good to get moving, leaves me feeling better afterwards, and is a great way to blow off steam after work. Working from home makes it challenging (And often impossible) to maintain boundaries between work and your personal life, so for me, going to the gym is a great way to “Officially” end my work day and get myself into an entirely different headspace. Plus, since I sit here at a computer writing all day, its feels great to work off stress by doing cardio and weights while I listen to dance music on my iPhone. So, what’s to hate?

I’ve talked a lot on here about the knee injury I’m recovering from, but I’ve never delved into the specifics of what happened. The injury actually occurred while I was using exercise equipment at the gym. The long and short of it is that I actually dislocated both my patella while using a stair machine. It was a “Gradual” dislocation – no, I didn’t know there was such a thing, either! I was using the stair machine on a high resistance for long periods of time, and apparently due to my skeletal structure and tendency to overpronate, the pressure on my patella caused them both to slowly slide out of their track. It took a long time to get a diagnosis of what was wrong, so it gradually got worse and worse due to both my knees being out of socket while I continued with my normal life despite the pain. After year of continuing to work out, attend conferences & business functions in heels, and just generally leading my busy life, things disintegrated to the point of me needing to use a wheelchair. Type-A personality plus a high pain tolerance hasn’t really done me any favors!

Once I finally DID get a diagnosis, my knees were in such bad shape that it’s taking a long time to get back to normal. My physiotherapist has me on an outpatient program that is getting results, but it’s disheartening to have such a long recovery time. In terms of my overall health, the effects of limited mobility have been pretty drastic. I know I’ll get back into shape once I regain all my knee function, but it’s hard when you can’t even walk normally, let alone work out. Physiotherapy is great for rebuilding function but it doesn’t do much of anything in terms of burning calories. I cannot wait until I regain my mobility and can hit the gym once again. Suffice to say, I will not be taking my chances on the stair machine again – I think I’ll stick to folding treadmills or a stationary bike!

This morning I was awoken from a dead sleep at about 5:30 AM by a loud CLANG! CLANG! BANG! CRASH! Just like in “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas”, I jumped out of bed and ran to see what was wrong. No, it wasn’t a late visit from Santa! As it turns out, an old laptop and some computer parts in Jai’s workshop fell out of a storage cabinet spontaneously and fell down the stairs – talk about random. What a week this has been!

I’m a “Morning person”, but it would have been nice to sleep until a little later since I was working until late last night. However, the upside to being startled awake at the crack of dawn is that I got to see this beautiful pink sunrise. Here’s to a great morning!

Do you like the new meme that I created? I made this as a joke after a very chaotic day dealing with a broken furnace. Our furnace bit the dust at about 10 PM last night and starting pumping out cold air, much to my dismay. While I shivered underneath my Snuggie and lamented how much it would cost to replace the furnace, Jai started doing some research on how to repair it himself. He’s unbelievably clever at figuring out how things work and can troubleshoot everything from a computer to leaky plumbing; but I feared that this might be something too specialized for us to do it ourselves, especially since we have gas heat.

After some searching, Jai found this very helpful video:

Watching this gave Jai the confidence to go under our crawlspace and open up the furnace to see what he could find out. He saw that the hot surface ignitor had a crack in it, so he removed the part and went to a local plumbing supply store to buy a new one for $44. One hour later, the new hot surface ignitor is installed and we have heat once again! Oh, what a relief to be able to fix the problem so quickly and not have a huge bill to worry about. Jai is a genius! I wanted to share this video with you in case any of my readers are in a similar boat – it’s great information and saved us a packet of money!

Thanks to QuickMeme’s Meme Generator for helping me to create the masterpiece above. Hat photo credit goes to the unknown photographer who took the original “Scumbag Steve” photo. Furnace photo credit goes to Jai, who took this photo of our very own scumbag furnace while writing down part numbers!

We woke up to a “Winter Wonderland” this morning!

Last week I created my own cookie recipe completely from scratch. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the work that goes into inventing a recipe for baked goods, and my own experience only cemented that. The hours of tweaking ingredient proportions to determine what sort of texture you’ll end up with, and then discovering how the mixture will react upon baking and figuring out what temperature and cooking time it will need is no easy feat. Before I came up with the final recipe for “Beeb’s Ginger Cookies”, I ended up with a series of under-and-over-cooked drop cookies and gingerbread men. Because we had to carefully experiment with the cooking time in order to figure out how long the final recipe should stay in the oven, I ended up with a bag of inedible lumps.

But I knew someone who would appreciate these reject cookies from the Contest Corner test kitchen:

The seagulls down at the beach!

Yep, these cookies are “For the birds”! The seagulls are very adept and capable of catching cookies tossed to them in mid-air:

We also took some of the cookies down to the local park to share with the ducks, but they seemed considerably less impressed with my cooking:

I don’t know what Betty Crocker does with her leftover cookie experiments, but this is how our test kitchen puts leftovers to use!

If you want to make a cookie that’s actually edible, check out my Ginger Cookie recipe – the cookie that all this experimentation led to!

New Year’s is a holiday that is extra special to me, because it’s mine and Jai’s anniversary of becoming a couple. As of this weekend, we will have been together for 9 years – wow, the time has flown. We became an item on New Years’ Day 2003, then got engaged on New Year’s Day 2009; and although we’d like to get married on a January 1st because it’s meaningful, I don’t think it’ll work out because a winter wedding isn’t really appealing to me – keep in mind, we live in Oregon!

Wedding planning has gone much slower than I would have anticipated because I’ve had some crazy health setbacks. Ironically, I injured my knees while working out back in March 2010 in a bid to get in great shape for my wedding dress, and it’s been a long journey to get better that left me an invalid for a long time. Suffice to say, I was in no shape to do much other than just get better, so a lot of things had to go on the back burner, including my planning for the nuptials. Although I’m still healing, I can at least leave the house and do more things now so I’m looking forward to a much better 2012 and finally getting a chance to resume my plans for our dream wedding!

One of the items on the wedding to-do list is to purchase our wedding bands. I’ve got a very specific style in mind, as I want to match my engagement ring. Something I’ve noticed is that gold doesn’t seem to be as popular for men’s wedding bands these days – or at least not on the websites I’ve checked – so I haven’t yet located a ring for Jai that will match mine. I’ve been hearing a lot about tungsten wedding bands recently, as they seem to have become a very popular style with today’s couples. I can see the appeal – the bands are very sleek and minimalistic, so they have a modern look that is quite attractive. Wedding planning is very exciting to me, so I enjoy checking out different ring websites and seeing all of the options that are available to us before we decide on a set. I don’t think tungsten bands would work out for us simply because the material wouldn’t match my gold engagement ring – I think it would look odd to have a mismatched set. So, we’ll just keep looking until we find the perfect set of rings!

If you’re in the market for this style of wedding band, check out Mens Tungsten Online for a nice selection of attractive wedding bands for men.

Are you married or engaged? If so, what kind of rings did you pick out?

Check out my new favorite Christmas ornament: A Maroon 5 bauble! Yes, they exist – and of course I would have one! It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with a big Maroon 5 fan, so when I found out that they had their own special Christmas ornament, I had to get one! Jai bought it for me as a Christmas present and now it is proudly hanging off my tree.

If you are also a Maroon 5 fanatic, you can snag one of these ornaments for yourself by visiting Maroon 5′s official store here. (And no, Maroon 5 did not sponsor this post, although my services are available if they would like to hire me. )