Around a month ago, we made a somewhat spur of the moment decision that we wanted to make a family trip to visit Ben and Emily in California.  This is the second such trip we’ve taken with Ashley to go visit them.  Last time we flew on Allegiant Air and it was a good experience, so we did the same flight again.  It goes out on Friday morning and comes back on Monday mid day.  This time we decided to get a rental car to give ourselves a little more flexibility.  We ended up getting a Kia Soul.  It’s a funny looking little car, but we actually really enjoyed driving it.  I’ve driven quite a few rental cars on my travels around the country, and this was actually one of my favorite cars.

One of the really nice things that’s changed since the last time we made the trip is that Ben and Emily moved out of the little one bedroom apartment and into a nice house.  Having a guest bedroom was a real enabler for the trip.

We flew into the Oakland airport and got the rental car.  From there we headed north towards the Muir Woods National Monument.  On the way there, Kathryn found a close by In-N-Out.  It turns out it was brand new and had opened only the day before.  It did not disappoint.  In-N-Out in Utah is okay, but this one being in California, on a family vacation, and being very hungry, was fantastic!  After our refuel, we continued on our way to the Muir Woods.  It was a very scenic drive taking us over the impressive Richmond San Rafael Bridge and through the Mill Valley.  It was fun to get out of the city and into a rural part of California.  We really enjoyed walking around the park and learning about the history of the place and beautiful scenic views.

After enjoying the park, we made our way back down the mountain and South on the 101, across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco.  Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge has been on my bucket list for a long time now.  Last time we came to visit Ben and Emily, we had a really fun day in San Francisco.  One of the fun things we did was go to the Cowgirl Creamery in the Ferry Building and get some fun cheese.  We thought it would be fun to go some more of the cheese to enjoy with Ben and Emily since we were close by.  We were close by in distance, but it took just shy of an hour to drive across town to the Ferry Building.  (I am glad that I don’t have to deal with that kind of traffic here at home.)  I dropped Kathryn off at the curb and she ran in and got the cheese while I circled around the loop with Ashley.  With cheese in hand, it was time to finish the trip down to Ben and Emily’s house.  Ashley was a real trooper and was a very good girl on the trip.

Hanging out with Ben and Emily was a lot of fun.  We packed in a lot of fun activities in our weekend.  One of the definite highlights was our trip to Los Gatos to canoe on the little lake they have.  This was Ashley’s first time being out on the water.  She was really cute in her huge life jacket, riding along in the canoe.  She really liked dragging her hand in the water as we skimmed along.  After canoeing, we went into the town and ate at a little restaurant where we tried Lobster Bisque for the first time.  After watching Studio C and their funny skit about Lobster Bisque, we definitely had to try it.  Between it and the red and white clam chowders we tried, it was the favorite.

One of the other fun things we did was visit several of the great parks Ben and Emily have near by.  Ashley was a big fan of the swing.  She thought it was so funny to swing with her arms tucked in.  We also had a great time flying Ben’s quadcopters.  We flew in his backyard a bunch and at the parks we went to.  I have a quadcopter that the brothers gave me for my birthday last year that I’ve flown some, but I really got a lot better flying on this trip.  I kinda got bit by the RC bug a little bit and bought a couple more quadcopters since getting home from the trip and have continued to practice flying.

We also ate some great food on the trip.  We made homemade pizzas, had banana bread french toast with real maple syrup, and tried swordfish for the first time.

The trip home was as smooth as you can expect when traveling with an 18 month old.  All in all, it was a fantastic trip.  Thanks Ben and Emily for being amazing hosts!

 

It’s time for another update on the basement.  We’ve been stalled out recently, busy with too many other things.  I was ahead on hours at work this week, so we decided to take Friday off and make a huge two day push on the basement.  We’re both sore and exhausted, and looking forward to a day of rest!

Due the decision to move the bathroom into the laundry room, we needed to do some more sewer plumbing rework.  We really didn’t feel like doing it ourselves, so we called in a local plumber.   We liked the estimate so we went ahead and hired him.  After looking at the end result, we felt like we got our money’s worth!  It was a lot more complicated to add in the bathroom drains than we were anticipating.   This actually happened a couple of weeks ago.

Here is where this weekend adventure really starts.  We decided to work on the new family room.  Since the decision to make move the bathroom into the laundry room, we’ve been at a bit of a loss about what to do with our old steel cabinets.  We considered putting them up on KSL, but never got around to it.  Then one night, Kathryn woke up with a fantastic idea of how to include them over in the laundry room in a manner that we could still the fun retro laundry room, and the bathroom!  Now that we decided to keep them, we went ahead and gave the sink one last cleaning before it’s new life over in the other room.

We had some great help to make the weekend possible.  Suzanne came over for whole day and took care of Ashley.  Kevin was amazing and came over and helped us for almost the entire day too!  We wouldn’t have been able to make it through the day’s jobs without either of them.

Removing the cast iron sink was a workout.  Those things are heavy!

We were originally going to leave the walls up in the family room, but made a last minute audible and decided to rip them out.  The outlets weren’t in the ideal location, and there was no insulation in the walls.  We will replace them with 2×4 walls.

I have no more desires to knock holes in walls after this project.  The goal of the family room is to make it as open as possible.  All unnecessary walls are now gone.

Kathryn snapped this pic as Kevin and I were driving to the dump.  I’ve now taken 5 loads of debris to the dump, two from this weekend.  Darus and the trailer have been very handy.  

The cast iron stack was wanting to crack where the old washing machine drain screws in.  In order to avoid a huge mess from a broken cast iron main stack, we decided to go with a gentler pipe remove method and cut out the steel pipe with a cutoff wheel.  This worked very nicely.  Behind this wall is the stairway coming down into the room.  All of the wall to the right of the old outlet has been deleted. 

Day 2:
Wow this room has sure opened up.  You can see how we cut the wall back to the middle of the first stair.  We’ll probably just trim back the handrail.  The carpet is ripped out too.  We decided to get crazy ambitious and level the floor this weekend.

After a trip to the dump, we headed to Home Depot.  We picked up 12 bags of sand mix concrete and a couple of bags of floor leveler.  We cleaned up the floor, brought down the wheelbarrow and shovel, and decided to just go for it!  Here is the first batch going down.  I would bring down a bag of concrete, and Kathryn would bring down the water.  We both pour our load into the wheelbarrow and I’d start mixing and then dump it.  The first couple of bags were totally mixed in the wheelbarrow, but then I decided to go puedo Puerto Rican style and do most of the mixing on the ground.  I’d mix it up a little in the wheelbarrow, and then dump it out to finish.  This worked much better and faster.

Ten bags of cement later, and lots of work, here it is.  It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be.  This is just the base that will be under the floor leveler mix.  That’s the game plan at least.  We hope that the floor leveler works as advertised and leaves us with a nice surface to put our carpet on.

Wow, what a weekend!  I haven’t looked forward to the resting part of Sunday this much since I was working on the farm with Mom and Dad.

A little while ago, I gave a BYU Capstone Seminar.

Kathryn and Ashley were very nice to come support!  Kevin came too.  Thanks!

Ashley wished the seminar went for 6 minutes instead of 60! 

The following are a bunch of pics of our little cutie.

I’ve been on a some work trips lately.  One of them was to Hood River Oregon.  We had a little bit of time one afternoon, so we decided to go up to the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.

On our way out, we stopped by the Vista House.  As the name suggests, it has a fantastic vista of the Columbia River Gorge.

I even made it back in time from my trip to catch Kathryn’s TSO concert!  

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Another trip was to Huntsville Alabama.  We stopped by the US Space and Rocket Center.  They have several rockets on display, but the king of them all is the Saturn 5 rocket.  This thing is massive!

They also had a space shuttle there.  It was a replica shuttle that they used to practice hoisting and attaching it to the rocket boosters.  This thing is also massive!

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Lastly, I took a trip to the NPE convention in Orlando Florida.  It is the country’s largest plastics convention and is held every three years.  Basically, if you have anything to do with plastics, you come to the show.  The reason why we went is that we recently purchased an injection molding machine so we can start making plastic enclosures for some of our electronics.  We went to learn more about the industry and make contacts.  We didn’t have any downtime on this trip really.  We arrived late on Monday night and left at 6 am on Friday morning.  It took us Tuesday through Thursday to walk the entire convention.  It filled up the entire Orlando Convention Center, that’s 2.1 million square feet.  It was split across the two convention centers.  The West building is a half mile long!

I put together this video with some trip highlights.

Here are the pictures from the video plus a couple more.

This was an eye opening trip.  As you can probably guess, the plastics industry is massive!  It was like being on set for a How It’s Made video.  So much fun.  I am very glad to be back home though and to give my feet a rest and be with my girls though.