Josh and Erin in the Twin Cities

So this morning I noticed that it seemed exceptionally cold. It turns out that it WAS exceptionally cold, to the tune of -4 degrees!

Other than that we haven't been doing a whole lot. I have been reading like a demon, and E has been learning how to develop websites in her spare time. We are still making more decisions on the loft although they are sometimes VERY frustrating. We met with the Kitchen guy last night and we essentially changed everything. We changed from the cooktop in the island with a double wall oven to a slide-in unit and an Advantium oven in the wall instead of a microwave. We also replaced all the lower cabinets with drawers so that there are not going to be any corners that are useless without climbing into the cabinet.

We are essentially having to start all over in the tile department, with the exception of the laundry room. We were told that we couldn't put slate on the walls in the shower because some bozo with 859 shower heads in his shower and a garbage disposal drain (Kramer) spent 957 consecutive hours in the shower, and ruined the drywall behind the tile. Now I ask you, is that fair? Not really, but then as my mom always says, 'life isn't fair', or another personal favorite, (but not from my mom) 'fair is where you get cotton candy and ride the ferris wheel'. So anyway, we are going to look for more tile, but porcelain is SUPER expensive and it turns out that slate is the least expensive natural stone you can buy, by a LOOOOOOOONG shot.

For plumbing, we are looking at things a little different and may be making a whole host of changes, but that is for Tuesday night of next week. We are hoping to bring the upgrade costs down significantly in the next few weeks just to get closer to where we want to be price-wise. We don't want to price ourselves out of our loft by putting too many upgrades on.

One thing I can say, this has been a HUGE learning experience, and it would be MUCH more difficult without talking to our families, and Fritz (the realtor). Mad props to you all!! (sorry had to throw that in there, no real reason for it...)