It’s The Most Busiest Time Of The Year

It’s been a busy and hectic month for us.  We’ve known for a few months that our almost 13 year old Lab was not doing well.  We finally decided it was time to let him go after Thanksgiving.  The weeks leading up to it and since have been hard.  We got him on our first anniversary and he was our Best Bud.

David finally got off the night shift, but they are still keeping him really busy at work.  We spent a couple weeks going back and forth with the draftsman and builder on our plans in the meantime.  The Kid and I were both pretty sick last week which really threw everything off.  I hadn’t even started Christmas shopping as of last week and our tree sat half decorated for a couple weeks.  I’m slowly getting caught up, but I don’t think things are going to slow down until after New Years.  To add to the chaos, we went to get a puppy last week and ended up with 2 new dogs.  We had wanted a male puppy, but they also brought out a 4.5 year old female who we really connected with.  They ended up offering us Goldie if we bought the puppy and we decided to go for it.

 She is really well trained, sleeps most of the time and made herself at home right away.  She has a sweet personality and is pretty funny.  We picked up the puppy a week later and he’s kept me on my toes since.  

He’s also a sweetheart.  We didn’t want 3 dogs, but our Mastiff is 10.5 years old and we know our time with him is also limited.  Our original plan was to adopt rescue Mastiffs next, but I had begun to change my mind over the past year as I’ve watched our boys age.  I fell in love with Bulldogs a few years ago and decided it was time to go with a smaller dog.  Several aspects of our new house have been designed with our dogs in mind, so the decision to not have giant breed dogs affects that somewhat.  Most things can stay the same no matter how big the dogs are (dishes in the mud room with tile floors, built in dog food storage, etc).  One thing we are looking into changing is our wood floor selection.  We’ve been planning on Brazilian Walnut because it one of the hardest woods and one of the few that can hold up to 150+ pound dogs.  It’s also one of the most expensive and putting it throughout the majority of the house was going to be a large expense.

Once we decided to get the Bulldogs, I started looking into other options for our wood floors.  I still want something extremely durable.  Most woods that are lower than Brazilian Walnut on the Janka scale have a reddish cast, which I don’t want.  We have started to look into bamboo.  There are several different types of bamboo flooring – some aren’t much harder than red oak.  We are looking at strand bamboo which can be almost as hard as the Brazilian Walnut.  I actually have a sample from BR-111 which I really like.

It’s a similar color to the Brazilian Walnut and it’s about 1/2 the cost.  After things settle down, I want to see what other options we have, but I think we can find a bamboo we really like and save quite a bit of money in the process.

We received another draft of our floor plans and elevations last week from the draftsman.  We are getting a lot closer to being done with them.  We were going to meet with the builder on Friday to go over them, but work and sickness caused us to cancel.  We are to the point now that we need to meet with the draftsman in person to finish up the last details.  I’m not sure when we’ll get to it between the holidays and David’s work schedule.  We may have to wait until after New Years.  Hopefully, then, we can get the plans finalized and apply for the loan.  I’m very anxious to get started!

In the meantime, from our family to yours, we wish you a Merry Christmas!