Before and After

Whew. Friday was insane. Don't get me started on the issues with Greg's work pager going off ALL NIGHT LONG due to a power outage in the server farm at 1am that screwed up all kinds of stuff. I'd rather focus on the good things. The positive changes we saw...

Before:

Kaycie's baby clothes, or at least what's left of them after I gave away a couple of big (huge) garbage bags full. Desperately in need of sorting and storing. So I sucked it up and bought a giant box of Space Bags for this mess as well as a pile of winter clothes, maternity clothes, and linens that needed to find a new home in the storage unit.

After:
And that's just the baby clothes portion. I also have a full bag of winter and a full bag of linens all bagged up and ready to go, with at least two if not three or four more to go!

Before:

Greg's been trying to get me to replace our old dishwasher since the day we got married. He hates it. I've been reluctant to spend the money. No, it's not the most efficient. It's loud. It doesn't always clean the dishes very well. Yes, I had to scrub everything before loading it. Yes, it still sometimes left food on the dishes and especially inside the cups. And yes, it was really hard to get the dial to the exact right place to turn it on but not skip the first part of the cycle. But a new one was so expensive... Then it got worse. And worse. And I started finding that Kaycie's sippy cups weren't getting clean. And Heaven forbid I cook eggs in a skillet and expect it to get clean. So last week I finally broke down and said, "Honey, I want a new dishwasher." After Greg picked himself off the floor and confirmed that he wasn't having a seizure, we went shopping. We checked Consumer Reports. We decided what we wanted and decided to keep an eye on it and wait for it to go on sale. We figured we'd have a couple of months. Thursday night, 12 hours after we made our decision, Lowe's put it on sale. At a significant discount. We went that night and bought it.

After:

Sniffle. It's so quiet. It does take about 12 hours (ok, 2 hours) to wash a load of dishes, but more often than not I'm not in a rush. I usually turn it on at night before bed anyway. And all the new ones take that long thanks to new energy standards that make them shockingly less efficient. Go figure. But it cleans my dishes, so I'm a happy camper. Did I mention that my father-in-law is made of awesome? He installed it for us Friday afternoon. It took forever, but saved us another $125! I swear, that man can do just about anything.

Oh, and while we're on a roll, one more thing...

Before:


After:
Happy birthday to me! While shopping for dishwashers I found this patio set for about half the price I thought we'd have to pay. Since we had my father-in-law's truck to get the dishwasher, we went and bought the patio furniture to. So glad we did, as it was the last one - we bought the display! I was saving up for it, but Greg insisted on getting it for me for my birthday. I'm now going to save up for the umbrella to go with it. Along with a few other things. Like digging up the jungle of a flower bed right behind the table and putting in concrete pavers to extend my patio.