The Little House Revealed- Kitchen

In April, Matt and I bought a Hud Home to renovate and live in. It has been a lot of work, but it is so rewarding to see all that we have accomplished. The home sat vacant for over a year, but before that the family that lived here did not do much house work, which was evident by all the dead bugs and bug poop everywhere. Before we painted we scrubbed everything down with disinfecting Pine Sol.

The house is little, 1100 sq feet little, but the space is laid out really well, and for such a small house it has a pretty nice size kitchen.
In the kitchen, we took out all the cabinets and scrubbed them, sanded them, and painted them. We also put Pergo floors in the entire house except the bathrooms and laundry room.


The new floors are great, they are really hard to scratch and so far even the chairs have not scratched them. I like them so much more than carpet and they have been so easy to keep clean. Some people said they would not do well in a kitchen, but so far I have not had any problems. We just made sure when we hooked up the dishwasher and ice maker they were not leaking.









 We took every single thing that was attached with a screw out of the house. We replaced all the hardware with brushed nickle and put in new electrical outlets and light fixtures. The only 2 things that were not taken out of the house were the bath tub and shower stall.

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 Painting the cabinets was a huge job, especially since they were so dirty and had to be scrubbed and sanded so much. We probably put at least 40 hours into them. Cabinets are expensive, so I think we still did really well. My dad had to help us repair a couple of them and he made us an entire new one to go on the side of the dishwasher so we could utilize the entire length of counter. You can see in the picture above that we have not hung the door on it yet.




  I really love my Folk Art chicken painting. I bought it on a Facebook resale page for my birthday present. You can't see it very well, but I have a vintage kitchen towel on the stove with a chicken on it and my paper towel holder is also a chicken. They are cute but I don't think I have overdone it in a cheesy way.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our little kitchen. I think it turned out great but what's most important is that I'm able to prepare and serve tasty and healthy meals.

It took me over an hour to format this correctly, and at the end I was so frazzled that I may have missed a few mistakes. Please ignore them. Thank You.

Kidney Check-up appointment

My girls in my kidney support group know what I mean when I say that the anxiety before a check-up appointment is horrible. I am sure it's just as bad if you had a cancer check-up. The fear that your labs will be bad is always present and real. My last appointment was a little less anxiety filled than normal, and I am thankful to report that I got a great report.

Exactly a year ago I saw my nephrologist right after Malakai had passed away and I was recovering from the Pre-Eclampsia. Looking back at the labs for the past year, everything is looking very stable and IN FACT things are getting better. (Yup, I am doing the happy dance right now!) The improvement is slow, but I am so thankful that the numbers are heading in the right direction. He said there is no reason I should be worried about my numbers since they are slowly improving. My creatine is slowly coming back down and my protein is also getting better. My protein was never a really big concern, but it has been hanging out above the normal range for a while now. Normal is 0-15 mg and I think I had about 50 mg. Some of the girls in my group spill 1 or more grams per day and that is when it becomes a concern.

We talked about getting pregnant again and he said that he would prescribe the IVIg treatments for me. Wahoo! He first wants to call and speak to a doctor that prescribes them to make sure they increase pregnancy success and to know how often I will need them. There are only a few doctors in the country that specialize in auto-immune disorders AND pregnancy (reproductive immunologist) and they all happen to be to far to drive to. These doctors use IVIg treatments a lot, so I hope they are able to help him help me. I'm praying that everything falls into place soon.

I'm so thankful that everything went well and we got all good news back. I'm continuing to pray for complete healing for my kidneys and that our family grows soon!

These pictures are from the appointment, since it was close to the beach we decided to stay and make it a vacation.