Hey all,

I totally forgot to actually publish this, so here goes.

I've finally cleaned up my scraproom. I've brought several things from the shop to the attic. That way I have more "playroom", if you get my point :). James and I moved the black closet to another wall. That way the one wall which has to be wallpapered is free. And I'm keeping it free. The black closet has found a very good place against the other wall. This way I'll have a full view on my beautiful new wallpaper.

Don't you just love it? I want my scraproom to have a nature theme and this wallpaper fits perfectly with it. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the wall is a bit shorter than needed, we'll have to cut off a part on each side and downunder. But the remainder will be awesome! After we've put the wallpaper on this weekend, I can start reorganizing my scraproom (what the heck, let's call it my Scrap studio, it's surely big enough for that, isn't it?). I want to clean all the remaining things. I have to decide what I want to keep and what I'm going to throw away (or send to a charity fund). And then I can really start scrapping in my studio again! I'm gonna love it, I already know that!

Maybe I'll add some extra decoration, but I'll just wait and see about that. First things first.

Once it's all done, I'll show the photos in the gallery!

Babbled by Ilse at 12:35 PM in Category: scrapstudio
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Hey all,

It turns out the storm from last Thursday did some real damage to our house. Our Roof window in the attic has been blown away. So, next thing we did friday was buying a new window and install it. We needed Saturday also to finish the job, but it's finally done. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos. When you know that it's goign to rain you really want everything to be closed on time. And it indeed rained, a lot! Thankfully we had everything closed in time, so the attic wasn't too wet, but it's not an ideal situation.

We have decided we want more windows in the attic roof, so we're probably going to that somewhere in the summer. Then I will take photos so that I can add these in our "Our House" album.

Have Fun!

Babbled by Ilse at 8:06 AM
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Hey all,

I've got pretty much to tell you today, so here it goes!

The Garbage
Well, the garbage from our bathroom is finally gone! James and my dad worked hard to bring it all to the dumpster. We have an empty garden again! And it gives a good feeling to finally be rid of all the garbage. It gives you the feeling the bathroom is really finished! I'm glad for that. With all the garbage, I kept having the feeling we were still working on the bathroom, while in fact it already was finished. It's wonderfull to have no more garbage in the garden!

I have also cleaned out one part of our shed. It really needed a lot of cleaning. A lot things from that part could go to the dumpster too, so that's done too! Now we can actually see what's in the shed again.

Work on the pond
We really needed to work on the pond. Our pond has two levels. The lower level was fine, allthough we needed to fill it to the old water level. With this drought the waterlevel dropped about 10 centimeters (or maybe even more). So I filled the pond today and now it's back to it's original water level. The fishes really liked the fact that they could swim through several waterplant again. Due to the drought, these plants have gotten a lot of insects and our fishes were really "grazing" in the plants to catch all het little insects. They even fought for it with eachother. It was funny to see!

The upperlevel of our pond is a completely other story. We have had a kind of weed in there. Here in the Netherlands we call it "Eendenkroos". This is a really stubborn weed, which can really take over the pond and that was not our intention. We've tried to get rid of it. To do this, we had to take out the plants we had in there and we've had to use a biochemical thing to get rid of this thing. In the end it did seem to have done it's job. The only problem we had left was an enormous amount of alges. It makes the water smell dirty and we had so much alges we couldn't see anything else. So I started to clean this part of the pond yesterday evening. We have had some special snails ("Posthoornslakken") which eat alges, but they couldn't keep up with this stuff. Anyway, I had to make sure we weren't going to through these alges away. This made a tedious job, but this morning I succeeded in recovering the last of them and I emptied this part of the pond for the most part. Since it's about 35 degrees Celcius again today, I'm not gonna work on the pond anymore. I'll continue tomorrow morning when it's not so hot.

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 11:00 PM
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Hey all,

It's warm outside again (about 30 degrees Celcius), so I decided to stay in today. I'm not sure if that was the best decision, but it gave me time to work on the gallery. I've finally uploaded the photos of our bathroom! Check them out here. If you want to know what we've been doing, please check it all here.

Veel plezier!

Babbled by Ilse at 12:45 PM
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Hey all,

I told you we thought we had solved the hot water problem from the sink in the bathroom, right? No, actually we didn't. But we didn't find that out until James installed the tap and turned on the hot water. We hardly got any water! Luckily we do have hot water in the bath and the shower, but still...... We want this problem to be solved. It turned out it is something in the pipes. But we can't fix that pipe anymore, due to the fact the problem is in the pipe in the concrete and we have already done all the tilework. So now we're going to make a pipe from the the hotwater pipe for the bath, through the hobbyroom and back into the bathroom around the place where the sink is. Then we'll have hot water in the sink too.

To make matters worse, the wallpaper in the hobbyroom has starting to grow fungus due to the fact that the wall apparently still has some water in it and it couldn't get away other then through the wallpaper. But since we had had a closet before that piece of the wall, we didn't notice it untill we shoved the closet away........ So now we have to put entirely new wallpaper on the whole wall again!

Let's hope we're done by the end of next week!

I'm glad I at least have almost everything from the shop downstairs right now. And we've made all the other accessible too now, by putting this in hte bedroom. So now I can start filling the internetshop again!

Oh well.... just a few more weeks and we're done, or so I hope so!

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 10:59 AM
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Hey all,

Well, it seems the problem "the hot water in the sink" is still a problem. We thought it was solved, but it turns out we have exactly the same problem with the sink and tap! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So it's in the pipes. We hope to solve it in an easy way. Otherwise we'll have to fix the pipes and place them somewhere else to have hot water in the sink. It's unbelievable!

We're kinda frustrated about this!

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 8:23 AM
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Hey all,

Well, there's an end coming into view. Little by little our bathroom gets finished. The toilet hangs, the shower was already finished, the bath is now finished too (including the kit) and our sink hangs. All that's left to do now is the real finishing touch. A few things need to be hanged and of course we need to clean everything. When you're doing such a thing you really need to clean everything afterwards. I think I'll start the cleaning job coming friday. I'll start in the attic and work my way downstairs. Thank god the living room is more or less decent now. Afterfour weeks it has been enough with everything just lying around everywhere. I think, or should I say hope, that it's just a few more days until it's finally completely done.

It's a complete other story for the site of Scrapping Memories. Since I have a new logo I want a new design for the layout too. Before I can work on that, however, I have to completely update the core component of the site due to security issues of PHP Nuke. I'm currently in the middle of downloading everything I had on my site. I have already made all the neccessary changes to the offline files. All that's left to do is check to see if it's working correctly. Once it does, I can finally start to work on my new layout for the general part of the site. When that's finished I can start working on the layout for the shop part on the site. And once that's done, I can upload all the products again. That would be wonderful! Then I can finally continue earning some money with the shop again! I'm really looking forward to that.

Well, this is it for now. Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 7:58 PM
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Hey all,

Although we went to bed late last night, we were up early this morning. Today I had to give a workshop for someone who came especially from Helmond here in Rijen to do the workshop Mini album in a can. I don't mind giving a workshop for just one person. That way I can really give al my attention to that one person. I prefer small groups instead of the big ones, just so that I can give each attendee enough attention.

Anyway, the basic preperations were done, but I needed to bring all the shopping products downstairs and we needed to clean up the leaving room, before I could give this workshop. Since the attendee was going to be here around 10 AM, I didn't have that much time. James went shopping for groceries and I finished up everything in the house. I was just about ready when the attendee was here.

James continued with the bathroom (these things have to go on also) while I gave the workshop. Truus (the attendee) was enthousiastic. She told me she had had a course for beginners in scrapbooking and that she had made a few 12" layouts, but she wanted to make mini albums too. That's why she wanted to do this workshop. I have to agree with her on the fact that mini albums are a lot of fun to do. I have made several mini albums (which, as soon as the gallery is finished, will be shown here in my gallery too) and I have made several "big" layouts. I like to do both of them. Also, I want to design several mini albums myself. Really original albums that noone's made before. Maybe I'll even sell packages of these albums in Scrapping Memories. That would be fun, wouldn't it?
I'm glad Truus enjoyed the workshop. After all, she had to travel about 2 - 3 hours from Helmond, so it'd better be worth it, don't you think so?

Anyway, back to the subject. It is doable to be rebuilding the bathroom and to give workshops, but only when you're "finishing up". On one hand I'm not happy with the fact that I had to put everything on a hold for rebuilding the bathroom. On the other hand I am VERY happy. We'll finally have a bathroom that fits our needs with a style that is really ours. There was nothing else to do then set aside the scrapping and Scrapping Memories. It wouldn't have been fair to James and this gave me an opportunity to work with him on something that's going be ours!
I just hope the next rebuilding we're gonna do is far away in the future. Or that I have a shop in "brick and mortar" so that the shop can continue.
The Happy side is still winning, though the bathroom isn't finished yet.........

Well, talk you later again. Have Fun!

Babbled by Ilse at 4:59 PM
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Hey all,

I told you the water wouldn't get hot in the shower and everywhere else, right? Or didn't I? Anyway, the point is, we couldn't take a shower despite the fact the shower was finally installed completely (including all the fininshing touches that needed to be done). We suspected the device for the hot water was broken down so we called in a specialist. He came this afternoon. Unfortunately he wasn't able to take away my sorrow.......

He tested the pressure in the tap first and told me it was not good at all. He needed to check the thing (it's "Geiser", but I don't know what it is in English). When he finally arrived on the attic, he ws astonished. We had two kettles(?). Well, yes, we have a maintenance contract with the specialist company in which this is stated already. Apparently they didn't tell this to the man who came today. And to make matters worse, this was one thing he hadn't seen before. People usually have a combi or a different one. This one is one they usually don't see. So, now what? He tried to check a few things (which didn't give any result) and finally phoned his collegue. He didn't know it either. It was probably the thermostat from the shower, or the pipes were connected wrong (cold pipe on the hot). You can imagine my feeling whenhe told me that. We had just finished all the tile work and installed the shower and the bath. He gave me the advice to have a plumber check everything before breaking anything open.

Half an hour after he had left, James phoned. He wanted to know how it went. Was the problem solved? I told him: "You're not gonna like this. You're really not gonna like this!" After I explained to him what that man said this morning, he didn't know what to do either. He had an idea of what could have gone wrong, but he didn't knwo for sure. He would check it when he was home.

When he was home tonight, James checked several things and finally we found the problem. The tap (or faucet) of the bath hadn't been installed yet. This due to the fact that we were still doing a lot of work in that area and we didn't want to break it even before we had had the chance to use it. Eventually we installed the tap and indeed, the problem was solved!

A big YEAH for us. We have hot water again everywhere in the house!

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 2:53 PM
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Hey all,

Well, it seems we're getting there. More and more from our bathroom is done. Our shower is really finished now. Our bath is installed. It only needs some kit and then it's done. Our heater hangs, so thaat's done too. Of course there are still a few problems left. We still don't have hot water. It's lukewarm, and sometimes not even that, but it's not really hot. So, we have to call in some help for that. Then there's the problem of the heater not being attached to the pipes. But we're gonna solve that too.....

All that's left now is the toilet and the sink. We hope to do either one of them tonight.

So, we're getting there......

Talk to you later

Babbled by Ilse at 8:07 AM
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Hey all,

Well, how long can it take to finish up all the tile work? A day, a few days, a week, more? And how long can it take to make the finishing touch on the tiles? An hour, two, more? No, really, make a guess!

I'll tell you. It took us a week and a half to finish all the tile work (actually cutting them and placing them on the walls and the floor). The finishing touch costed us several hours. We were finished with that Sunday morning at 5.30 AM. And yes, we have worked straight on from saturday evening. Now how's that for dedication?

I can garantee you it's a heel of a jb to do. Luckily this is a rewarding job to do, because you can see all the work we've done for it. It's a whole other story with the heater in the floor. You can't see it, but it took us quite some work. But in the end we don't have to have cold feet in our bathroom and that's a big plus!

Now that the tile work is completely done we can continue with other things.......

Talk to you later.

Babbled by Ilse at 8:23 AM
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Hey all,

Well, we haven't finished our bathroom yet. We're not having our days at the moment. Today, well actually it's yesterday at the time I'm writing this, we discovered our tile saw was really "up". We had to by a new blade. Other things were necessary too. And when I came back from my morning walk, James had a nice point: The pipes for the heater we're placed wrong, so now they're too close together and neither one of them can be fit on the heater. Thats a problem we'll have to solve too!

At last, at the time I'm writing this, we're done with putting on all the tiles. What's left now is the finishing touch for the tiles. That's what we're doing now. Mind you it's 0:52 h (AM) here in the Netherlands, so we're both kinda exhausted, but we have no other choice now then to go on. We hope to be finshed with this around 2 AM. we'll just wait and see if that's really going to happen........

Once this is all finished we can finally place our shower tomorrow. We SO want to take a shower in our own house after three weeks of taking showers at my parents house. It's very nice of them of course, that we can take showers there. We highly appreciate it, but after three weeks...... We just want to do it at home. (now get your mind of the gutter, that was NOT what I was thinking about!)

James said to me this afternoon we were not goign to another rebuilding in the house at all. Okay, so we have a house from the seventies with styling from that period (mind you, it's 1970, not a future kind of thing!). The kitchen is old and really needs to be replaced. The electric wiring is way to old. I can't have diswasher and the frying pan have turned on together, cause all will stop (and that's when the refrigerator and freezer are connected elsewhere!), so work needs be done on that...... The wallpaper needs to go too......... there's so much left to do. So, in short, was I disappointed when he said that? NOT AT ALL! After three weeks of rebuilding the bathroom, I'm completely exhausted and I have the same feeling as he does: NEVER AGAIN!
But then again.... Okay, after diner we decided if we'd do it again, we'd hire someone to do it for us, instead of us doing it all.

Anyway, it's 1 AM sharp and I can do a little bit of finishing up. Maybe we'll be able to get to our beds by 2 AM.......

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 12:49 AM
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Hey all,

We had a little financial break and we decided to rebuild our bathroom. In a house that's more then 25 years old and with a style from 25 years ago, we thought it was time to redo it. Especially since we had a few leaks and we wanted those solved too. So, with months of planning (and shopping) done, we decided to start almost three weeks ago. We had hoped we would have enough time to do it all (it's our holiday) and that we would be done by the time we had to get back to work again.

At first we had to, very logically, tear everything down. We were "given" a few surprises right then which we had to fix. It set us back about a day. Tearing it all down and cleaning up everything so that we could start building again, took us a little week. And then we could start building. First we had to fix the pipes so that could have our bath, the shower and the toilet exactly where we wanted it to be. After we had done that, we could plaster the walls, since everything had come down when we ripped of the tiles.

At last we could start putting up the new tiles about a week ago. Mind you we're all doing it ourselves. James is very handy, so that's a good thing. And I'm doing my best to help him where ever I can, but it's not easy.
Still, it's costing us more time then we had anticipated for. Right now we still have the bottom layer of the tiles on the walls left to do, but before we can start with those, we have to finish the floor, for which we placed the first tiles today. It's going! (Ahum!!!!). Right now we're at a speed of about one to two tiles per hour. Don't worry, these tiles are big (45 x 45 cm). On the other hand, our bathroom isn't that big and with thespeed it's all going right now, we won't be finished by the end of this weekend and then we have to get back to work again.

I really hope we can finish up all the tile work today, so that we can go on with other things tomorrow, but so far....... I just really want our bathroom finished by the time we have to get back to work! Oh well, we'll just see...... I
I'll just some other tiny things now and talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 3:20 PM
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