Whole 30: Day 20

I know, I've been completely MIA.  And I've been called out a few times by Greg's brother last weekend, which lit the proverbial fire for me. 

 

Remember back in March 2012 when I did a Whole30?  Technically kind of did a Whole30 since we had cheat meals on the weekends.  Well, I'm at it again, this time not only is my friend/partner in crime/motivator/person to commiserate and share recipes with, Heather, doing it with me, but also my other friend from work, Kelly!  ​And this time we are are doing it FOR REAL for 24 days, meaning no cheats on the weekends.  My high school besties and I had a girls weekend the first week in June, where we all ate and drank more than I think any of us had in a long time -- whose idea was it to do jager bombs and red bull vodkas?!  Heather and I anticipated the debauchery and gluttony, so had planned for it to be our "last hurrah" before starting the Whole30 on Monday June 9. 

 

Why?!  Well, as you can see from my previous post, I gave up grains for Lent.  Six weeks with no grains and what did I have to show for it?!  A 2 pound weight gain!!  How is that possible, you ask?!  Sugar is the devil, that's how.  Although I wasn't eating grains, I was pounding chocolate covered almonds (excuse: they were dark chocolate, so they must have been good for me...) and homemade grain-free cookies (excuse: they were grain-free, made from almond flour and natural maple sugar).  So that six week "experiment," if you want to call it that, taught me that my body cannot handle that much sugar anymore.  Hence the motivation to try something else and that's where the Whole30 came in. 

The Devil. 

Almost three weeks into this and I feel REALLY good for plethora of reasons, but here are a few 1) Actually sticking to something I set out to do, and not caving/cheating is pretty rewarding.  Especially when faced with serious temptations -- bar food, happy hours, Georgetown Cupcakes! 2) Experimenting with recipes to incorporate healthier, unprocessed foods, which is just all around better for you has been a lot of fun, and last, but most certainly not least 3) SEEING RESULTS!  I weighed in on Day 15 and lost 7.2 pounds!  Granted, I still have another 10+ pounds to lose before getting to my ideal weight, I've lost the 7 pounds JUST by changing my diet.  I've only exercised a few times in the two weeks  -- one workout and a few hikes with the dog.  That's how important the types of food you put in your body is.  It has truly been eye opening to me. 

Foods.  From top left: 1) Steak, sweet potato hash, and mashed cauliflower. 2) sweet potato hash with eggs over easy. 3) Banana, sooo good when you aren't eating sugar. 4) Bun-less burger, parsnip fries and homemade ketchup. 

My plan for the next week and half is to really up my workouts.  I realize that may cause me to gain muscle and therefore I may not lose as much weight as I did the first 2+ weeks, I know I'll see the results in how my clothes fit.  And that, my friends, is the best motivator. 

 

Although we set out to do this for only 24 days (due to the Fourth of July), with the exception of having a few celebratory drinks, I'm planning to keep up most of the habits during Fourth of July weekend.  Then starting back with it again, in a less strict fashion, after Fourth of July weekend.  By less strict fashion, I mean trying to make the majority of my meals compliant, but also enjoying a few indulgences from time to time during the week. 

<3

K$

Week 1: No Grains

I decided to give up grains for Lent this year.  Since I was subjecting myself to the pain, I of course also guilted G$ into doing it with me.  In addition to grains -- bread, pasta, rice -- I'm refraining from eating anything made from regular potatoes -- fries, mashed potatoes, chips.  Sweet potatoes are still on the table, but since G$ isn't the biggest fan of sweet potatoes, I've given him a pass on regular potatoes. 
 
Caveats. Before setting out on this fun torturous adventure, I did create a few caveats, which I realize is completely against the purpose/intent of lent, so don't judge me, G$'s mom.  :)

• No rules for my birthday weekend.  No further explanation needed. 
• Cheat meals are allowed IF we have plans with friends.  If it's just G$ and I wanting to cheat, no way.  However, we do have some dinner plans with friends scheduled at restaurants I've been wanting to try, so I didn't want to limit myself while there. 

Why!?!  Throughout February, I was consistently working out and trying to watch my portion sizes, but didn't see the scale budge, at all.  After a few binge weekends, the scale actually went up and sadly stayed up.  I kept chalking it up to muscle gain after 3+ months of not working out (I'll get to that in a separate post), but if you are losing fat and gaining muscle, you should start noticing your clothes fitting better.  That was sadly not the case. 
 
I knew removing grains from my diet would eliminate a lot of the simple carbohydrates that provide zero nutritional value and force me to eat healthier foods.  Since I refuse to starve myself, not filling up with bread, pasta, or rice meant that I would automatically eat more vegetables so I'd feel full after eating.  So far so good.  

What it means in practice?  Well, one week in and I can honestly say I am not missing grains.  In the mornings, I make a banana, chocolate milk, peanut or almond butter, protein powder, flaxseed, and chia seed shake.  Lunch is either a salad or an assortment of meat/veggie items from the salad bar in the cafeteria at work.  Dinner is a meat with a veggie side. The biggest change for G$ is no oatmeal or cereal for breakfast.  And for the both of us, no sandwiches at lunch. 
 

Salad (left), Random Assortment (right)

I say I haven't missed the grains yet, but I also haven't had a meal that I typically associate with grains.  For example, my favorite Indian meal -- Tikka Masala chicken.  I love it at an Indian restaurant, but I also love the jar of Masala sauce from Trader Joes.  It was one of our go-to, easy-to-cook-after-work-meals.  Despite the fact that I would put chopped spinach into the sauce, it still meant we were eating rice AND naan (bread).  Oh my gosh, nothing is better than sopping up the extra sauce with naan.  I have Chickan Tikka Masala on the meal plan for this week, but instead of rice, using mashed, steamed cauliflower.  Sadly, I could not come up with an alternative for the naan. 
 
Dessert.  G$ always wants dessert after dinner, so we haven't eliminated that.  A handful of chocolate bits chips, chocolate covered raisins, or chocolate covered almonds fill the sweet void there.  I'm excited to try a chocolate chip cookie recipe made with almond meal instead of flour.  If it turns out ok, I'll post the recipe here.   
 
Only 5.5 more weeks until Easter Sunday!  I'll do another update after a few more weeks. 
 
<3
K$

Very Important Puppy

Outside of this quick picture post, since I did the original post about sending Kairo to daycare, I don't think I ever provided an update on daycare. We send Kairo to daycare two to three time a week. In spring through early fall, when daylight savings is in effect and it stays light later, we only send him twice a week. During winter, it's three. With the days so short in the winter, it's nearly impossible to get home in time to exercise him before it's pitch black (and depressing).

Snuggling

"Pelted"

We have been sending Kairo to the same place since he was six months old and couldn't be happier with them. The staff has been pretty much the same for the past 2+ years, so they know him and know us. A typical day at daycare for Kairo involves playtime in the morning until noon, a mandatory nap from noon to 2pm, following by more playtime until we pick him up. The mandatory nap is key, because like small children, tired dogs can get "cranky" and a cranky dog sometimes starts playing sloppy. During nap time, the dogs that will sleep with other dogs are moved into a separate room with a few of the humans. In true Kairo fashion, we know he "claims" some of the humans to sleep on/snuggle during nap time since he sometimes comes home with a perfume smell on him. Spoiled.

One of ladies, Felicia, loves Kairo so much that when G$ and Kairo entered one morning, she exclaimed, "My boo is here!"*  That immediately caused Kairo to do his frantic-butt-shaking-tail-wag over to her, followed by a quick sit for a treat.
 *For those of you who don't know, "boo" is a term of a endearment, usually referring to boyfriend or girlfriend. 

Desperately need to paint the window and door frames.

As I mentioned, Kairo's is a "regular" and has been going there for quite some time. As a little background, there are two separate rooms -- the sweet side and the salty side. They split the dogs up, not by size, but by how they interact with other dogs. The salty side tends to be more rambunctious from what we are told. Kairo, despite being a high energy dog, prefers the sweet side. They've tried putting him on the salty side, but was a bit intimidated and overwhelmed, causing him to not really play with the other dogs. In addition to the different rooms, they also put different colored collars on the dogs -- red, yellow, green -- to indicate to the room monitors which dogs to keep a closer eye on.

Well, last week, G$ dropped the K-Man off at daycare and someone new was working, so they asked Felicia which room Kairo should be put in and what color collar he needed. Felicia quickly responded, "The sweet side and he's doesn't need a collar, he's VIP!" That is how we found out that Kairo is both well-known AND a perfect angel.** G$ and I both have had numerous staff members tell us how sweet he is, which makes us very pleased to hear.
**Just a little puppy-parent bragging.  We know he's not a perfect angel... all the time. :)

Enjoying some spring-like weather this weekend

<3
K$

Floors & Stairs

Well, hello there. Two days in one week. I'm just as shocked as you are. Writing the post for the o​ffice made me remember how much I enjoy writing for the blog and documenting our trials and tribulations. Down the road, I imagine it'll be fun looking back to remind ourselves of the progress we made. Without further ado, two more before and afters...

The Floors.
You may have noticed these beauties in the office pictures. One of the first things we did after moving in (well, technically two months after moving in) was have new hardwoods installed throughout the first floor. When we took possession of the house, there were five different types of flooring, six if you count the plywood, yes, plywood.

1. Original hardwood in the front bedrooms
2. Newer hardwood in the front entryway and area outside the kitchen
3. Tile #1 in the kitchen
4. Tile #2 in the family room 
5. The most disgusting, stained, stinky carpet I've ever seen before in the back bedroom, now office

Here you can see: Kitchen Tile, Newer Hardwood, Plywood, and Family Room Tile

G$ and I (ok, entirely G$) did all the demoing of the existing flooring. I got outfitted in the safety gear for the photo-op, then let G$ finish it. How nice of me. :)

Making it look like I did the demo

The fun of floor demo.  The original hardwood floors were installed in 1953 with old school nails.  We saved them, so I need to figure out something cool to do with them. 

We did the demo, but for the sake of both time and staying married, we opted to pay to have the floors installed.  Since there were so many types of flooring and we were dealing with an addition, we had to have 5/8 inch plywood installed throughout to level the floors before the installation. I'm not going to lie, but even the consistent plywood throughout looked better than what was there when we bought the house. Plus it was clean!

Nice, level plywood subfloor

Between the plywood and the hardwood, it took the installers about three days to complete. When they were finished, we had beautiful new hand-scraped hardwood floors. I don't think I've ever been so giddy. I could finally walk barefoot in my own house again! Without fear of the previous owners' filth or tiny pieces of broken tile getting all over the bottom of my feet.

Installation

A little before & after

Ahh, beautiful!

The Stairs.
Now that our beautiful hardwood floors were installed, it made the golden oak stairs look really out of place. I had seen numerous blog posts (are you noticing a theme here...) where folks re-stained/painted their stairs with the two-tone effect -- white risers and railing spindles/balusters with dark (stain or black paint) on the tops of the stairs. Each and every one's only regret was that they didn't do it sooner. I was sold!

I decided to take off the two days after Christmas, so with the weekend, it gave me four days to tackle the project. Three weeks later, I finally finished. Although, it was a painful, tedious process that took way longer than I estimated (that always seems to happen!), every time I see the completed stairs, I get a huge smile on my face, so it was 100% worth it.

Before & After

I'll quickly walk through the steps, but I'd recommend checking out any of the above blogs for detailed instructions:

Step 0. Hang plastic to keep the mess somewhat contained

1. Sand -- what a mess it made! Luckily, since I was painting the risers, I really only had to thoroughly sand the tops of the stairs. Lightly sanded the risers and sides so the paint would adhere. 
2. Strip -- Getting the stain off the little nooks and crannies with Citrustrip.
3. Sand again -- More mess
4. Stain tops of steps, doing every other step, so we could still access our bedroom, which is upstairs. Carrying Kairo up and down when a fresh coat was applied right before bed was fun. 
5. Dry. Stain other half of steps.
6. Dry. Apply polyurethane to tops of half the stairs. Luckily, I bought the kind for floors, which only recommended two coats. 
7. Dry. Reapply.
8. Apply poly to other half of the stairs. Dry. Reapply. Are you getting that it's a very lengthy stinky process... the fumes.
9. Allow poly to cure per instructions.
10. Tape off freshly stained tops, so they don't get white on them. Oh, the taping! I hate the taping. With a passion. 
11. Apply primer to risers and sides and spindles.
12. Dry. Apply paint to risers sides and spindles.
13. Dry. Apply second coat of paint to risers, sides, and spindles.
14. Remove tape and notice where the tape failed you. 
15. Fix where tape failed you -- still in progress in some areas... (guilty) 

In Progress, every other step stained

Sticky notes so we knew which steps to step on. Sanding the railing.

See what I mean about this being such a drastic improvement?!?!

Ahhh, love it!

And as I was going through pictures for this post, I ran into this fun picture from the beach with my family. We were in the Outer Banks for Memorial Day last year, right before our floors were installed.

Kairo and my beautiful niece Ally on my lap.

<3
K$

I'm baaaaaaaaaack!

Hello!?!? Anyone out there still reading?!!? I know of a few faithful readers who check the site periodically and then give me a hard time for not posting updates. We'll see how long it takes you guys to see this post. 

Well it has almost been a full year since we closed on our house. 11 months since we moved in. We have made some tremendous progress in those 11 months, so I figured it was a good time to post some before and after pictures. I love a good side-by-side before and after. Nothing makes me feel more accomplished. :)

I'm going to start with my favorite areas of our house and will spread this over a few posts. Get excited to see some action on the ole blog!

The office.

Before & After

We knew from the beginning, this back bedroom, which is right next to the family room, would be turned into an office. G$ works from home on Fridays, and unlike me, isn't a fan of working from the couch. G$ also has a ridiculous number of books and has always wanted a library of sorts, so we knew that built in bookshelves were going to be a must in the office.

Sidebar: Notice how I'm refraining from calling this G$'s office. I put a lot of sweat equity into the office, so I don't just want to hand the credit over to G$. 

I had read numerous blog posts about folks who hacked IKEA bookcases to make them look built in, so that's exactly what we did. I spent way too many hours putting together the plan using graph paper with room dimensions and bookshelf dimensions. It was tricky because of the room layout -- windows on two walls, a closet door on a third wall, and the entrance door opened onto the only wall with nothing on it. This meant that a simple wall of built-ins like all the blog posts showed wasn't possible. Luckily, IKEA's Billy Bookcases had a corner brace attachment piece to make three bookcases into a corner bookcase -- those Swedes really think of everything! 

After figuring out all the pieces we needed, we made the trek out to IKEA to buy everything for the bookcases, plus some other items I wanted for some other areas of the first floor.  After losing a curtain rod out the open hatch of the car while getting onto the on-ramp of 95 (whoopsie!), we made it home safely with all seven bookcases, plus top extender pieces since our ceilings are higher in the back of the house. Let the fun begin!

Here's me assembling the shelves.  Did I mention how much I love IKEA?!?

After all 14 pieces were assembled and secured to the walls, I measured for the baseboards and the crown moulding and off we went to The Depot, our favorite place in the whole, wide world. Installing it was a tag-team effort with G$ -- I would measure the piece, G$ would make the cuts with the mitre saw, I would take it back in and install with the nail gun. 

Sidebar: Nail guns are awesome. :)

Sometimes some additional tweaking was necessary, shaving a bit off, etc., but once we got into the groove for the baseboards, we finished in no time. Then it was onto the crown moulding for the top of the bookcases. This is where we wasted a whole board, I kid you not, trying to get the cuts right. The first outside corner cuts were easy, but when we got to the inside angles for the corner, neither one of us could figure it out. We both were beyond frustrated. G$ called his dad over to provide some assistance. With three minds working together, we finally figured it out. And, of course, we were over complicating it. With the little "test" pieces for each type of cut made and marked with the appropriate saw positions, we were ready to finish this thing! And that we did.

Kairo posing next to the mitre saw

After the moulding was installed, it was time to move onto the board and batten effect on the bottom half of the wall. I again, spent hours figuring out the perfect layout based on the length of the walls and the width of the "batten" pieces, which is just lattice.  Since it's thin, with only a 1/4 inch depth, it doesn't stick out past the baseboards, unlike true "board" in "board and batten" would.  We pretty much followed almost the same process as Young House Love, but instead of doing a true board and batten top rail, we opted to go with an ornate chair rail. After another Home Depot trip, we followed the same process -- I measure, G$ cuts, I install. 

Wrote the lengths directly on the wall

Now that all the moulding and trim pieces were in place, it was time to move onto caulking. I now have a love-hate relationship with caulk. It's really amazing how it transforms a space from incomplete to complete. I oddly found the smoothing the caulk process a bit therapeutic like painting. The "hate" part of this relationship was due to the fact that every time I put the damn caulk gun down, inches of extra caulk would come seeping out while I smoothed. 

Last, but not least was finally painting.  As you saw from the IKEA assembly picture, I had already painted the top of the walls the navy blue (Benjamin Moore Gentleman's Gray matched to Behr Premium Plus Ultra Satin), but just used ceiling white on the bottom to cover the bright yellow.  The IKEA bookshelves were slightly off-white, or off-white compared to the existing trim.  To match it, I took one of the shelves to Home Depot and they colored matched it, perfectly.  I put a fresh coat of the IKEA white on the bottom half of the walls, as well over the seams I patched on the bookshelves (on the exposed sides where the top extender pieces attached to the top of the bookcase).  

Ah, the after!

There you have it, our first big project.

Still on the To Do List for this room:

• Paint or Stain Doors
• Paint Window Frames
• Buy Desk Chair -- current chair is one of our dining arm chairs
• Buy Rug -- I'm thinking cowhide
• Make Faux Roman Shades from Mini Blinds -- G$ currently has binders stacked to block the sun

Fabric for the Faux Roman Shades

 And to leave you with a picture of the K-Man enjoying his new Pottery Barn chair.  No, we are not letting our dog on a $2000 leather chair, it was actually a Craigslist find steal.

Just as cute a year later. :)

Thanks for checking in.  I'll try my best to keep this updated on a more regular basis!

<3
K$