David and Susi’s Blog

It is nearing the end of April 2008, and as you can see from the pictures in our photo album, we have been extremely busy with the renovation this month. With only a few days until the end of the month, I felt that it was only appropriate to look back on the many accomplishments that were made this month, and to once again thank and praise our wonderful contractor Robert Schaefer. Robert is nothing short of incredible and continues to really add a lot of unique features to our project. We had some pretty good ideas as to what we wanted to have the house look like in the end, but an awful large part of this overall project was created somewhat on the fly by bringing Susi and I’s thoughts and ideas to Robert and then allowing him the creative freedom to do something that will certainly be a one of a kind renovation.  When all of the dust finally settles and the final finishing touches have been made, this will certainly be a showcase for Robert’s many talents!

These have been some very difficult times for all of us, Robert included! We will certainly face many more challenges in the coming weeks, but we can still be damned proud of what we have accomplished in less than 5 months!

I have to put a plug in here for our Contractor, Robert Schaefer… If anyone in the St. Louis Metro area has any sort of construction work that needs to be done, feel free to email me or Susi and we will put you in contact with Robert. We have him pretty much booked up for the next couple of months, but we may be able to spare him for a few days here and there, if you have something urgent that needs attention or you are finally ready to do a little updating around your house. Robert does quality work, at affordable prices and is as honest as the days are long! If you haven’t checked out our photo album, I encourage you to browse through the many photos that we have taken throughout this project–I am sure you will be impressed! If you are in the area and want to see first hand what is going on here, drop on by! I should warn you though, it is a work zone, and we may just put you to work

David

Tags: House, Renovation by David
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For everyone – especially my family in Austria – who worries about us about the earthquake we had this morning: we are fine, nothing happened and our house is still standing!

You all probably read about the two earthquakes we had this morning. The first one was very early this morning (4:37 am), I was already awake, but didn’t realize it. David was sound asleep, so he didn’t notice anything. I still can’t believe that this was unnoticeable for us as it was recorded as 5.2 on the Richter scale.

The second rattle came around 10:15 this morning, we were just checking our emails when all of a sudden the whole house started shaking. It lasted for about two minutes. This aftershock was recorded as 4.6 (Richter). It was a bit scary, but thankfully to Robert’s awesome work the house withstood both earthquakes. I am not so sure if we had been that lucky without having the house stabilized. So I guess this was the first big test in regards of stability.

As I mentioned before, we are OK, nothing bad happened, even all the stuff that we have put on the walls are still hanging (including our cuckoo clock LoooL). Our babies also obviously didn’t realize anything, they were only very playfull this morning, but even during the aftershock they didn’t behave different.

So, we can continue to enjoy our long weekend – David is at home today and doesn’t have to work YIPPEE!!!

Tags: House, Uncategorized by Susi
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April, 16th, one day after “tax deadline” (except for flooding victims in MO and IL) – one day after all the floors are done! Well, not finished, I am talking about all the new subfloors….

Robert managed to finish up the new subfloor in the dining room and the transition from the kitchen into the dining room (pictures available in the Photo Album). He is off now for a whole week with a comment to me “Enjoy your vacation LoooL” – as if I would have one…. nice joke, Robert hahahaha! I have to do some “home work” while he is away like cleaning up the mess in the living room, taking all the electrical stuff upstairs, getting all the insulation material into the outside shed, sorting the tools, etc – all besides the small things like cleaning up the whole house from the drywall and saw dust, cooking or doing laundry. PEANUTS!

I started today by collecting all the loose cables laying around, putting them into a big box and trying to get that damned huge, heavy thing upstairs. Just when I came around the corner of the staircase, I saw a red cat tail disappearing from the rafters of the roof outside to the outside soffet and my heart stood still! Oh my God – one of the babies is strawling almost outside of a two story house in the soffet made of thin aluminum material. I first thought it was Mephisto, but I had been wrong – Angela, the little girl was the bold one this time. I rushed to get the ladder to maybe get a hold on her, but I couldn’t find her – no wonder, she just walked in at the other side of the soffet. Glad, that she was back I tried to get all the babies downstairs – it wasn’t possible as the other 6 of course got curious, running around in the upstairs between the framing. And of course two of them got back into the soffet. I finally managed to grab two of the red babies and locked them into our bedroom. I had a harder time with Mephisto, the third one, as he got suspicious and ran away from me all the time. But I finally caught him and he also was put into our bedroom. When David came home, we cut some old subfloor scraps and covered up the stairway into the second story. I hope we can sleep well tonight – this constant worry about the babies getting lost or hurt somewhere in the construction zone wears me out!

Oh, I forgot to mention …

Yesterday we had these troubles with Mephisto. The floor in the dining room was almost finished, the last panels were about to be put down, when Robert noticed that one of the red babies disappeared under the living room floor. Great :-0 ! I tried almost everything to get him outta there, but in vain. So we continued with the floor, but only got the last panel cut out, didn’t amount it, so that Mephisto could get out at some point. An hour later, shortly before Robert was about to pack all his tools, Mephisto finally sneaked back out again and we rushed to nail down the last panel of the dining room floor. I thought that this had been the last trouble with the babies hiding somewhere in the construction zone…. Yeah, than today the next trouble. I really try hard to keep them all safe, watch them, count them (to make sure all of them are safe), search for them, chase them away from danger….. this alone is almost a 24 hour job! I am so much looking forward when everything will be finally closed up and I don’t need to worry any more!

Tags: House, Renovation by Susi
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I just added some additional functionality to the web site tonight, which I hope our readers will enjoy using. This new capability allows our visitors to double click any word on the web site, which then opens a series of menu items. From these menu items, you can do things like translate words from English to German, search Google and Google Images for the word, or look up the word on Wiki or one of the pre-configured dictionary services like www.leo.org or dictionary.com…

This is a screen capture showing what happens when you double click on ANY word on our web site.

This screen shows how a word looks when it has been translated using the Google translation service.

Once you are done looking at the presented information simply click the close window icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen, and you are returned to the page on our site which you can explore further.

I stumbled on to this plugin the other day on the WordPress Plugins directory, and thought that this would be a real nice addition to our site. The plugin is called Tree Magic Cypress and is written by Ambient Web LLC. The plugin works extremely well, is additionally very easy to install and configure, and doesn’t add significant time to page loading. As always we would like to hear what you think about the new feature, so drop us a line or better yet, leave us a comment!

Tags: Blog, WordPress by David
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This is a video of Robert tearing out the dinning room floor. We discovered some time ago that the floor in the dinning room was serious not level, and that one day it would need to be torn out and fixed right. Well, today was the day for tearing it out. As with everything else with this project, you never really know what you will get into until you get it completely torn out. We also put additional pictures of today with comments in our Photo Gallery – to show what Robert had to deal with and how happy we are that nobody had been hurt in the past!

Tags: House, Renovation by Susi
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It’s April, 11th – pretty much exactly 4 months after we first discovered the weakness of our house. Wooow, time is running fast, but we think that we made incredible progress! Yes, we think that we are almost half the way done with our big project and are very proud what we accomplished in these 4 short months! It’s actually less than 4 months, because the real “meltdown” began in the second week of January.

As shown in the picture gallery Robert finished today the framing for the upstairs. This guy is nothing less than amazing! He managed to frame the whole upstairs in two days – all by himself!

But let me start from where we “blogged” last time.

The last entry was from April, 5th – David and Robert still working in the kitchen. This was only one week ago, when the drywall on the ceiling went up. Well, one and a half days later the whole kitchen was drywalled, Robert even made a very nice transition from the dining room ceiling towards the (new) hallway, he framed kind of an open plant shelf for me. I’m loving it!!!! Next was the entry way from the kitchen into the hallway and the hallway itself. We considered several options and I guess we found the right solution. We will have an additional closet in the hallway. This closet is supposed to go with the former laundry room, which could be a guest room in the future for people who have troubles with walking up and down the stairs. (Around the corner is a full bath for this room as well). The new hallway will also feature a wardrobe to hang coats and a little bench (which will be open to put shoes in). The open flow of the kitchen and the dining room will continue in the hallway and take away the cramped feeling it had before without wasting space. The former laundry room is now closed up again with a new wall and has a door – we could reuse the former laundry room door and door frame, because the previous owner didn’t install it right and the frame came out so easily without any damage. Great!

Well, all that had been done within three days and Robert moved on to the upstairs. As I mentioned earlier, it’s almost miraculous what Robert did in these two days – the whole framing for all the rooms upstairs is already done! You can tell that this was his favorite work-part in that whole construction project. He definitely loves to frame! Robert, you are awesome, we can’t tell you how much we appreciate your work – it looks fabulous!

Here is a video of Robert doing some of the framing work upstairs which Susi took earlier today.

Tags: House, Renovation by Susi
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Since most things in our lives seem to change a lot, I figured it was time to give the Web Site a different look. I stumbled onto a couple of very nice FREE WordPress themes written by InfoCreek. I had initially downloaded and installed the theme that looks like blue jean material, but there were a few compatibility issues with how it displayed some of the aspects of the site.  So instead of spending hours fiddling with the theme attempting to fix the formatting, I decided to check out a few of their other themes.   I also liked the theme called Aspire, mainly because it looks very different than most Blog themes.  After downloading and installing Aspire, I decided to keep it, since it functions well with our content, and adds a bit of texture and style to the place.  Let us know what you think about the new look. Speaking of new look, have you seen what Susi recently did to her hair?

Tags: Blog, Theme, WordPress by David
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Here are a couple of videos that show David and Robert working on the Dinning Room and Kitchen on Friday the 4th of April 2008.

In this video you can see the installation of the sheet rock on the kitchen ceiling. Susi also captures the structure which will form the tray ceiling in the dinning room.

Susi captures David and Robert bringing in the sheet rock from the garage, measuring, cutting and then installing it on the ceiling.

Tags: House, Uncategorized by David
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April, 1st 2008 – the day of the big change!

For a couple of months I had been already playing with the idea of getting kind of a makeover – played around on different websites with virtual makeover-features where you can put in your own picture and play around with different hair cuts, make ups, even eye glasses. Was a lot of fun and gave me an idea how I would look like afterwards. David watched that once in a while – I wanted him to be part of it as he has to see me every day LooooL

My birthday was coming up end of March and to my complete surprise my wonderful husband gave me as a birthday present a gift card for a day spa for a new hair style and a spa pedicure. I was so excited!!!!! What a wonderful and useful present – the best he could get me!

So I went to that place this week, curious how I would look like and feel afterwards. The hair stylist worked quite a while on my hair – she was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted to have my loooooooooooooong hair radically cut. We looked at different options and finally decided what to do. I also got a new hair colour (very similar to my very own one) with highlights in it.

When she started cutting I admit that I had some second thoughts, but thinking about all the hassle with maintaining my long hair (washing, drying, ……) and the fact that I very seldom could wear it open (due to all the work around the house and the construction – lots of bending and turning, which forced me to always have it tied together) I was convinced that this was the right decision. I really loved my long hair, but now I even more love the picture in the mirror that I see every day and the low maintenance job

David loves my new look as well, although he had also loved my long hair, especially when I had it dyed kind of blondish. That makes me even more happy with the new outfit and I guess the “before – after” picture proofs that I possibly could distract some people away from my real biological age LooooooL

The pedicure was an experience with an incredible “wooow”-factor! Sitting in a huge leather chair (like in a thrown), having my feet in a water bubbling stainless steel tub, the chair softly massaging the back and having a warm pillow wrapped around my neck – all that to the sound of silent, soothing piano music made me fall asleep after a few minutes. After the treatment I walked away like on clouds!!!!!!!!! Wonderful!

Thank you, baby for that wonderful experience of being pampered – it was incredible and I enjoyed it a lot!

Tags: Uncategorized by Susi
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After a somewhat painful upgrade process, we are now running on WordPress Version 2.5 which was released a few days ago. There were several additional WordPress plugins which had to be upgraded due to conflicts with the new code, but all is now working very well. One of the most problematic pieces to the upgrade was the visual editor and the integration with our Picture Gallery Plugin (NexGen Gallery). It initially seemed as though the Picture Gallery Plugin was breaking the visual editor, which is what is used to write the posts on the web site. After installing and removing the plugin several times, and even completely reloading the core WordPress install, it ended up being a browser compatibility problem with Internet Explorer 7.0! Everything works like it is supposed to with the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.13) installed…

Tags: WordPress by David
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