Six years ago, on September 30th, my boyfriend at the time surprised me with a late morning hike and a new diamond ring. Yes, that was the day my husband and I got engaged. Those of you who read my guest post on Not Pretending (to be sane) will be surprised that I remembered my upcoming anniversary. I’m surprised too. I never remember such things.  I have to keep checking my phone to figure out the date. Maybe it’s the blogging. It keeps me more organized or something.

So I decided to post a couple of pics from that special day:

An beautiful view…

A super cute marmot witness…

And a yummy dinner to cap off the day.

About a month later, we went all crazy and decided to test our relationship, see if we could push it to the brink of imploding. We decided to do something that would take love, commitment, perseverance, and a sense of humor. Something that would require an offensive amount of paint chips and me to wield a sledgehammer.

We plunked down our downpayment and became the proud owners of a dump–a 1950’s foreclosed ranch that needed help. Lots of it. Like strip it to the bones and just start over, help. And since that anniversary is also coming up (see how good I am with the anniversaries all of a sudden), I’m going to start posting pics of our remodel on a monthly basis. Because some of it was kinda crazy, some of it kinda scary and some of it kinda funny. But it all worked out in the end.

Here is a sampler of one of my remodel pics:

This is what our bathroom used to look like. We were living there at the time… Hey, at least we had a tub!