I got a robot for christmas!!!

I'm so excited about this early Christmas present!!!

I have been asking Tim for a floor cleaning robot for a few years now. What a great idea! A robot that vacuums the house for you!
The amount of dog hair that our dogs shed all year around is ridiculous. I brush them all regularly, and now we keep Peanut Butter shaved pretty short, but I still have dog hair all over the house.

Now that we have Mia, who sheds worse than I would have ever imagined, I really can't keep up with the hair balls. We have white fur piles along every wall and in every corner of the house within 3 days after I sweep and vacuum the whole house. The fur is under and behind every piece of furniture, and it's just nuts. I honestly do not have the time or the energy to sweep and vacuum the entire house every 2-3 days.

This year I begged Timmy to get me a robot to help me keep up with the pet hair. The I-robots have excellent reviews and are reasonably priced. I found one that is specially made to help with pet hair and I showed Tim the website.

He finally agreed to get the robot, and a few weeks ago this arrived:

Jack wants to know what's in the box.

I was SO HAPPY to open this box!!! Help has arrived

I was a little worried about how the dogs would react to our new robot. I pictured them chasing it and barking a lot.
I was wrong. The girl dogs don't care much about the robot. They move out of it's way when it comes near them and they mostly stay on the couch or the bed when it's turned on.
I think Jack likes it though. It was parked near my chair while I was reading the manual and I found Jack with his paws touching it. How cute!!

I decided the robot is a girl, and I named her Rosie, after the Jetson's robot. I've always wanted a robot like Rosie from the Jetsons, and I have a feeling we're not too far off from having robots that do more housekeeping tasks.

My Rosie as just awesome!!! We plugged her in and charged her up by putting her on her home base.
When she was charged, I pushed the button on top that says "clean", and Rosie went to work.

The first time around the house, she bumped into all the furniture and walls, although not hard enough to scratch anything. She must have mapped out the house on her first run, because now she knows where everything is and she slows down just before she gets to a table leg or a wall.
She has a sensor and she won't fall down the stairs (we made sure of this before I let her clean unsupervised)

She does a really good job with the vacuuming! She gets 99% of the pet hair every time she cleans. Much better than I even expected.

It takes her about 2 hours to make her way around our small house. She's not quite as noisy as a regular vacuum cleaner.

Here is a quick video I took of Rosie working on the kitchen.
She goes around in a haphazard pattern, but she eventually gets every corner and around all the furniture.

When she's finished cleaning she goes back to her home base and plays a little victory song.

The only thing I have to do is empty out the little tray where the dirt collects.

Rosie has a feature I can set so she will clean when I program her to. Now that I've had her a few weeks and I trust her not to get stuck somewhere or hurl herself down the stairs, I'm going to set her to clean every 2 days. She can clean while I'm at work!

I-robot has several different models of the Roomba. We picked a mid-grade one that is especially good for pet hair, so there were cheaper models than the one we picked, and there were more expensive ones too.
In case you are curious of the price, Tim paid $399.00 for Rosie. I do think that's a reasonable price for a vacuum cleaner, and especially one that cleans by itself.

This is THE BEST Christmas present I could have asked for! Rosie is a huge help to me and I love love love her! THANK YOU, TIMMY!!!

Living Room update - Dec 2013

We are making progress on our living room too.

I'm so ready to get going on re-doing the floor in here, and I want to buy a huge colorful rug. 

My decorating kind of came to a halt when I was getting ready for my huge cruise a few months ago. Now I'm ready to get going on finishing this room up but it looks like I am going to have to wait some more. 

Tim has some major electrical work he wants to do on the whole house. He needs to rewire the entire house, which will involve punching holes throughout the drywall all over the house. I'm not sure when he will start this, but I have a feeling it's coming soon. He's been talking about it a lot lately. 

As long as he is rewiring the whole house and cutting up the walls, he decided to put new drywall up rather than repair what we have. Sooooooooo.............I might as well stop what I'm doing with the decorating because it will all be taken down and I'll have to start over.

It took me FOREVER to get this living room painted!  I should be very frustrated that I will have to do it all over again, but I'm not. 

There are a few reasons why I don't mind. 

1. We will have brand new drywall in the entire house! I can't complain about that, can I? He's also going to put some insulation in the walls, so we will have more of a sound barrier between the living room and our bedroom, which share a common wall. It will also help keep the house warmer in the winter when we have insulation on all of the outside walls.

2. There are several layers of wallpaper under the paint in the living room. I really should have taken the time to remove it all, and I have regretted not doing it the last time I repainted. Now I won't have to go through the hassle of removing all that paper. 

3. I used semi-gloss paint when I painted the living room walls this last time! Yikes! It's a little shinier than it should be, and I didn't even notice my mistake until the entire living room was painted and our neighbor pointed it out. 

Whoops!! 

So I knew after that, I was going to have to redo the living room walls anyway. 

So it looks like the entire living room is going to be completely gutted and re-done at some point in the nearish future.

Here is where we are at right now. 

Tim is going to replace the front door, we have been looking at doors and we haven't decided which one to get. The one we have looks fine, but it's very drafty around the edges. 

Tim's mom gave us her leather love seat and chair. They fit perfectly in the space.

We have been talking about the floor a lot lately too. We have looked into laying new hardwood floor on top of this one, or refinishing the existing floor.
We decided since we have to empty the room to re-do the drywall, we might as well re-finish the existing floor at the same time.
I think we decided we want a dark colored stain in here. I do not like the orangy color it is now. The floor looks pretty bad, it's all scuffed and scratched up.

So, although we have made progress on the living room, I have stopped doing anything to this room. I'm putting my focus on some other things until we get some of the big projects done and I can get back to decorating.
More living room updates coming when we start removing drywall..........that should be fun!

Kitchen update - Dec 2013 - A very Christmassy kitchen

I've been wanting to do a kitchen update for a while now.The last time I posted about the kitchen, I had just finished painting. We still have a long way to go in here, but we are making progress. 

It's very Christmassy in the kitchen right now. I hung some red Christmas lights from the curtainrods (they aren't staying! They are just there for Christmas) 

We haven't bought curtains for the kitchen yet, but I had a huge bolt of red and white striped material that my mother-in-law gave me. Since we are planning to add some red color to the room, I decided to use the material for some temporary curtains. I kind of like the way they look, they really brighten up the kitchen. 

These "curtains" are fastened to the rods with safety pins. I didn't even bother sewing them. I'm pretty sure we will take them down after Christmas and get some real curtains.

 

Notice the "curtain" on the door is hanging up with magnets

This side of the kitchen still looks a little bare to me.
Looking at these pictures, I don't think I like the baskets I hung on the wall. I'm pretty sure I'll be taking those down.
I also need to finish painting the trim white.

Here are a few pics that show the Christmas lights a little better. It looks really cool in there at night.

I have been wanting to paint the insides of the cabinets white. The pine looks awful to me.
I've been waiting for my 3 and a half week christmas break from work to get started.
Today, we bought some paint and I got to work emptying out the cabinets.
I decided it will be easier if I do one section at a time.

Tim gave me a refresher course on how to use the sander, and how much I needed to sand down the insides of the cabinets. We needed to scuff up the wood so the paint would stick.

I sanded all the wood and wiped everything down to remove the sawdust.

This is where we are now after 2 coats of paint. We are using Behr Ultra-pure white semi-gloss, which is the same thing we used on the fronts of the cabinets and all of the trim in the house.

I still need to give these another coat (or two), and then I'll make my way around the kitchen.
After it dries, I'll put down shelf paper before I load our dishes back in. We haven't found any shelf paper we like yet, so we need to keep looking until we find something. It's so expensive! I refuse to spend that kind of money on something we don't love. I hope we find something soon, I'll have to be able to put the dishes away by Christmas!
It feels good to finally get this project going though. I really like everything painted white, I think it looks much better than the pine did.