Liz & Nate

I was taking pictures of my lovely engagement ring to post up here when all of a sudden –

Kitty swipe!

Don’t worry. Its safely back on my finger. Nate bought my ring from Ames Silversmithing, a family-owned business here in Ames. As soon as we saw the salesman’s rough, dirty, artist’s hands, we knew this was the place for us. I pointed out several rings that I liked and Nate went back later to make the final decision. I just love it!

Filed under:
Wedding by Liz

First, a brief history:

Liz and I moved into our house back in July of 2007. It was a wonderful house. Fast forward to May of 2008, Ames got some torrential rain. My best friend Jim was getting married on Saturday, and it had been raining for days. He fortunately had beautiful weather, but the rain had taken its toll. We started getting seepage in one corner of the basement. We pulled back the carpet and did what we could to deal with the water, but had to tear into the wall. Sealant was applied, and life went on. That winter a pipe burst in the same corner. The carpet was soaked and we had enough of dealing with carpet in a basement. Out went the carpet and our basement transformed like a caterpillar into a butterfly (I promise to have posts on that in the future). We’ve done a lot of work to the main room, and have had a lot of fun doing it. Fortunately we ripped out carpet from the entire basement, but unfortunately didn’t really do anything about the floor in the secondary room.

Fast forward again to March of 2010. We finally get around to working on the secondary room in the basement. We call it the “Project Room”. It is our place to do all the messy things that we don’t want to do in the garage. Over the past year, we have found more and more to store in there. It had devolved from the Project Room to the Storage Room.

We thus decided to clean and re-dedicate this room to its original intent. A space for us to work on projects in the house while watching a movie. As well as a clean friendly space for Liz to do sewing, painting, and other artsy things that I don’t really comprehend. In a mad dash the room was emptied of its original contents.

The floor is a wonderful shade of rust red with some fantastic vinyl flooring in the little alcoves

Unfortunately this didn’t mesh with our desire to not have our eyeballs bleed when we entered the room. Enter my implements of destruction!

Side note: sealing yourself in a small room with no ventilation and very strong chemicals is a sure fire way to kill brain cells.

Starting at noon on Saturday with this:

In three hours I had gotten to this:

All I have to say is that it was a very even match. I’ve managed to scrape out two of the three alcoves (Point Nate), but lost the ability to grip things for an afternoon (Point Project Room). I’ve decided to bring power tools along for the next round, I never said I would play fair.

Filed under:
House by Nate

At least some of them are. We finally got the awesome Save the Dates that Liz designed for us and she has been diligently addressing them (by hand no less). Hopefully we will have them all in the mail by the end of the week. It makes things feel rather official, now that we are sending out written notice of our marriage. Catering contracts and reception venues were a leap, but we hadn’t advertised yet. We are now moving out of stealth mode and into public view. I can only hope that the world is ready for us.

Filed under:
Wedding by Nate