Time for another posting. This one has been about 3 months or more in the making. Blair and I bought our own place. We have been living at his parents house since the beginning of March. We knew we didn’t want to stay there for too long. We used the time to save but also to get a few things that would have been otherwise impossible (like our camcorder for use with Hannah). We spent some time looking at a lot of different places. It was getting quite frustrating trying to find a place that was in our small budget but wasn’t a total pit.
We were turned onto a place by my mom up in Bountiful. We looked at the website for the place and saw the price was within our range so we thought what else do we have to lose. We went up, looked through a few of the available units. We both felt good about it so we decided to jump on the opportunity. This complex was formerly apartments and a group of people bought it and were converting all the units into condominiums. The unit Blair and I decided on was totally gutted as seen by some of the pictures. The developers were willing to re-do everything from the flooring to the paint to the doors and light fixtures. To have them do it would have tacked on approximately $14,000 to $15,000 which didn’t seem like that great of a deal.
Blair’s dad, Von, is into the cabinet and granite countertop business so with that and a few other connections with various people we decided to fix it up ourselves. Like I said this has been about 3 months in the making. Blair has spent just about every night after work up here working with whoever is willing to help. We had my dad here to help with the tiling. When I say help I mean he pretty much did it while Blair watched and learned how to lay tile. My dad also helped with the baseboards and just quite a bit of other stuff. Blair’s family and friends also came and helped quite a bit, painting and putting the cabinets in place and everything like that. I have never seen Blair work so hard and for so long on anything. He was great to get everything organized and finished while still keeping his sanity.
Well that is the long version of the story. I think our new place look fantastic. Both Blair and I are so excited to be on our own again and to be in a place that is all our own. These pictures are obviously some before and mostly after shots of our place.
It was Hannah's first year of Halloween. I can't say she loved it because she went to sleep the first step we took outside to go trick or treating. We were able to go to dads work during the day. She was awake for that. Dad got to dress up for work. He dressed up as his day off. 
He bushed out his beard and spiked his hair.
Grandma Merkley bought Hannah a Butterfly for Halloween. She looked so cute. We were not able to due the hat on her head up. Because of her double chin it would fit all the way. Next year we will try to get her to stay awake.
