A New House in the making...

On June 1st, Zui and I became homeowners for the very first time!!! We bought a 4 bed/3 bath in Mililani. It's great because it's walking distance to where we both work, at Zui's dad's house. So our house is considered a "row house"-- attached on both sides like a townhouse but without the association fees. Because it is an attached home, it sold for much cheaper than other 4 bed in the area, which run about $600k.

We are so excited to have: a garage, an attic, 4 bedrooms (Yay! Izaiah will no longer have to sleep in the living room!), a dishwasher, small backyard, and lots more room inside :) We are going from 700 living sq. feet in this 2 bed townhouse to almost 1700 sq ft.

So we actually haven't moved in...yet. We've owned the house 3 weeks and are still fixing it up. First thing to go was the popcorn ceiling. Zui got a few boys from church to help take it down (thank you Carson, Nathan, and Cameron!)

It was quite the project, but as you can see the boys had fun in the process with "snow"ball fights and rain showers.
This is most of the accumulated popcorn they collected...crazy!

With the popcorn ceiling down the next step was to texture, which Zui did with the help of a few boys again. Good thing I married such a handyman!
After texturing, they primed the ceiling, then painted it. Here's just a little idea of the mess in our house...good thing we're getting these carpets replaced.
4 days after we got the keys, Zui left to go to Moloka'i for a week for a high adventure survival camp with the young men. Luckily my friend Katie came to help me through it. We were determined to not let anything slow us down while Zui was gone so...everyday we found sitters (thank you Brady's!) to watch Anjuli and Zion for a few hours so we could paint.

Zeya either played in the portacrib (didn't last long) or tried to go to sleep in the portacrib (didn't really happen) and mostly just stayed attached to me in the baby trekker. I got a little paint in his hair, but he didn't mind :)
Sorry about all the cheesy pics--I had never picked up a paintbrush before in my life, so painting for me was such a thrill!

I loved watching the walls turn from dirty white to "cottage cream." It instantly made the house feel more like a home.


Here's my friend Katie. I really can't thank her enough. She flew all the way from New York to help me while Zui was gone. She watched the kids everyday while I taught piano, then during the day helped paint AND at night my visiting teachers stayed in the house with the sleeping babes so we could go back and paint til 11pm or so.