Helmut Arrives!

Renee's father Helmut is visiting Portland for the first time. As a certified electrician and general handyman if all sorts, he wasn't in our new house five minutes before he pulled out a chisel and got to work!

The studio construction is done. Yesterday Helmut worked on the electricity and we worked on painting!

Snowlandia!

 The snow keeps on coming!  There was a small gap this morning and Renee was able to get out on her scheduled flight to Michigan, but since she left it has been snowing and freezing rain all day!  Here are some pictures courtesy of PDX Pipeline.

People stopped driving and just decided to ski everywhere.  Seriously, people have been skiing past all day!

And what better food for hungry skiers than ice cream!

 This was our house this morning!

 

Judging by the snow on our trash cans we've gotten 8-10 inches in the last 48 hours!

First icicles on the new roof!

Snowpacalypse in Portland!

Yesterday afternoon Portland was hit with a surprise attack of winter! Most schools, including Brian's, were cancelled halfway through the day. The conditions were bad enough that it took Brian over 2.5 hours to drive home from Hillsboro (usually 40 min!) when he was let out at 1:00.  Thankfully we are safe and sound and there's no school today!

Studio progress!

Renee's studio got a roof and walls this week! Now it's on to priming!

Renee's New Studio!

Contractors are hard at work to revamp the garage into a new studio for Renee!  It's gonna be BIIIIIG!

New house and NEW year!

Things have been CRAZY since our last post! As most of you know, we did INDEED get the house!  Here we are signing the papers!

The next day we went by and were given our keys!

Buying the house turned out to be the easy part, in reality it was the moving that proved to be the challenge.

It took a while to pack up the apartment...

  

THEN it was time to move into the new house!  Here's the first box!

 Which was soon followed by a few more!

 Our new house has hummingbirds - can you find him?

There are also a plethora of cats for Olive to watch out the window.  One is bigger than she is!

One of the largest city parks is only a few blocks away!

At a shop down the street we found the perfect (maybe strangest) ornament for our first Christmas in the new house!

 On Christmas we went to a friend's condo for dinner and beautiful view of Portland!

We rang in the new year at good ol' Voodoo Doughnuts! Renee shouted "Happy New Years!!!" in the middle of the restaurant and everyone cheered.

Renee found the "unique" lamp at a local vintage store.  We are pretty sure that the last owner was Luke Skywalker.

Renee was also VERY excited to find this old school chair!