Drink Like You're Irish

It's not all toolbelts around these parts! We recently put on our party pants and hosted a Happy Diane O'Neil Day (a.k.a. St. Patrick's Day) Party. And by party pants, we mean party shirts and temporary tattoos. 

Per tradition, we made an obscene amount of Irish Beef Stew.

Kristina prepping for the stew.

Pot o' Meat

We had chairs galore positioned around a fire pit. Awesome, right. Don't get too excited, because we eventually moved all the chairs into the garage (pronounced gay-raj) due to the sub-par weather. 

Kristina decided to combat the poor weather with a Snakebite. If the opportunity shall ever arise, you should ask her to make you one because she is pro. We are talking perfectly separated and equal parts cider to Guinness. 

She's got this on lock so don't worry about her closed eyes. 

Booze Station.
A lot of Baby Guinness were made here. 

In case you are curious about our temporary tattoos...

Kristina shamrocks Irish Boys.

Diane is an Irish Princess. And headed towards a life of crime. 

Jamie is bad ass. Period. 

Suprise!

Saturday afternoon we returned home from volunteering at the state spelling bee to find a daffodil peaking out of the dirt! 

Thank you, previous owners, for planting a wonderful spring surprise for us. Okay, I realize it was clearly not a surprise meant entirely for us but I have decided to take it as such. It was there way of saying, "sorry you have had to drop some serious cash over the winter to replace busted appliances, but on the bright side you have spring flowers blooming all around you."  Ah, that is nice.  

Don't mind the dead rosebush... that guy won't be there for long. 

Miss Knickers' Garden of Delights

We have been mixing things up at Casa de Kitzmmer. We started with our bathroom. We liked our DKNY shower curtain, but it felt too heavy in the space. After looking online we found a wonderful shower curtain at World Market (love that place) that had all the right colors to make our hearts' smile. 

The shower curtain is awesome, but the star of the bathroom is a housewarming gift from our buddy, Ben. 

Yes, we have a brothel price list hanging in our bathroom. Are you jealous? You should be. 

Was:

Now:

Adirondacks How You Do It

Do you know what we love at Toolbelts and Party Pants? We love Adirondack chairs; our bums love to sit in them and our eyes love to gaze upon them. Too much?  Nah, just enough.

As soon as we knew the house was going to be our home, we ordered a pair of red Adirondacks from World Market. They were already on clearance and Jamie had a coupon code for 30% off all furniture so we pounced. Two days after we closed, there were four large boxes holding our two Adirondacks and our two fiesta floral Logan chairs waiting for us on the front porch. 

Don't they look like they want more friends? The chairs, not us.

But two is simply not enough, friends. As luck would have it, while we were at Home Depot looking for back doors (another story for another day), we found unfinished Adirondack chairs for under $30. We looked at each other, said "hells to the yeah" and put them on our flatbed cart. We then picked up a few sample size wood stains and spent a few hours of our life making more bums and eyes happy. 

Kristina with her tiny wood stain sample.

The arm piece is connected to the back piece...

Ta-da!

So when you come to our house, you will have a wonderful place to sit while we enjoy a beer on our back patio. Or in our garage until it gets a bit warmer... because that seems to be where everyone congregates.

So comfy.

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane

Friends, allow me to spin you a tale. A tale of two lovely ladies that found the house of the dreams (cute bungalow - check, original features & character - check, close proximity to local bars and restaurants - check) and decide to put an offer on said house. The lovely ladies ask the current owners about the condition of the appliances that will be left behind and are informed that all the appliances are not only staying in the house, but are in wonderful working condition. The lovely ladies high five and do a quick jig to celebrate their luck and happiness in finding this charming red brick bungalow.

The lovely ladies move in and begin to use all the appliances that the previous owners so generously left behind. They quickly realize that things are, in fact, not in perfect working order. Over time the lovely ladies have discovered that they despise the previous tenants and their lies. Quite often one could hear the raven haired lovely lady yelling, "LIES! Eff the previous owners. They are swine!"  (The raven haired lovely lady has a flare for the dramatic.)  The lovely ladies slowly discovered that almost EVERY. SINGLE. APPLIANCE. is broken. 

The lovely ladies like to wash their clothes, and they happen to have a lot of clothes to wash because they are lovely and fashionable. Yet every load of laundry sounds like a jet plane is attempting to land in their laundry room. The lovely ladies don't want to wear ear plugs in their home so the caramel haired lovely lady calls a local washer/dryer repair dude. Local repair dude says, "does it sound like a jet plane is trying to land in your laundry room?" Apparently that means you need to completely replace the washer bearing...and that costs as much as just buying a new washer. The caramel haired lovely lady thanked the local repair dude (thank you, Appliance Expert!), and the lovely ladies cursed the previous owners once more. However, they saw the bright side to this storm cloud and bought these beautiful machines. Laundry now sounds like a waterfall over a rainbow of butterflies.

You so pretty.

And so quiet.

And for poops and giggles, a picture of the caramel haired lovely lady trying to disconnect the hot water tube from the wall. It had rusted on, which was totally awesome. We soon learned that no house is complete without a crescent wrench (thanks, Steve).





Shake Your Bon Bon

We recently received Wii Zumba from Jamie's bestie. We decided that last night was the night that we would dance our booties off in our living room. We moved the furniture, we put on our workout clothes, and Kristina strapped on the Wii controller. We were ready to rock... or so we thought. Friends, Zumba is hard. There were moments when we would look at each other, shrug and utter, "I don't even understand what she (the Zumba instructor) is doing right now." We did two 20-minute Zumba classes and by the end we were sweating balls and our legs were soar. This is not Wii Bowling, y'all. 

Below is what you see on the screen and your goal is to follow her dance moves. As you master different moves throughout the "class" you earn points that unlock different Zumba class options and locations. We made the team decision that Kristina would wear the controller because I was less Zumba movements and more spastic movements. I dance to the beat of my Latin drummer, so please keep your judging eyes off of me.

This was probably the easist move in the mix.

 As you can see, one of us was clearly better than the other.
(And, yes, Jamie was wearing a beer shirt while working out.)

Zumba is legit. And Wii Zumba allows you to feel like a dumbass in the comfort of your own living room.  Thank you and good day.

Let it Mellow

Pretty much since we bought the house, Jamie and I have discussed getting a dual flush toilet (we are totally adults now). First and foremost, it saves water and secondly, it just looks kind of cool. Plus, our friends Brian and Tori have a dual flush toilet, and we always thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Thank you, B.U.T.T.!

Well, not too long ago we were presented the opportunity to replace the flusher on our toilet...because ours rusted through and ended up like this: 

Disgusting, if you're wondering.

Let's be honest, the entire back of the toilet wasn't much better:

Yummo!

So before anything new was going to be installed, it had to be cleaned up a bit.



I'm excited about this, clearly.

And now, for the dual flush. Friends at home, don't be intimidated by something like this. I went online and found a good article on doityourself.com by Brian Simkins who says "The toilet is one of the simplest mechanical items in your home, and with a basic understanding of how it works, you can fix it yourself." Hooray!!




First step is to actually buy the Dual Flush mechanism.

Ta-Da!

The instructions includes were pretty easy. First we had to remove the original flapper valve and flush lever. Then we put in the bottom piece of the dual flusher mechanism where the flapper valve was. Like so:

Then the top part of the dual flush mechanism went over it. This has two 'floats' in it to control the amount of water that goes through for each type of flush (Mellow vs. Not-So-Mellow).

Next, the actual flush buttons are put where the old flush lever was. Once it is installed, you have to adjust the float level for the "#1" flush. The instructions say to put one square of toilet paper in the bowl and adjust the float level so that the #1 flush will actually flush the toilet paper.

I recommend putting a more normal amount of toilet paper in the bowl to test (who the heck uses one square of toilet paper...ever!).

And honestly it is that easy!! Total took about an hour. 

Done and done

Mellow and Not-So-Mellow