a room with a view

What do you see while you're doing dishes?

~Week 4~

Last week I dug waaaaay back into a kitchen cupboard and pulled out my bread machine. And then spent a good 30 minutes trying to scrub the thing clean! Jake bought me this bread maker for Christmas about 8 years ago and I think I put it away about 7 years ago. ahem.
The problem was, all of the bread machine recipes I had were sort of cumbersome and made reeeeally dense and frankly, awful tasting bread. But, I recently discovered this great recipe website that has a whole section devoted to bread machine recipes.
So I gave myself an ultimatum: get out the bread machine and use the blasted thing or get rid of it already!
The first recipe I found was perfect! It was simple, used very few and very basic ingredients that I already had on hand. The bread was delicious...light and soft!! And the big bag of yeast that I bought at Costco after Jake gifted me that machine? Still active! What a deal! :)

My machine now has a permanent place on my counter....at least, for the next month. I'm going to try to make all of our bread and not purchase any dough for the next month. This means our Sunday morning cinnamon rolls (I usually use Bridgeford frozen bread dough for this), sandwich bread, muffins, etc. I'm going to make all of it from scratch. Well, I'm going to try!

If you don't have a bread machine, you should try my absolute favorite recipe for beer bread. Talk about easy!
*preheat oven to 350
*mix together:
3 cups of self rising flour (or regular flour with salt and baking soda added)
1 12oz bottle of beer (or a can, if you're really red-neck :))
1/2 c. sugar

*bake for 1 hour; when there's 10 minutes left, pour 2 Tablespoons of melted butter on top

If you devour the entire thing yourself, I promise not to judge you.

a bathroom remodel (part 2)

Since the handyman we were using for our bathroom remodel had a full-time day job, Jake decided we could save a lot of time (and money) if he did the demolition himself. Basically, that involved knocking out all of the tile in the bathroom. If you remember from the previous post, there was a lot of tile!

Here is the inside of the shower after most of the tile had been removed. See the pile at the bottom of the shower? Also, see the protective face shield at the bottom of the shower? He didn't start out wearing one of those. Let's just say, he thinks safety equipment is overrated. Or at least, he did. We had Jonah and Nathan for the evening and our girls were already in bed when I hear the pounding in the bathroom suddenly cease. Then I hear him shouting for me. I run in the bathroom and open the shower door to find what honestly looks like a murder scene. There was blood every.where. Most of all, it was pouring down his face and into his eyes. Apparently a piece of tile had flown off the wall and hit him in the forehead. As is true of most head wounds, it took a long time for me to even find where the actual wound was and then to get it to stop bleeding. And being the supportive, loving wife that I am, the whole time I was thinking, "Well, great! I'm going to have to wake up the girls, load 4 kids and a bleeding husband into the car and drive into to town and sit in the emergency room at 11:00 on a Saturday night!" However, the only thing my husband finds more overrated than safety equipment is doctors. The bleeding finally stopped on it's own....and the next day he bought a safety mask.


He complained about that mask for the rest of the demolition process.

When we took out the medicine cabinet, we found hundreds of razor blades in the wall. Brand new ones, thankfully, but still! There's no telling.... The green towel on the floor is plugging the pipe for the toilet. Don't worry, I threw that towel away.

to be continued.....

Just one more time, I promise!