Road Trip: Coastal Adventures

As we continued our road trip down the coast toward Southern California there was one place we certainly did not want to miss. MADONNA INN!  If you know us, you know that we are way excited about Madonna Inn.

We always have to get the pink champagne cake when we come here.

I mean, just look at this place!

Ugh. If the Madonna Inn were pet friendly we could have spent our entire vacation there. Just like the oldsters that we truly are. I *suppose* there are also some non-Madonna Inn things to see along the PCH.

For instance, we stopped at this iconic bridge near Big Sur.

We also stopped to visit a colony of elephant seals!

There were so many of them! Even Norman got to take a gander.

They make fart noises with their mouths.

Stay tuned for our kayak trip to Channel Islands NP!

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Our New Old House

We had so much fun making our CA house our own, but when it came time to sell it was obvious some of the more personal touches needed to be toned down a bit because mass appeal and all that boring stuff.

Before we look at all the fun pictures I just want to thank our realtor, Shanne Carvalho who supervised all the work on the house while we were on vacation.  We literally left for two weeks and when we came home, floors, paint, yardwork, staging, everything looked perfect!  It was like an HGTV reveal when we walked in that door! He did an amazing job.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Shanne!

The outside of the house looked like this before we bought it:

Then we transformed it to look like this:

To prep the house for sale we had to say goodbye to our purple shutters and purple door.

That one hurt a little, but it was really the only change we got a little teary over.

Here's the living room and dining room before we moved in.  Look at all the damage on those wood floors.  Eep!

And when we lived there.

And all staged for sale!

Goodbye yellow, but look at those beautiful wood floors! We had them refinished because the truth is they needed it when we moved in and then they sustained 2.5 years of pit bulls.

Here's the kitchen before we moved in.

No real changes in the kitchen to prep the house for sale, but here's a nice professional picture of it all staged.

Here's Eddy's office when we bought the house.

When I officed it all up for him:

And staged as a bedroom!

Our beloved dog bathroom pre dog wallpaper.

And all staged for sale (which was basically what it looked like when we lived there.

This was my office.

Here it is all ready for quilting and such.

And staged as a bedroom.

Here's the library when we moved in (which ended up just being a wasted space where our dogs hung out.)

But here it is beautifully staged for sale.

The laundry room before.

And after we lived there.

And the only bedroom we ever used as a bedroom!

Here it was in all its glory as our master bedroom.

And all staged.

The master bathroom.

Oh gaw, it was terrible! This is what it looked like when we lived there.

And all staged for sale.

There was also an amazing transformation in our back yard where a crew removed all the damage our crazy dogs did over the years, but there were no pictures in the real estate listing. Sad face.

It's been a crazy ride, but we've said goodbye to our old place and we're excited about our new Portland home!

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Road Trip: Monterey and Carmel

It was a bit of a whirlwind move from CA to Portland (things just happened so fast!) but we did find time to take a road trip with our Norman dog to say goodbye to some of our favorite California destinations and to explore some new things.

We began with a bit of the familiar: Carmel and Monterey.

First stop was the dog beach in Carmel, obviously!

It's not a road trip until you take your dog to the beach.

Then we just sort of bummed around Monterey looking at random stuff that we like.

And by "random stuff we like" I apparently mean just tacky stuff we pass by.

But we did say one last goodbye to the colony of sea lions that lives in Monterey.

Gonna miss these guys!

Stay tuned for so much more CA road tripping!

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