House #6 - It Begins Again

We are at it again.  We finally found our next house.  Here are the before pictures.

The entry.  The lovely brick tiles will be leaving shortly.

The current parlor/future dining room.  We will remove the wood-covered wall.

The current dining room/future parlor.

The kitchen.  This is the first kitchen we will be gutting completely.  We are replacing all the cabinets and making the kitchen significantly larger.

We will be removing the brick wall with the oven and putting in a gas range.

This wall will be removed as well.

We are taking in the breakfast area and including it in the kitchen.  We will create a bar area for a breakfast table.

The utility room.

The family room. 

The house has 3 bathrooms.  This is the first hall bath.

The house has 4 bedrooms.  They are nice sized bedrooms.  We are not used to having guest bedrooms this large.  Here is the first.  It was the girl's room and we will be losing the pink/purple color.

Bedroom #2.

The hall has these great shelves.

Hall Bath #2.  We will remove the shower and small linen closet and replace them with a larger shower.

The pedestal will be replaced with a new vanity.

 The master bedroom.  There is a wall of closet doors.  We will be removing this wall and expanding the closet so it can be walk-in and have only 1 door.

The master bath.  We will remove the tub and replace it with a shower.

This cabinet is in the bath.  It will come out to make the bathroom feel bigger.  We will put in a more efficient linen cabinet.

Yellowstone National Park - Petrified Tree

Here is a picture of the petrified tree we were headed to when we saw the black bear.

Yellowstone National Park - Black Bear

We enjoyed just "playing it by ear" for the trip through Yellowstone.  There was no real set time table we were following.  We would come across a side road and say "let's go!"  One such time we saw a sign for petrified tree and decided to head that way.  Well we came across a bunch of people standing on the side of the road with their cameras and binoculars.  We looked and looked and just could not see anything at first.  Zooming in with the camera I was finally able to see this:

A black bear that people said looked to be about 2 years old.  They said it was probably out on one its first solo food-finding missions.

Yellowstone National Park - Pronghorn

I have to admit this animal was not on the list of goals but that is probably because neither one of us had any idea what it was before we entered the park.  Pronghorns are fairly common so we saw quite a few of them.

 

Yellowstone National Park - Eagle

While we were watching the buffalo we spotted this golden eagle hunting its dinner.  It was nose diving the river in its quest for food.  Unfortunately this was the only clear picture I got of the bird.

Yellowstone National Park - Buffalo

Buffalo are also very common in the park.  For most of the day we were seeing buffalo in pairs or by themselves. 

 

If we happened across a pair we would joke that we had found the herd.  Then all of a sudden we found the herd...

 

 

Yellowstone National Park - Elk

As I said in a previous post, elk are common in the area.  We saw them on our way into the park and on our way out.  It was getting dark when we headed to West Yellowstone for the night and there was a line of cars in front of us with a park ranger directing traffic so I didn't get a very good picture.

Yellowstone National Park - Goals

I am going a little out of order since at this point I still have not had a chance to go through all the pictures I took on the trip.  I have to get my act together.  Haha.

Some backstory for posts I am working on...On the drive into Yellowstone we were discussing what we would like to see.  We had the first day's goals: moose, buffalo, elk.  These animals are very common in the area and if you can make through the area without seeing at least one of those then you aren't looking very hard.  The second day's goals would be a little more difficult: bear, wolf and bighorn sheep.  So we had our goals for the trip now we just had to meet them.

Yellowstone National Park - Kepler Cascades

Our first stop after entering Yellowstone was at the Kepler Cascades.  I wasn't sure what to expect and forgot to take the camera bag with my other lens.  Well I had the wrong lens for this stop.  There is an overlook to see these falls but to the side there is a "path" where you can get down to them.  Justin started down first and reached the bottom before I overcame my fear of heights and began my descent.  Because I had the telephoto lens on I didn't really get any good pictures from the bottom of the cliff.

Just to give you an idea of the height we climbed down here is Justin sitting on the cliff.  I Was standing on the lookout.  Don't worry we didn't have to scale the cliff.  There was an actual path to get down there but it was pretty steep.