Because I was only going to be there for three days, I chose to focus on a few key rooms instead of taking on the whole house. I decided on the half bath, guest bath and bedroom, dining room and living room. It was a lot of work but we were able to get all rooms to about 90% complete except for the guest bath. Pictures and figures of the guest bath will be coming soon.

1/2 Bath: $79

Before                                                              After

The half bath was a lot of fun. It was very plain and had dated brass fixtures and accessories. I chose a nice tan color to give the room a little warmth and oil rubbed bronze fixtures to replace the brass. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a bronze faucet that was within the budget, so I told Jenna to search online for a better deal. For the mirror,  I chose a dark frame that complimented the fixtures and had a lot more presence than the frameless oval one. I also wanted to update the light fixture, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money so I spray painted it. When I was done, it looked like a completely new fixture.

-Paint: $12
-Spray paint: $7
-Mirror: $30
-Accessories: $30

Guest Bedroom: $45

Before

After

Updating this room was really simple. I just painted the bookshelf black, decluttered, and added some accessories. A lot of rooms have everything you need to make them look really great with minimal work. It’s just a matter of decluttering and finding potential in the items you already have.

-Paint for bookcase: $9
-Mirror: $24
-Flowers: $12

Dining Room: $198

Before

After

The dining room was one of the most dramatic before and afters. It was also one of the more challenging rooms because of the house’s open floor plan. There really is nothing that separates it from the rest of the house beside the wall between it and the kitchen. I really wanted to make it stand out, so I added  chair rail, crown moulding, and the tan paint from the half bath. I also  picked out a new chandelier, but due to the ceiling height, we weren’t able to install it ourselves.

- Crown Moulding: $39
-Chair Rail Moulding: $23
-Paint: $23
-Chandelier: $89,  (coming soon)
-Flowers and vase: $24

Living Room: $24

Before

After

The living room was one of the easiest rooms to update. I painted the fireplace to make it pop, rearranged the furniture to make it feel bigger, and added accessories they already had. That’s about it.

-Paint: $4
-Flowers and container: $20

Cost of Supplies: $80

Total Cost: $426

Now that’s a deal!

(WREK product placement FTW)

I immediately pulled over to (have a hissy fit and) make a few calls to Amanda and the insurance company trying to figure out what the best thing to do was. Our insurance company gave me a few glass companies that they recommend since our deductible is much higher than the cost of fixing it.

First call: Marietta Toyota
In shop repair for $850 + labor + tax.
HAHAHAAHAHAH AHAHHAHAHAAH *click* #toyotasucks

Second call: All American Auto Glass
Mobile repair Wednesday for $230 (includes labor) + tax.
WAYYYY better, but I still have more calls to make.

Third call: Safelite Auto Glass
Mobile repair tomorrow for $226 (includes labor) + tax + free lifetime warranty.
They came down to that from 236 after I mentioned my previous quote. Better, but let’s keep going.

Fourth call: Executive Auto Glass
Mobile repair tomorrow for $207 (includes labor and tax) + life of the vehicle warranty.
Hooray!

Fifth call: Safelite already came down once, so I gave them the chance to do it again.
In shop repair tomorrow for $190 + tax.
I also double-checked that they were using OEM glass and asked them what their warranty covered exactly.

Sixth call: Why not give Executive Auto Glass a chance to price match?
Mobile repair tomorrow for $196.30.
Not only does Executive Auto Glass offer a warranty for the life of the vehicle (follows the VIN number in case we ever sell the car), they use OEM glass.

I guess if we have to spend money, I feel like I got a really good deal.

After more than 9 hours of driving, we had finally gotten off the interstate and were only a few minutes away from their house. I pulled up to a traffic light and a bright yellow car pulled up on the right side. Amanda glanced over and asked me if the car was a Corvette or not. I confirmed that it indeed was a Corvette, but jokingly added that it probably wasn’t a very good one because it still had a Carmax sticker on it. Taking the joke further, I asked Amanda if she thought I should ask him to race. (We’re driving in a 2004 Toyota Corolla by the way. With extra, added poundage to boot.) She immediately said she didn’t approve and we continued laughing.

The green light for the turn lane changed from yellow to red, so I put my left foot and the brake and my right foot on the gas. As soon as our light changed from red to green, I hit the gas and started to pull away laughing. (At this point, I still haven’t even made eye contact with the driver of the Corvette.) All of the sudden, the Corvette bursts past us in a flash of yellow. As he goes past, he pauses just enough for us to look over and watch him smile and nod and gun it some more.

Awesome.

Personally, I thought it was hilarious. He knew exactly what I was doing and decided to play along. Amanda and I are laughing that something so funny happened while my eyes drift to my rearview mirror.

Cop.

Blue lights pass us and pull the Corvette over. Makes the story even funnier to me. Amanda felt terrible because we kind of egged him on, but he didn’t have to break the speed limit to play along.

Last Sunday at church, Alan talked about vows and what the Bible has to say about them (a lot actually). Obviously one thing that jumps into mind is wedding vows. At the end of the sermon I took Amanda to the altar (mainly just some steps in front of the stage where the band plays) and prayed for and over her — out loud.

It didn’t really hit me until just now that all this week Amanda and I haven’t been running as smoothly as we usually do. We aren’t arguing or fighting about anything, but rather we are becoming more easily annoyed with each other over small things. I publicly prayed over my wife and for the past 6 days it has been somewhat of a struggle to feel like toward her. Coincidence?

If this small testimony can help you in any way, I hope it helps you know that standing up for Christ and doing things with your life to follow Him just might bring some trials your way. Remember to keep doing what you are doing and continue to know that He will bring you through it.

The only way to edit bookmarks is through the tedious use of the star icon to the left of the address bar. By clicking that star you can add a bookmark. If that star is filled yellow, you’re on a page you’ve already bookmarked so you can click it to edit where it’s saved or delete it altogether.

I ran into an interesting problem that I could not fix. I somehow saved a bookmark for http://google.com into my bookmarks bar. Since the address bar will never read that exact URL, Chrome doesn’t recognize me ever visiting that exact URL and thus never filling in the star so I can delete it. Make sense? http://google.com always resolves to http://www.google.com so I couldn’t delete the bookmark. There is no way to right-click the bookmark and edit it. That functionality is simply not available yet in Chrome for Mac.

The first thing I tried was to delete Chrome from my computer altogether. I reinstalled Chrome and opened it “for the first time” to find that all of my bookmarks were still there. WHAT?

[On a Mac, deleting applications is rather simple: drag the icon from the applications folder into the trash -- done. If you have a dock icon, drag that too. The great thing about a Mac is that those icons in your applications folder are actually a package -- a bundle of files -- that appears to be a single clickable file. All the files that you need to run the application are contained within this package, so to get rid of it, you just drag it to the trash.]

When I opened Chrome to see that all my bookmarks were still there, I knew that the bookmarks had to be stored in a separate file located somewhere outside of the package. (I guessed that they were stored in some kind of XML format.) I started poking around my harddrive and found the file where the bookmarks are stored.

/Users/MY_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks

The file is called Bookmarks and there is no extension. You can open it with TextEdit.app (I used my development program called Coda). All of your bookmarks are stored here in some kind of list format (Edit: It’s JSON. Thanks Trey.) with each element containing the attributes date_added, id, name, type, and url. You also find “children” attributes that contain all the same information for folders.

[If you just want to delete all your bookmarks and start over, just delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and restart the Chrome application.]

Now you can edit your bookmark structure by hand. Close Chrome, go to town, save the file, and reopen Chrome. BE CAREFUL. You are editing code that the browser needs to be able to parse in order to run properly. If you mess up something, stuff breaks in an unrecoverable way. You’ll have to:

1. Delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome
2. Delete the Chrome.app from /Applications
3. Download and reinstall Chrome again

Hope this helps someone. Definitely helped me.

Any information you might have that could help, please let me know in the comments.

I’m a little disappointed though. I was told that I would have an extra seal on my diploma for participating in the cooperative education program. I don’t know if they changed something from the time I started until now, but there’s no seal. Just some tiny little letters.

Funny thing, we are not worried at all. We are believing in the one true God of the universe and we have complete confidence that we will be provided for.

I don’t know what’s going on, but I am not ashamed to tell people about God when talking about our new money situation. This is kind of new for me. I just throw that jazz in there every chance I get.

I think it’s great. And you should too.

Again, if you have any questions please let me know.

• OLD URL – http://charlieholder.com/blog/
• NEW URL – http://charlieholder.com/

Yes. I am just moving the blog from a folder called blog to my root directory. I will be nice and automatically forward people that hit the old URL to the new URL. However, if you’re reading through RSS, you’ll be out of luck on that regard.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Then yesterday, a pair of pants that I’ve had since high school felt a little too snug. After work, I broke down and pulled out the old workout DVD. I just figured that I was getting to the age where eating whatever I wanted and not exercising wasn’t going to cut it anymore. I mean they say you are supposed to gain an extra 10 lbs in your first year of marriage, right?

This morning when I was getting ready for work, I couldn’t even button a pair of pants I’d just bought. I mentioned it to Charlie and told him I thought I was getting fat. He got this “Oh crap!” look on his face.  When he ran out of the room, I didn’t know what to think. When he came back in, he told me that he’d accidentally washed them in hot water and shrunk all my pants.

So good news is I’m not fat, but now I have nothing to wear. This would normally be awesome news. Shopping Spree!! Unfortunately we are saving money right now. Looks like I’m just going to have to keep working out to fit into my clothes.

Yay.

But since I don’t live with my parents anymore, it’s kind of essential that we actually do stuff around the house. I guess we could hire a maid, but why pay for one when I married one? HAYOOOOO! OMG JUST KIDDING.

I don’t really know how long it took, but Amanda and I eventually just came to an agreement on some things:

• If you prepare dinner, you don’t do the dishes.
  • If both of us prepare dinner, we both do the dishes.
• Amanda will fold the laundry if Charlie washes it.
• Flip-flop letting the dog out.
  • Charlie is a heavy sleeper. Amanda lets him out at night if he’s whining.
• Flip-flop cleaning the bathroom as needed.
• Flip-flop vacuuming as needed.
• Trash goes out with the next person to leave if it’s full.
• We don’t dust.

Well, Charlie wanted a new deal. Amanda does everything. OMG JUST KIDDING.

I requested some amendments to the agreement. After a bit of negotiating, the agreement was amended as:

• Amanda does all the laundry.
• Charlie keeps the entire kitchen clean.
• Charlie vacuums as needed.

The key to negotiating is ranking your assets/items. A 1 is something that is not important to you. A 10 is something that is very important to you.

To me, not doing laundry is a 10. I’m pretty willing to do most other things in order to get that.

Keeping the kitchen clean is a 3-4. I don’t dislike doing dishes. Taking out the trash isn’t a big deal. It’s a little more time consuming than washing clothes, but my personality just prefers this over laundry.

And vacuuming is a 1. I do it already. And I’m pretty savvy at it. (HAHA GET IT?!?) Plus we have the Dyson Ball DC24. It’s so money and you don’t even know it.

When I initially asked Amanda about the laundry-dishes trade off, it only included laundry and dishes. A 3-4 for a 10 in my book. I’m already coming out ahead. When she came back with adding vacuuming, it was over.

FDR would be proud.

Everyone has resolutions for the new year and taking a look at last year’s, I did like none of them. I think I failed miserably for a combination of two reasons: getting married and unrealistic goals. Getting married took up a big chunk of time. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t change a thing, but I’m simply recognizing the fact that I kind of got busy and other things had a larger priority. Setting goals is always important, but it’s even more important to remember to set goals that are actually attainable.

So baring any unforeseen, new marriages I’d like to set out a few, more realistic, goals that I’d like to achieve for 2010.

ACTION ITEMS

1. Read through the New Testament
2. Run a 10k road race in under 40 minutes
3. Start my freelance development
   • Finally pick a design and stick with it for my personal site
   • Create the lunch site as a stand-alone application
   • Develop the poker site
   • Challenge the cooking site
4. Finish the poems I started
5. Visit another country
6. Buy a car
7. Put lots of pennies in the jar

GENERAL ITEMS

1. Play more guitar
2. Take more pictures
3. PRAY MORE
4. Save more money toward a house

Well, here’s to twenty ten being a great year. Cheers.

• Had a bachelor party.
• Saw Ashton and Demi.
• Joined a new church.
• Moved into my first apartment.
• Got married.
• Visited Jamaica.
• Started tithing.
• Caught a foul ball from Garret Anderson.
• Joined the WREK Sports Baseball Broadcasting team.
• Got baptized.
• Adopted a rescued dog.
• Ran a mile in 6:03.
• Shot a handgun.
• Learned XSLT and SimpleXML.
• Graduated from Georgia Tech.
• Bought a Macbook Pro.

What I learned:

• I don’t want to copy Will Clarke that much.