Temple Square

 With the beautiful spring weather drawing us outdoors we took a drive to Salt Lake City with our neighbours to do the tourist thing.

We parked one street north of the conference centre and were pleased to find the spot where Win's Great Great Grandfather (George's namesake), George Washington Taggart lived when they first settled in Salt Lake. Their original house no longer remains but it was situated where the tree and driveway is in this photo.

What we found remarkable was that if it still stood it would look right onto its neighbour, the new conference centre on the opposite corner to this house.

 Before we set out the kids complained that it was going to be terribly boring.  2 minutes into the tour they declared that it was the "Best Day EVER". There were so many fountains to dip their feet in. A few times they tried to steal coins from the water.

 We started at the conference centre and made our way from one water fountain to the next until we arrived at the beautiful gardens of Temple Square.

 In between the Conference centre and Temple Square is a creek, not sure if it has always been there, or if they bought it to the surface with the recent construction. You wouldn't guess that this is the busy main street of SLC would you?

 So many flowers....

 These tulips were unusual, the yellow/ orange ones were very large and there were dark purple, almost black tulips that looked like velvet in texture.

 Another fountain... this one on the south side of the temple.

 As were debating where to find a suitable toilet a man approached us and said that we could go into the adjacent Church Office Building to see the view from 30 floors up. The prospect of good toilets seemed likely so we headed into the large high rise and were escorted to the viewing platforms on the west and east side of the building. On one side we could see the Capital building and Ensign Peak in the background. If you look in the bottom left of the photo there is a prominent red house which is the same mansion that is built on the place that George Washington lived.

 This was an amazing view of Temple Square and the reflection pool where we saw many brides getting their photos taken.

 Below: Inside the Church Office Buildings there was a large mural on the wall. The whole time we were there our kids kept trying to peak through keyholes to see if they could spot the Prophet.

 Below: These are our neighbours, a great source of fun for all of us- we feel really lucky to have landed in the house that we did because of the great people that live there.

 We decided to take a lunch break and Matt suggested the Lion House/ Beehive House Cafe. We hesitated taking all  8 kids to a place like that but once we got in there it was a casual setting, and cheap as well, the kids getting large meals, a roll,dessert and drinks for the whopping price of $2.95 each. 

After eating we toured Brigham Young's old house and Isabelle, who was fascinated by the history of the place asked what had happened to all his daughters. We told her of course that they had died a long time ago. While walking through we passed a room with some women dressed for a fancy tea party, or something with dresses and old looking hats. As we were leaving Isabelle whispered to me "I saw one of his Daughters, they are still alive!!"

 At the visitor's centre we saw many diorama displays and when we found the prophet "Isaiah" one we had to get a photo with Isaiah.

 The Christus was a little bit embarrassing because our kids all wanted to climb on the base and touch the holes in Christ's feet. At first we dragged them off but then I thought that it probably had more meaning to them being able to touch those imprints than looking from a distance. We may have gotten the "Spiritual Evil Eye" from some people in the room but the kids really had a special experience.

A Tour of our House

 We  have been renovating the house since we moved in and are finally nearing the end of stage one (Stage 2 might be in the distant future when we are rich and famous). 

There has been lots of painting, to the point where the girl at 'Lowes' (the hardware store) said "Wow, you sure like to paint"- not really, I just wanted to do it before the new timber floors went in so I didn't have to use drop sheets.

I painted the cabinets in our en suite which were an orange wood colour - not a good look with the green bench top. So I primed and painted the cabinets white to go with the rest of the room.

 Our Bedroom was all oatmeal coloured (the picture below, RIGHT)- oatmeal shag carpet, cream beige walls and beige light fittings- including a splendid squid shaped light hanging from the ceiling. I painted the walls in a grey/blue colour that is a lighter version of the dark grey blue in the living rooms. 

  I spray painted the light fittings a brushed silver colour. You can just see them in the picture below (two sconces on the wall above the drawers and the body of the squid in the centre).   

We upgraded the skirting boards throughout the house (or 'base boards' as they call them here) to larger ones and we put in solid 'handscraped' maple timber floors.

 One of the obvious things lacking in all our rooms are wall hangings. I do have great plans for phase 1.5 which involves framed pictures and things... also involves a few new light fittings if I can get them past Win.

 In this picture you can see the entrance to the en suite and to the walk in robe; where we also installed timber floors. It was so nice to be rid of that awful carpet, it would do the strangest things when you tried to sponge out a stain, turning pink and looking worse than when I started.

 We haven't done anything to the kitchen, just some new bar stools for the kids, and Mum you can see Lucy's calendar sitting to the right of the stools.... despite the fact that you think I never look at it. :)

 The kitchen looks onto the living room that we also painted a grey blue. 

 

Below is the 'Before' and above is the end result. We painted the fireplace, painted the walls and put in timber floors. Now all we need is some furniture and rugs- the room looks very empty at the moment.

 

 Below is a pic of the kids eating cookies on the front steps with their neighbours.

 Here is the dining room, again we painted it grey (was cream/white) and we added the frames around the bottom half of the room. We replaced the carpet with timber floors and now we can finally eat without worrying about dropping food on the carpet!

 Below is George's room... it is way to big for his tiny little toddler bed and plastic drawers. This is part of the basement, you can see through the window the 'window well' that looks like half a water tank against the wall. He has two windows in his room so it is quite bright for a basement room. 

 This is in the basement 'cinema' room.  Of course the kids are watching the weird movie "ponyo" mostly on George's insistence- he is a little bit in love with Sosuke. Win secretly loves it too because I catch him singing the terrible theme song several times a day.

 Below is the entrance to the "Dungeon" as the kids call it- the cold storage room that snakes around the corner and is great for food storage.  It is like a refrigerated room year round.  Next on the wish list is shelves to organise our food storage. You can see some of the boxes from the 'Dry Food Packing' project that Win did. You can  go to a cannery and pack all kinds of foods like wheat, dry milk, mashed potato pearls, dried strawberries, oats, rice... well the list is endless but those are some of the things in the boxes.

 This is Win's office, its not a great photo but I just couldn't take a picture that showed much of the room. He has a great big desk that we negotiated with the previous owners to leave, we figured that they would not want to have to dismantle it out of the basement. 

 This is the Twin's room, and like George's room it is too big for their lack of furniture but it includes a newly renovated ensuite and toy storage walk in closet (both to the left of the photo).

 Below is the Twin's ensuite, They no longer have the excuse that they are out of bed to go to the bathroom in the night.

 This is the hallway that  has the Twin's room at the far end, the TV room at the closest part of the photo, Win's office to the left and the wall on the right is plumbed for a kitchenette if we ever wanted to make the Twin's room a self contained area for family.

 Below is our grass that's in desperate need of a mow.

 Below is our raspberry patch. The plants were all kindly donated by our wonderful neighbour over the fence. They are a thornless variety which will make searching through the patch a much safer exercise.

The compost bin is a spinning one from Costco.

 These are our strawberries, also donated by our neighbour Paul, he even helped rotary hoe the garden beds for us. There must be a hundred or so plants so hopefully with the automated sprinkler system we will see some great harvests from these.

 This is the front yard, Win reading junk mail and enjoying the spring weather.

 Unfortunately our neighbours all have manicured lawns, so there is a lot of pressure to keep the lawn looking good... we haven't purchased a lawn mower yet so already our lawn is letting down the community.

Above: Jack, who has grown to full size now and can barely fit under the couch to hide from Isabelle

,

 George doing a puppet show with Win

 One of my favourite things in our garden: the lovely tulips and daffodils. The whole neighbourhood seems to have an abundance of flowers at the moment.