I wish I had gas. Natural Gas, to be exact. And no, not the kind of "natural" gas you get when you eat a lot of beans.

I'm talking about the kind that WE Energies needs to come out and install in our house so that I can start making pancakes and bacon on this bad boy...

(I really need to work on my photography skills apparently. Nice bucket, vacuum hose and blue tape, eh?)

And then, after I'm done making pancakes on our beautiful new gas range, I can wash my syrupy dishes using this...

And put any leftover pancakes (not that there will be any) into this...

(We have the fridge, but the picture I took of that is even more awful than the range. Picture big, bright glare shining back at you)

So, as you can see this past weekend we officially became the proud owners of our new appliances. And installed our new faucet. Which I ordered from Amazon at a much better price than the big orange store had to offer.

We also got the upstairs hallway painted by Joe's Professional Painting Services, LLC (AKA, my dad. Thanks, dad!).

And put in new light fixtures in the laundry room, back hallway and upstairs hallway. Well "I" didn't put them in. That would be the handy work of my awesome husband.

And cleaned out our disgusting basement, of which we have zero before and during pictures.

For a full visual, picture this on the walls:

And no, it is not wood. It is 1970s fake wood embossed paneling. With mold crawling up behind sections of it because of past water issues. Ick.

And then we had a pile that looked similar to this on our floor for about a week:

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating slightly, but it was pretty bad. That coupled with the mouse poop from the mice that were clearly living in our basement ceiling. Disgusting.

Have I mentioned yet how grateful I am for our friends Tom & Zach who came to help Erik demo the basement? Well, I am. Extremely grateful. Because of them I did not have mouse poop fall into my face.

But I did get to help clean it up.

And now our basement looks like this:

I know its not glamorous or anything but it is in much better shape than when we first got into the house. And it no longer smells like must, mold and mouse poop.

Plus, the demo has allowed much easier access for a plumber to come run the gas into the necessary areas of the house in (fingers crossed) a few weeks. Making it even more feasible for us to actually move into the house that we are putting all of this love and sweat into.

And then we can regain ownership of our dog who, I'm convinced, now believes that my parents are her new mom & dad. Partly because we are at work all day and at the house on the weekends. And partly because she's just a brat. She's lucky she's so cute.

Anyone else have any exciting stories like cleaning up a mouse poop filled basement from their weekend? Or a dog that no longer loves them? Or a strong desire to have gas?