Jenie and Frank dot com slash blog

Today is Kiya’s 3rd Birthday! She will be showered with love and gifts of the food variety and maybe even a toy or two!

This day also marks the two year anniversary of Kiya becoming a part of our family.  We adopted her from the Oakland SPCA on Feb. 25, 2006. Frank just fell in love with her online posting–it was the picture of her that got him! We can’t believe two years with her have gone by so quickly! We’ve been through a lot with her–both good and bad–and we wouldn’t have it any other way! She is just the cutest thing and has the best personality. We really lucked out!

Happy Birthday to our baby girl! We love you Bubba!

We’ve been so consumed with the store construction the last few weeks that it occurred to me just a little while ago that we had some catching up to do with wedding stuff. So in the in the last few days, we started searching for wedding invitations, checked out local Livermore hotels, and I got my hair and makeup trial done.

The whole makeup artist search was a HUGE headache! I was banking on one particular artist who was highly recommended by our photographer. When I first made contact with her (she will remain nameless) back in November, she informed me that she works on a 6 month business calendar and therefore wasn’t taking bookings for August 2008 weddings until February 2008. So, on my calendar, I marked Jan. 31 as the day to send my second email inquiry to her. I heard from her two days later (and honestly, those two days waiting were not fun), saying she regretted to inform me that she was unavailable on our wedding day. Huh? What happened to the six month calendar thing? I guess someone beat me to it by emailing her earlier than I did.

So the search for a different makeup artist was on. I was finding it very difficult to get someone to come out to Livermore to do only makeup–one was charging an additional $200 because I didn’t want hair services. So in the end, I decided to go with makeup and hair, which I found out saves money in the long run and also saves us time on that day (I was originally going to have my regular hair stylist take care of our hair because I love her and she knows my hair and style).

Anyway, I found someone who was available on our day and set up the trial right away. I didn’t want to book someone without getting a trial first, and I didn’t want to loose out on getting someone, so I had to do the trial right away. It was fun! I even got some pictures taken by a professional photographer that the makeup artist hired for that day, just to take complimentary “after” shots. Girls, don’t you wish you looked that pretty everyday?

Today, I went to Trudy’s to order the bridesmaid dresses for my best friend and two sisters. I can’t believe it takes 3-4 months to get them in, but can’t wait for the call!

Next up, wedding invite samples…and I’m still looking for those gold shoes for my Chinese dress.

We are very excited and pleased to announce that our Grand Opening date is set for Thursday, March 13th, 2008! It’s been a long time coming, and we can’t wait for the opportunity to open our doors!

Please join us that evening from 5-7pm and help us celebrate! It’ll be tons of fun!

Our flooring was completed on Friday! This was the last big portion of the construction process. The whole flooring process spanned about two weeks, from sealing the cement foundation to laying the laminate. Now the store looks almost done!

A pic of the front:

And one of the back:

6 months to go until the big day! We can’t believe how quickly time keeps passing by! I suppose it seems especially fast because we’re so busy with the store.

The only wedding things we’ve done lately have been veil shopping, gold shoe shopping (for the Chinese dress. That’s been unsuccessful to date.), and going to Crate and Barrel’s Wedding Party event.

We signed up after hearing about it from friends (thanks Lilia and Kerwin!) and we went to the first one they held this year. It was so much fun, but really overwhelming! I thought it was simply an informational kind of thing, so I was totally unprepared when they actually handed us a scanner to begin our registry. Frank got totally trigger happy and wanted to “beep” things left and right. I wanted to strategically go through section by section, with the most important things visited first. Needless to say, it took us awhile to figure out how to compromise. Can’t believe we actually started our registry! We’re not done with it, and I have a feeling that we’ll be changing lots of it as the wedding gets closer. But, we had a great time and everyone there was so helpful! And of course, Frank had an extra good time because they served appetizers throughout the event. It was hard getting his attention, between all the food and his happy trigger finger!

Next up, meeting with our Wente wedding coordinator, deciding on the menu (yum!), and designing invitations! Fun stuff!

It’s amazing how these little sprinklers can be the source of ALL my headaches these past few weeks. These innocent inanimate chunks of metal embracing frangible glass bulbs containing liquid which breaks, have delayed our construction efforts for a little over 3, yeah… 3 weeks. Here is the story behind it all…

Let me just first introduce the standard practice behind construction build outs. Usually, the process is as follows…file for permit. Get permit. Install according to permit. Set up inspection with the city. Inspection of work according to permit. Done.

So…way back in early December, we let the sprinkler contractor know we were going to be ready for them to install the sprinklers by the end of the year. After wasting about a week, they finally showed up on Jan. 4th. They finished installing our sprinklers on Monday, Jan. 7th (and made a mess doing it, screwed up our new paint and banged up our walls, but that’s another story). When they left, they told us they were waiting for the Fire department to schedule an inspection. I took their words and waited…and waited…and waited.

Finally on the 16th, after one and a half weeks went by, nothing! No word on the inspection. I finally had enough and went down to the fire dept. to see what the hold up was. I was ready to give them a piece of my mind after all the delays they had caused us, or so I thought…I found out that day that the sprinkler guy had just submitted the plans for permit on Friday, Jan. 11th. They filed an application for permit 4 days after they had installed the sprinklers! Holy cow! When I mentioned this to the guy behind the counter, he was like “I didn’t hear that!” because in the grand scheme of things, I, not the retarded sprinkler contractor, could get in trouble for performing the work without a permit!

To make things worse, the sprinkler guy had to re-submit the plans twice because the plans he created were not up to code! This wasted another 2 weeks. So here we are, the last week of January. Finally, we got the permit. We were able to schedule an inspection the day after, and that went well. We passed our inspection with the fire dept. So yeah, this sprinkler ordeal started on Jan. 4th and finally ended up done on Jan. 30th. Aye ya!

The thing is, if we were just doing the sprinklers and nothing else, I’d probably just be really pissed. But since there are lots of things dependent upon the sprinkler guy doing his job on a timely manner, I am really pissed and really screwed. You see, because we couldn’t get the sprinklers inspected and passed off, we couldn’t cover up the ceiling with our ceiling tiles. Because we couldn’t cover up our ceiling, we couldn’t heat up the space (no ceiling tiles means heat would escape to the top of the building and we’d be wasting money heating up the top of the building. Because we couldn’t heat the space, we can’t get people to come in and finish installing our floors. Because we can’t get our floors in, we can’t install our plumbing (sinks, toilets, etc). So, not only did this little sprinkler incident cost me much pain and suffering, it also delayed the rest of the work needing to go into the store. We had hoped for a Feb. opening, but now, realistically, we’re looking at early March at the earliest. Doh!