New Pictures

We just had family pictures taken and wanted to show off how cute our son is.

The New Look

Hey, look at us. We took a few classes from Suzanne and suddenly our page looks cool. Happy Autumn everyone. With love, from the Brees.

The Set

So it's kinda hard to tell but this is a houseboat. This is actually the set for my play. It's not finished yet but it's really starting to take shape. Houseboat shape. It's so exciting and also a little weird. I mean, I made this thing up and there it is sitting on stage. When I go to rehearsals sometimes and I have the same feeling. I made up these jokes and there the actors are saying my lines and laughing and making me laugh. It's so crazy. Anyway, as more pictures come along I'll post them.

Houseboat Honeymoon

So this is poster for the show that I wrote. That's right, I wrote a play as you can see by my name on the poster. It has to say my name, you know why? Because it's in my contract. That's right I signed a contract! Anyway, the idea behind the whole thing is that a newlywed bride and groom show up at a houseboat that they think is where they are going to honeymoon but turns out to be the family reunion. And before they can get off the boat the family kidnaps them. It's actually pretty funny. If you want to find out more go to BYU.edu and search my name. It should come up with this.

Damon's Birthday!!!

Today we celebrated Damon's first birthday! Yesterday, October 2nd was actually his birthday but we figured that Friday was easier to get some friends over and also he probably wouldn't remember very well. So anyway, here are some pictures of Damon on his first birthday.

We blew up lots of balloons cuz Damon loves them. He had so much fun running though them.

This Stich costume is the present Joel is most excited about. He has wanted Damon to be Stich for Halloween since before he was born. When we went shopping for presents, we found this one and it is perfect!! Damon is so cute toddling around like a little destructive alien.

Damon and friends couldn't wait to get their hands on his cake. Once they did, there was no stopping them, as you can see:

Damon also learned what "brain freeze" means.

Damon loved climbing on his box so much that we were worried that he wouldn't be interested in his present, but never fear, he loved his hungry hippo too.

He had so much fun!! It was a perfect 1st birthday. Other events of note today, Joel and I started dating three years ago today. Hooray for us!!!

Image Tag

Type your answers into google/yahoo image searchand post a picture from the first page of results.

My Age: 24

Where I live now: Provo, Utah

Place I want to travel: England

Favorite Food: Fresh Peaches

My favorite color: Green (Not really green, but the rest of the images were wierd and I love veggies)

My favorite animal: Jaguar

Something I used to love: Sleeping in late

First Name: Julie (and she has world records in spearfishing!! Who knew?)

Middle Name: Denise

Last Name: Bree (never played/heard of LOTRO game, but turns out there are lots of busty women with my last name)

I tag anyone with a little free time

Let's Catch Up For Real

Okay, so you should never type in the name of your blog and then push "enter." Then you end up with a post that is nothing more than a title. And I'm sure that my brothers and the one or two friends who check my blog sporadically are going to comment on it and leave nice messages like, "Hey Joel, way to catch up." or, "Wow, Joel, that's the most intersting thing you've ever written on this blog!" Well to them I say stuff it. That being said I will proceed to write the blog that I had originally intended to write.
First of all the house. We're so close to being done. Just a few more weeks. A lot has happened since we last posted. Unfortunately we don't have any pictures to share but I'll tell you. The sheet rock was all installed and textured. Then I got to paint it. That was quite an experience. Paint prep, as in taping off the windows and caulking the windows and base boards, took a lot longer than I thought. Then painting was a little unnerving because it was the first thing we were doing that wasn't going to be covered up by something else. But it all turned out just fine. Not the most professional but pretty good. Anyway, after that we installed cabinets, we have our vinyl flooring in, we have our fridge, stove and dishwasher. Yesterday I installed our toilets and guess what, no leaking. I've been working on building the deck out back. All that's left is to get the carpet in, put the rock on the front, finish the deck and install the kitchen sink. Oh, and the sprinklers. We have to install sprinklers. So if all goes as planned we should still be in sometime in October. We'll try and put some pictures on soon.
Other exciting news is that my play is currently cast and in rehearsals. The show will go up the two weeks before Thanksgiving and then the week after. It's so bizarre. The good news is that some of my jokes are actually funny. As soon as I know more or have some picuters or something I'll let you all know.
The last thing is that Damon is still the most adorable boy in the world. He started using words. And he's walking. Not just a few steps here and there but walking all over the house. He likes to say "hat." He pats his head and says "hat" and points up to the hats that we have on a shelf. The other thing he says is Duck. Julie will read him a book about ducks or take him to the pond or something and he'll say "duck" over and over. He's really coming along. I'm really looking forward to Halloween because we got him a Stitch costume. He's going to be crawling all over the place looking like a little monster. It's going to be fun!
Anyway, I think you're all caught up with so I'll leave you alone. The last thing is to let you know that Julie is still as amazing as ever and I wouldn't be able to survive without her. And don't you forget it.
Goodbye all. Until next time.

Let's catch up

House Watch: Getting Caught Up

So here's the latest on our house: we're waiting. For the past couple of weeks we've been helping out in other people's houses getting ready to paint or getting the kitchen ready for vinyl flooring or just cleaning up. Meanwhile our house is getting worked on by subcontactors. We finally finished framing and stuff is happening but we're not doing a lot. This next saturday (Aug 23) we're supposed to finally start paint prep in our house. Things are going really great and it looks like we'll definately be in our house sometime in October. What will we do with all our free time? But here are some pictures to give you an idea of how things are coming.

This is a picture of the sweet set of stairs that I built with the help of my Dad. Mom and Dad came out for a few days so we could get our hours early in the week and take that trip to Tahoe.

Here's Julie taking a shower in what will soon be our Master bath. We like it a lot because in our tiny apartment now the bathroom is barely big enough for the tub and toilet let alone a person. Our new bathroom will be a lot roomier.

Here we can see the subs are getting the walls insulated so we won't freeze to death.

And here we see the sheet rock put up. They really do a good job of giving the walls texture and rounding off corners and things. It's going to look nice when we're finally done.

And this a picture of the scaffolding that they put up all around the house so they can put up the stucco. It's really coming along and hopefully at the end of this week we'll have pictures of the finished exterior. We only hope it looks good. It's been so long since we chose the colors that we can only hope they look good.

And just to make you jealous this is a picture of one of the awesome sunsets that we get right out our kitchen window.

First Steps!!!!

Damon took his first steps tonight!! After we came back from working on the house tonight, we were hanging out at Talon and Lisa's for a bit and Damon wanted to go to his dad (he always does--Joel is definately his favorite). So I let go of him to see if he'd stand a little, and he just took a couple of steps to Joel. It was so exciting!! Then after we came home, he took three steps to me while we were getting him ready for bed. It's amazing how fast babies pick things up.

Damon has been learning so many things lately. His most recent accomplishments include playing the guitar and piano with Daddy. He also likes to work out with Mommy.

Happy Birthday To Joel

Happy Birthday to me! Yesterday was my birthday! Hooray! Now I'm another year older, another year wiser. It was a good day. I went out and worked on the house most of the day but when I got home Julie was really making what was left of my birthday special. She made me a cake with a Superman symbol on it and it said "Super Dad." It was pretty cool looking. Before we had cake, of course, we went out to dinner first. It was the first time either of us had been to Tucano's. It was incredible. It's a Brazillian Grill and bufftet. For those who aren't familiar with it you have free range of an incredible salad bar (which they call a salad festival) and while you're sitting there servers come around with different meats, supposedly cooked exactly like they do it in Brazil. It was all delicious. We had filet mignon wrapped in bacon, sirloin steak, teriyaki beef, garlic roasted steak, turkey and pork, mango cod and barbequed pinapple. You could really just sit there and eat yourself silly. We almost did. And since it was my birthday it was two for the price of one. So it's an expensive restaurant but didn't cost us quite so much.
So it was a great birthday; it's too bad that it comes around only once a year.

House Watch Catch-Up: The Trusses

Okay, now it’s time for the next catch up entry: the trusses. It’s kind of a difficult day because we have to make sure we have enough people to do the whole thing. We need people up on top of the walls nailing the trusses in and setting braces and we need people down below to hook the trusses to the crane. Oh yeah, did I mention we need to hire a crane? Aside from all those people we need to have extra people to act as ground support. The last time we did trusses we only had 5 or 6 people and that’s not really enough. It took us quite a while. For our house, however, we had a lot of people and it went really smoothly. In fact, it was like the fastest time we’ve ever done trusses. It figures that we would finally get it right for the very last house. But anyway, it went really well and here are some pictures of the process. I was one of the people up on top nailing and Julie was down below acting as our ground crew. It rained on us a little bit that day and since it had been so hot lately it felt really good. When we were all done a rainbow came out and I joked that it was God promising us that we would never have to do trusses again.

House Watch Catch Up: The Walls

So here's a progressive show of the exterior walls coming up. They started just laid out on the ground like in this first picture. Talon Haynie is a real friend and has spent some time coming out to work on the house. When Talon couldn't come out to work he and his wife were real life savers and offered to babysit Damon so Julie and I could go out and work together. Talon and Lisa Haynie are two people on our list of "Couldn't have done it without you" heroes.

Next the front and the back wall came up. It took us a little while because mostly Julie and I were working by ourselves and neither of us had done exterior walls before. It was challenging. Quintin Jones took a lot of time (and used a lot of patience I'm sure) to show us what to do. Eventually those two walls finally came up.

The next two side walls went up a lot quicker. It took us like three or four days to get the front and back up but these two side walls went up in just about a day. We had some problems making sure that the walls were straight but in the end they come out nice. It just helps if the floor is cut straight and unfortunately that's not always the case.

This is the first interior wall. Julie built it. Quintin helped her but I like to think that Julie did most of the work herself. Quintin gave Julie a great compliment that night. He said that he didn't mind working with her because she worked. If you knew Quintin you would understand why this is a compliment. He rarely has anything nice to say.

This is a picture of (left to right) Kyle, Spencer and Lena. Spencer lives (or soon will live) just two doors down from us. His house was second to last and ours was last to be built. Kyle and Lena are married and live (or soon will live) down the street. Kyle and Lena are just about my favorite people to work with because they're so upbeat and encouraging. Their attitude seems to be "You don't know what you're doing but neither do I so let's figure it out together." Even when they do know what they're doing they're still fun to work with. This day was particularly difficult for me because a lot of people were helping to stand up walls and I didn't really feel like I was contributing much. I finally built this wall, with the help of Ashley Munoz, another soon to be neighbor, but I put the window right where the power box was. It was already late in the afternoon and I wanted to go home but Kyle, Lena and Spencer cleaned up what they were doing and helped me to fix the problem so we could stand that wall up before we left that day. That really helped me feel better about myself.

This last picture is a picture of the finished front of the garage. At this point all the exterior walls were ready for the next step the trusses. Here in the front of the house you can see the trusses all stacked up and almost ready to go. I'll tell you all about trusses in the next House Watch Blog. So tune in next time. Same...well, you know, the channel thing and "Bat-time" and...well you get the point.

Getting To Know Julie Bree

Since Julie and I decided to combine our two blogs into one and close hers down I thought I'd put this post in so you could all learn about Julie. When I first created Julie's blog for her I wrote this awesome "About Me" section for her. Unfortunately, for several months it was the only thing that was on her blog. I thought rather than lose it I could post it here. Here it is: The truth about Julie Bree.


Julie Bree
First and most importantly, you should know that I'm madly, oh, ever so much, so muchly-much-much in love with Joel Bree. Were I not already married to him it would be my dream to someday be his wife and I would fantasize about my wedding day and it would be absolutely perfect. Almost as perfect as my actual wedding day. I have a beautiful son named Damon and he's just as cute as his daddy. Aside from being beautiful I am exteremly intelligent and pretty dang funny every now and then. I'm also extremely talented: I sing, dance, play the violin, piano and mandolin, sew my own clothes, paint and invent new tasty recipies to try out on my family. I enjoy the outdoors. I love rock climbing, hiking, camping and biking. My favorite color is green and since I'm a dietician I love to eat the lesser loved veggies like squash, zucchini, and asparagus. And my husband eats them too Occasionally I cry for reasons beyond explanation but my husband is patient and has a talent for making me laugh so those moments pass. I love to read and play the occasional game of Lego Star Wars and I love my husband so much. Why else would I let him write this for me?

Housewatch Catch-Up: The Floor

Okay, so it's been a little while since we caught you up on the house and a lot has happened. But too much for one blog so we'll do this is stages. Stage one: the floor.

So, if you remember where we left off we had just finished the greenplate. The next step was to put on the floor. To do that we had to start by putting on what's called rim board. To the left is a picture of Julie working on the rim plate. At the same time we had to build a wall across the basement. You know, to support the weight of the whole house. A good friend, Jason Standring, came out to help put up the wall. It was one of my first times building a real wall. A guy named Derrick who will eventually live right down the street from us did all the real work of making sure that Jason and I didn't mess up. What to you think?

After the floor and the rim board were up and good to go we had to put on what's called the floor joyce. Long boards that run the entire length of the house. It took a few days because the main body of the group was still focusing on two other houses. Julie and I did one half of the floor, my brother-in-law, DJ, came out and helped with the other half. I even did a few myself. But eventually we got all the floor joyce on.

Once all the floor joyce was on we just had to put on the floor. It comes in big sheets. My father-in-law and brother-in-law, Gene and Greg, came out and helped. My other brother-in-law, Ben, also came out and helped. We had to glue the floor down and then nail it. A soon-to-be neighbor, Blaine, and his father-in-law, Darryl, also helped. In the end we got the floor on and we were ready to move onto the next step: the walls. But that will have to wait for the next catch up entry.