For the last five years I've been strictly a Keurig coffee drinker for my at home coffee consumption. It's the perfect device to wake up, throw a pod in and have a good cup of coffee. But as anyone who's had a Keurig knows they aren't the most reliable. My Keurig broke probably a half dozen times in the five years I had it and required heavy cleaning to even get it to work. In the last month or two I was having to re-clean it over and over to get even close to a half cup of coffee per pour. Not worth it. So it was time for a change. 

After deciding to stay in our new home we've begun doing the renovations we were going to do back in February. The best part of waiting has been re-prioritizing what we wanted to get done for the house. After removing those ugly built-ins from the second bedroom and the atrium we were on to the second project, the carpet.

This past weekend we (being Jake, Amy, Ally, Jenn and I) planned a surprise wedding anniversary celebration for my parents 30th wedding anniversary. For their 25th we all went up to San Luis Obispo where they went on their honeymoon and surprised my mom with a big celebration dinner at the Madonna Inn (a pretty weird place). We didn't want to go as big for their 30th but we still wanted to surprise them. 

Jenn and I love ping pong. When we lived at The Colony we would walk over to the Marriott and play ping pong near their pool. Probably not the classiest thing to do, but we enjoyed it. It always made us feel like we were on vacation. When we started looking at houses one of the "nice-to-haves" for me was an area for a ping pong table. And of course if you've been following the "Casa de Szerlip" series you know that we have a really nice size atrium at our new house. 

It took us nearly three months, but we just finished up our first big project in the house. When we purchased the house in January of 2015 one of the big projects we wanted to undertake was removing the built-in's from the second bedroom and the outside atrium area. They weren't bad built-in's but they didn't fit the decor or setup that Jenn and I wanted for either of those areas. It restricted our options for the rooms and took up more space then we would have ever wanted. 

When I was still in High School I used to spend a ton of time reading tech blogs. Each year when these websites would do their predictions it was that home automation was going to be the next big market. However there never seemed to be the adoption that was expected. That was until the iPhone. Now you go to any home improvement store there are tons of options for connected hardware. The biggest product in the home automation category of the last couple of years has been the Nest Thermostat.