Merry Christmas

Our first impulse is not always to laugh when our toddler pees on the unpainted bathroom door. Nor do we cheer when we find crayon or nail polish all over the newly painted walls. We don't smile and wink at our spouse when we realize our wedding ring just scratched the stainless steel fridge. We don't high five when we find a leak in our roof.
But all these experiences make our life more colorful. We get wiser, learn the hard way, and have good stories to share around the table when we get together with family and friends.
We wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas this year. We pray you find time to ponder the seriousness of the holiday as well as celebrate the best way you know how. May your families be brought closer together. May your idea of the perfect holiday be thrown out the window and may you just roll with it. May you find assurance that Spray'n Wash will get the stains out of your kids' holiday sweaters/dresses. May the sugar high result in a sugar crash right as you tuck your little ones into bed.
Merry Christmas!

Small project, Big impact

I have not been good at keeping up to date with the small projects that continue to go on in the house.

Here, Sam is continuing the never ending project that is our fireplace.

Sam also dug a trench and placed a plastic barrier between the grass line and the plants. We also added mulch. It looks so good now. The picture below is right after we did this (the big dirt patch is where we had to raise the level of the land since we kept getting a pond forming). It looks so nice now. I just need to get out there and get a picture.

Here's my muddy sneakers. Just to prove that I actually helped!

After dumping most of the concrete from the slab we had out there, Sam got to work building a raised planter. We hope to have a garden there some day!

 Sam up in the attic again. Thank you for fixing all the duct work before the cold weather came!

 Just one of the many things he had to fix up there.

 I've painted two doors. Two more to go. Not sure if it is our paint or what, but this is not an easy process! Takes so many coats and still the streaks! Oh well.

And finally - Christmas has come!

I didn't get a picture of the font door or the yard, but they are decorated too.

Rachel managed to get in both photos:)

Where are we?

Well, we are in the middle of patching holes, caulking trim and joints and painting.
Remember the inside of our closet trim?

Before caulking                                                            After caulking (before painting)

Not bad eh?

We also decided to add trim around the kids' closet. Brilliant idea, Sam! Looks so much better.

Just the top part to go (it's up now, just didn't get a picture).

This is how everything is looking now that most of the joints are caulked and holes are being patched. 

We still have to pain the doors.

Piece by piece

Here are the details.

Upstairs:
Four door frames and doors down.
Four new jams and doors installed.
New door trim and baseboards painted.
Trim sanded and repainted (insert mad face here).
Wall paint touch-ups.
Trim cut and installed on two and half doors.
More trim sanded and repainted and more new trim painted.
Baseboards cut and installed in master bedroom and half of the upstairs hallway.

Okay, that is a little demoralizing seeing all of that in such a simple list, because it was a lot of hard work. This list does not include all the runs to the store, all the mistakes, all the issues with having no plum line or square angle in the house...or the fact that our floor rises and falls like the middle of the ocean. Still, it is great progress!

Pictures here!

Bathroom, Oh Bathroom

Tile, check! Baseboards, check!
Now we just have to do the hard work.
Sam started putting up the backer board this past week. He also framed out a shelf in the shower area. Not easy work, but it's starting to get to there.

I guess we never took a picture when the backer board started to go up. This was just the first steps. Plastic and framing.

Here is the other slow progress that is taking place elsewhere in the house - the fireplace...will this ever be finished?

More scraping and washing.

Looking better every time. I ran out of paint remover though.

Just so we are all clear...this was not a good idea.

Family duties call! Gotta go.

Yardwork

Here's what's been going on here.

Our lemon tree is finally growing fruit. I hope that this is just the beginning of a healthy relationship. I love lemons...and I keep stealing them from my mom's tree. So if this poor tree can be revived, then I will be more than ecstatic.

We relocated our herbs and they are so much more happy here! They now live next to the lemon tree. Yay for fresh herbs every night. I can't wait until they really take off.

Our mint is quite happy and out of control, actually. I have been enjoying mint tea though. Time to trim this guy back though.

Grass is starting to grow where we (meaning Sam) removed the old rotting deck. 

It's hard to keep our backyard looking great...constant changing, moving one pile of dirt here, shoveling sand there. Under the tarp is all the sand I moved from the front of the house. The bricks were placed on top of it.

All the bricks I moved from the dirt patch (pictured below) in the front to the side of the house.

 Look how green our new grass is growing in! Sam has repositioned sprinklers to get maximum watering. We also seeded some of the patchy parts. So exciting to see it growing in so great.

Today we planted some bushes and flowers in the front. I am so excited! With the sun positioned right behind the house, I couldn't get a good picture of what we did today. So that will come later.

Whole House Fan

On Thursday we got heat in the 100s. It was 84 degrees downstairs, hotter upstairs, and even hotter outside. So we drove down to Lowes and picked up a whole house fan. Sam started in the morning on Thursday and hoped that he could be at class by 1pm that afternoon. Ha!

 Welcome to our attic. What the...? Why is there a fan up here? After a good cleaning it actually became a new best friend in this heat!

Hello broken duct work. No wonder the kids' room was so cold during last winter!

Not sure that those wires should just be sticking out there.

After assessing the layout for possible placements of the fan, we decided to go with the ceiling in the hallway outside the bathroom upstairs. That was the easy part. Actually installing it there was a whole other story. 

Our joists were not the standard 16 inches apart, nor were they parallel. So Sam needed to build a frame first. I could go on and on about all the issues we had. The lumber used to build our joists were not standard measurements. Electrical wires in random places. Duct work needing to be torn out (just created another job - but needed to be done anyways). And the heat just added to it. It was about 500 degrees up there. 

This job was my least favorite we have done. AND I WASN'T EVEN DOING ANYTHING...mostly just there to help Sam. It was just hot, messy, and frustrating. I much prefer being outside doing hard yard work. Once Sam opened the ceiling opening, the house got about twenty degrees hotter. I felt the heat wave rush in.  That and all the drywall and insulation dust...yuck. That dust was everywhere upstairs!

That was about as far as we got after day one. Sam was so hot and exhausted. Needless to say, he did not get to class.

We were blessed with better weather (cooler) the day we completed our house fan installation. Sam had to make a platform for the fan to sit on, put some insulation stripping on it, put finishing nails in the drywall up into the frame, and do the electrical.

The electrical required that we first figure out how our electrical is set up. Flipping breakers on and off, walking all around the house, we finally decided where the switch should be placed. 

View from inside

Sam even bled for this project

Cutting into the wall in the upstairs closet, switch installed

After a practice run, it was time to finish everything up. 

Woohoo! That was a killer. I am glad it's done and can't wait to actually try it out. Of course it has cooled way down since we installed it. :) Good job, honey!

Side projects: Since Sam was up in the attic, he also put a new junction box for our bedroom fan. Now we can actually turn on our ceiling fan in our bedroom without it falling down on us. Yay!

I also finally finished the stairs (caulking the side trim)...that only took forever.

 Next project: Order and install baseboards upstairs! And tile bath/shower, install new floors, finish bath and wall construction in upstairs bathroom.

Trees!

Today we decided to go buy some plum trees and in the process had to tear out a huge big-rooty tree in the back yard...

Just the beginning

Some where in the middle

More cutting and sawing

Digging that root out

Relocated my herbs to this side of the lawn

Almost!

Manure time...you can imagine how funny our boys thought that was

My tree! Please be happy here!