Feeling Green

I've been busy painting. Now that we have three kids at home, our kid to room ratio has changed. Everyone gets their own room! I even told them I would paint their room a color of their choosing, within reason. I did veto Topher's original pick. Sorry to my friend Elise who loves orange, it felt too bold for walls. He went with this spring green instead. Now that it's done, he calls it his earth room. He seems pretty pleased with the result.

Reading for Prizes

After school got out for the summer I signed Topher up for the summer reading program at the library. 

And then totally forgot to have him work on it.

He's read voraciously for the last two months, which is great. But the summer reading program has specific reading prompts, plus some art projects and local field trips. So reading what he picked only checked some of the boxes.

On Monday I realized that the summer reading program ends tomorrow.

On Tuesday I asked Topher if he wanted to pull out the booklet to see what he'd already accomplished. Just from regular reading, he'd gotten through a quarter of the one hundred and twelve prompts, seven weeks with sixteen prompts per week. He decided he wanted to try to finish it. I pulled books from our home library that would fulfill some of the assigned tasks, then we went to the town library for the rest. He read a lot when we got home that day.

Then on Wednesday he did some of the art projects with Phoebe and read some more.

On Thursday I wrote out the remaining tasks on post-it notes so he could easily see what was left. This worked so well for him and he knocked through many of them on his own pretty quickly, moving them from one side of the wall to the other once he'd finished each task.

Today Topher read the last few books, grabbed some paper and a crayon, and drove around with me for the local field trips. He finished the art assignments while we found the community garden, ginkgo trees in town, and life in this creek.

Then we went to the library to present all one hundred and twelve finished tasks in his summer reading booklet. He earned several trinkets of his own choosing, plus coupons for two ice cream cones, a hot dog, two doughnuts, and six dumplings. They were all well earned.

Motivation

In addition to deep cleaning and sorting through papers, I decided hosting the youth was a good reason to take apart the great room and paint most of the trim. You know, normal house prep stuff. Topher helped by borrowing my phone and taking a bunch in-process pictures.

At first I thought I would be able to pull the trim off the wall without moving this big cabinet. I was wrong. Emptying and moving this added significantly to my project.

The contents of the cabinet were relocated to the table, then to the library when we needed to eat dinner.

This door trim was sanded and wiped down, but not yet painted. A few of the kids liked the distressed look from the sanding and tried to convince me to stop here.

I kept going though. In this picture the trim looks black, but it's actually a deep chocolate brown. I really wanted to paint the walls as well so they would match the white walls in the rest of the downstairs, but I decided sleeping was a better idea than painting for three days straight.

I also though about painting all the walls this beautiful blue color instead of just having the blue as an accent wall. Again, sleep won. The trim looks closer to its actual brown than black in this picture.

I was awake until 2 o'clock in the morning on Sunday finishing the painting and cleaning up my supplies. Somehow we made it through 9am church and got the house put back together in time for the fireside. And now I'm so much closer to having all the downstairs trim painted!

Trimmed Out

I've spent my week getting ready for Thanksgiving. I've baked and cleaned and sorted.

And stayed up until 3AM on Monday painting the banister and entryway trim.

You know, the basics.

On a Roll

The number of emails I get each day is pretty ridiculous. I know I'm not the only one experiencing this. I try to skim the titles and read the important ones. Because I prioritize staying off my phone when I'm with my kids, I tend to look through big batches of emails in a few minutes, a couple times a day. That means that many of my emails are left unread. Usually they're the newsletter/spam/junk mail kind of emails. But every once in a while I miss something important.

Tonight I discovered a few of those important missed emails. I shared my frustration with Bryan and he suggested I take a little time to clean out my inbox. Except I had nearly 34,000 unread emails.

Yup, 34,000.

He kindly showed me a trick to batch delete emails, something he uses when his inbox gets out of control. Which is almost never, because he stays on top of digital clutter. (For what it's worth, most of my focus goes to physical clutter rather than digital clutter.) He suggested I spend ten minutes a day working on it until my unread count was zero. I knew that once I started this project I would want to finish it as quickly as possible.

And that is how I came to spend the last four hours deleting emails.

I'm currently down to 14,895, which I think is pretty decent progress.

One for the Books

While this picture of the bookcases might not look that different from the one at the end of this post, it is. The shelves now have two coats of matte water-based polyurethane, which was not super fun to apply. But now it's done. And the books are mostly sorted. I haven't put the crown molding on yet, but that's because I know the look I want and I haven't found the right pieces yet, so I'm waiting. And the carpet needs to be tucked under, but hopefully that'll be done soon.

This picture makes me really happy.

Living the (Colonial) Life

Sophie gave her colonial presentation today. I got to go support her and her fellow fifth-graders. She did a great job! I really struggled to hear some of the kids when they recited the information they'd prepared about their assigned job. Sophie was articulate and loud and well-researched.

Well done, Sophie!

Feed the Birds

Today is the 100th day of school! (Yesterday's ice delayed it a bit.) The kids in Topher's class were invited to make a project celebrating the day. It needed to have 100 of something displayed in a creative way. Topher decided to make a bird feeder using 100 cheerios on a pipe cleaner. It thought it was cleaver, creative, and kind. Those words all describe Topher as well.

The Limner

The fifth graders in our school district learn about colonial life and then pick a colonial career to do a project about. Here's a post about Peter's project, and one about Cooper's project. Phoebe escaped this particular assignment since she attended virtual school for fifth grade.

Sophie spent many hours recreating a limner's workshop and preparing her presentation. I love that she drew several waiting canvases. She used playdoh in those tiny jars to make it look like they're full of paint. And she made a wagon as a traveling workshop, in addition to the diorama.

A few days before it was due she reminded me that she needed a colonial costume. This wasn't too hard for the boys. I just had them roll up their church pants to the knee, wear a pair of Bryan's church socks, wear a white church shirt, and throw on an apron. Sophie's costume was more involved.

I thought we might be able to reuse the Mary costume I made for her for the Nativity movie, and maybe add an apron. The night before the project was due I pulled the costume out from its box in the basement. That's when I remembered that I'd made it quite billowy. That wouldn't work at all. 

And that is how I came to spend the next six hours cutting up and pinning and resewing the dress. I found some pictures online and did my best to approximate what they looked like. I didn't want to add a zipper (because I haven't mastered that skill) and wanted her to be able to pull it on and off herself without help since she'd need to do that at school. That's why it's a little loose. It's definitely a costume and isn't nice enough to wear to church. But it is solidly made and won't fall apart. Considering I really didn't know what I was doing, I think it turned out well.

Sophie loves it, and that's good enough for me.

Pick Up a Good Book

The floor library is back. I'm prepping to add a water-based matte polyurethane to the bookshelves. That means I had to unload the books and find them temporary homes elsewhere.

I'm looking forward to loading them back onto their proper home. Floor library is not my favorite.

He Thought She Could, Too

I talked to someone at church on Sunday about the bookcases and showed him the finished picture. He said he had lots of plans like that for his own house, but his wife wasn't on board with any of them so he hadn't started them. 

It made me reflect on how very supportive Bryan has been through this whole process. He believed that I could do this crazy hard thing, even when I felt like I was in way over my head. He bought me a 10" miter saw for my birthday this year so I could build the shelves. And he was willing to ask the right questions (which was admittedly frustrating at the time) to help me consider other necessary options. He joined me for the two person tasks and did a lot of heavy lifting when I couldn't.

He's the best.

She Thought She Could, So She Did

These pictures cover the last three months of work on these bookshelves. The corner was the hardest piece to build and definitely the heaviest section to move.

Bryan and Cooper get the credit for moving this beast into the house.

I measured and cut out the cold air return holes while the corner piece was still in the garage. I cut the outlet holes inside the house.

Once all the individual units were completed and in place, we had to attach them to each other. That's what I'm doing here. Also, it's kind of interesting to see the scale of these things. They're pretty big.

In order to install the final bookcase, we needed to move a light switch from one side of the wall to the other. Thankfully, Bryan took on that task. It helped that there was an old phone jack right where we wanted to put the new switch.

When my brother's family visited in October I put the shelves in so we could get all the books off the floors (the rest of the books were on shelves in the basement). That's when I learned that my carefully cut shelves weren't all the correct size. Lots of sanding and just a little cutting later, they fit.

Bryan and Cooper helped install the top and bottom trim.

I took on the task of doing all the front trim. This also required soooooooo much sanding to get the fit just right.

They're technically not done yet. The carpet is rolled back down but not tacked yet. I want to find just the right crown molding. And I need to empty them and add two coats of water-based matte polyurethane to protect the wood. Since we were hosting some small, active people for Thanksgiving, I figured it would be better to fill up the shelves rather than have what could be mistaken for several ladders ready for climbing.

 I'm really happy with them.

Team Work Makes the Dream Work

We're making progress on the bookcases. My arm is mostly healed (though it does ache when it rains), but I'm still being gentle with it. This has turned into much more of a team project since I can't do as much with my arm as I would like. Bryan has stepped in and helped so much. I was able to handle the corner shelves by myself though.