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.

Timber

The weekend was packed full. Saturday started with an early morning kid choir rehearsal, then a nativity practice, then several hours of yard work. We pulled weeds, gathered clippings, and Bryan chopped down a tree. Also, looking at these pictures reminds me how desperately we need to paint our shutters.

Stay Cool

Over a month ago, before my aunt came to visit, our fridge died. The freezer still worked, but the fridge was no longer cooling things to a food safe temperature. We quickly (at midnight, because that's what time the fridge started beeping at us) moved the food out to our smaller garage fridge. After doing some problem solving, we decided to use whatever money we would have spent on a repair toward a new fridge. Bryan ordered it and we waited for it to be delivered. We've been so busy that we pushed back the delivery date. And we pushed it back again. And again. And again. I started calling the garage "our summer kitchen." And I barely went grocery shopping because we had so little room. On Monday of this week the kids were complaining that we were essentially out of food. I told them I would go shopping as soon as we had the new fridge.

Well, the magical delivery day finally arrived on Tuesday.

Here's the old fridge:

And here's the new fridge! It's taller than the old one, so we had to remove the cupboard above it. That's part of why we had to push back the delivery date, we needed time to take it down and paint.

It's huge and fancy and clean and, best of all, it works!

Sparkling

We have no idea how old this dishwasher is. It had to have been at least eleven years old because it was hardwired. It's been having trouble cleaning glasses for a while and in the last few months it's been really loud. Like, sounds-like-it's-trying-to-blast-off-to-the-moon loud. On Tuesday morning some Costco contracted installers arrived and took this dishwasher out.

And then they put in an outlet and installed this one. It's nearly silent and, so far, everything has come out spotless.

Hurray for a new dishwasher!

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.

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.

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.

Where There's Smoke

Tonight's adventure was provided by a driver hitting a power pole on the far side of the street behind our house, the whole pole coming down, the driver being pulled from his car by either my neighbor or the police (that detail was fuzzy), something then exploding, and at least three of the pine trees in our next-door neighbor's yard going up in flames. I gathered the kids, their school bags, and a few irreplaceable items and we sat in our van across the street from the front of our house watching the firefighters battle the fire. There are pine trees all along the back of our property and I was concerned that the fire in our neighbor's yard would jump over to our yard. The fire is now out and we're all going to try to sleep for a few hours before we need to be up for school.

The first picture was taken from our front yard.

The Great Outdoors

After lots of rain and cold, we've finally had a few days of spring weather. Cooper, Sophie, and Topher have taken advantage of it and played outside everyday this week and a few days last week as well. I love that they still love having a backyard.

Robot Servants

Our washing machine had been having trouble for a while. It would become unbalanced often and the only way to get it to finish a cycle was to lean or sit on it. I've spent quite a bit of time in the last year leaning on a very shaky washing machine. Bryan and I took advantage of President's Day sales and bought a new washer and dryer. It took several weeks for them to be delivered, but that day finally came last Friday. Bryan, having read unfavorable reviews about third party delivery and installation people with whom Costco contracts, opted to just have the old machines hauled away and the new machines deposited in the garage.

I wasn't home when the swap took place. I came back to see all the socks and gloves and other small clothing items that had been trapped under the old machines. I got to work cleaning the space with the intent that Bryan would install the new machines that night. Except then I saw how much that room needed to be painted. And I had leftover paint from the bathroom across the hall.

And that's how I ended up spending my Friday afternoon painting the laundry room. And some of my Saturday.

You can't really tell the difference, but this is after I painted. I can tell though, especially in person.

This is as far as I could paint on this wall, which makes it a little easier to see the contrast of the old (right) and new (left) paint. The other half of our laundry room is a pantry and I didn't want to rehouse the food and shelves while the laundry paraphernalia was taking up space in random parts of the downstairs. It would have been too chaotic. Instead I painted as far as I could and intend to paint the other half someday. Probably not any time soon.

I had done a pretty good job of cleaning up when I had to pause for the evening. That included wrapping my paint brush in plastic wrap so I could keep using it the next day. I painted more on Saturday but had to stop for a bit to work on something else, so the brush went back in the plastic wrap. I was not pleased when I found my brush later in the day, out of its wrap. Topher admitted he had gotten it out. What I didn't notice until the next day was that Topher had tried his hand at painting as well. So, now I get to paint the door.

After three days of painting, replacing all the switches and outlets in the room (Bryan), and a ridiculous number of trips to Home Depot (also Bryan), the new washer and dryer were installed. Bryan spent many hours working on this and Peter was his assistant when it came time to carry them inside. They're beautiful and our clothes feel and smell cleaner.

Of course, we did discover that when the washer spins on high it literally makes the entire house buzz. So instead of only rattling when leaning on the old washer, now we can rattle anywhere in the house, at least for the last ten minutes of the cycle.

We were not expecting that.

As long as we remember to turn down the spin cycle it's fine.

Up the Down Staircase

I was working on something in the basement when I realized how gross the stairs were. I figured I would give them a good scrub to see if that helped. It did, but not enough. That's when I grabbed the orbital sander and created a crazy amount of dust.

I didn't take a before, but here's after I scrubbed, sanded, vacuumed, and wiped down the stairs. They looked so much better. This is how I spent Monday.

But after all that work, I figured it wouldn't take much more time to paint the stairs, thus making them easier to clean in the future. So on Tuesday I painted.

I'm thrilled with how nice the stairs look. Unfortunately, now the walls look gross...