A birthday and more kitchen destruction

We had a friend turn 4 last week, and they had his party at a McDonald's with a play place. I have to say, it gives me a little bit of anxiety to let them play there. We don't do McDonald's except when we meet Nana and Papaw, and that one doesn't have toys. It's just a sticky, icky place. The girls had a blast though!!


The kitchen is still in progress. I am hoping to send Luke to Lowe's today to pick up two cabinets, and then we can get those up, and the rest of the tile board that goes behind the countertop, and then hopefully we can get mud on the walls so we can paint the rest of it sometime this month!!

Kitchen Re-Modeling

We had finally put up drywall in the pantry before Lexi's party, and now it's time to finish it up. I always thought the kitchen would be last on the list of house re-models, but I believe it is the reason we eat out more than we should, and eat unhealthier meals. We need a good space to prepare food, and the old kitchen didn't offer that to us. Since we are cash flowing the project, we won't have everything we need to finish it this weekend(like two cabinets and the OTR Microwave), but we will have the soffet done, paint on the walls, shelving in the pantry, and the tile board up. It will be enough that the groceries will fit on the shelves, and we can easily take inventory of what we have. The floor will also stay unfinished, but really, I don't care about that floor anyway. We will get there one day!

Back in the Swing of Things

Sunday we met with Nana and Papaw in Marietta and picked up Lexi and Lilly! They were very excited to see us, and they love their room. We have Dora wall clings, and glow in the dark planets, moons, and stars. They also have pink curtains now, and a pink see-through curtain on their closet, so now they like to hide in the closet.

We got the living room painted and have some pictures hung up. We still need to finish organizing the dining room and hang more pictures, but most importantly we need to paint a bunch of frames so we don't have a bunch of mis-matched wood like we do right now. My goal is to start getting the house into a nice enough look that we could put it on the market on a moments notice. I would love to move out and go build on the land, but the economy is just too crappy right now. I want to be ready, so when the market starts to turn, we can make a move!

Luke's knees are doing much better. He is down to half a tablet on the prednisone, and his knees aren't nearly as swollen and puffy as they were when we started this adventure.

So now we are back to normal. The house is full of noise and chaos. I've had Kendra this week to babysit, and looks like I may get Kaden on Friday. The house just feels empty and weird when it's so quiet. My nerves may be fried everyday, but I wouldn't want it any other way right now!

A Quiet House...

Yesterday we made the trek to Marietta to meet Nana and Papaw at Applebee's. We had a nice lunch and then Lexi and Lilly went with them to West Virginia. They will stay down there until Sunday, when we will meet half-way and pick them up. So far they are having a blast, playing in the snow. Lilly tells me Hi on the phone, but Lexi just listens to me and doesn't really talk. I miss them. At least I still have Avery to cuddle and make me feel like a Mom still.

Socks went to West Virginia as well, so she can be an outside cat with Callie. She will have to adjust a bit since there is still so much snow, but I know once she is familiar with her surroundings, she will love being on the prowl outside. Inside a house in the city just doesn't seem to fit her needs, so I'm sure she will be happier down there.

We've been working on the house a bit since they are gone. We are touching up the girls' room, and we have some Dora and star wall clings to decorate with. We are also going to re-paint the living room and paint a bunch of frames and redecorate the walls a bit. Hopefully we can get everything done, since Luke is still light duty with his leg.

Avery's 2 month checkup was today. She is 25 inches long and 14lbs 13oz. She is growing beautifully, and we all agree that she may be starting to teethe already. She is slobbing a bunch and chewing on her hand, even when she's not hungry. That should be a fun time! I don't think I want to go overdue with a pregnancy anymore. It seems like she is just growing so fast since she cooked a bit longer than Lexi and Lilly did.

Luke is doing well with his leg. He is on prednisone for inflammation, and he seems to be able to move his shoulder better than he has in years, and his knees are doing pretty good. The blood thinners have him a bit weak still, but I'm sure he will adjust soon. He has an appointment on March 1st with a rhuemotologist to diagnose his arthritis, and see how we can manage that for him.

He gets his finger pricked tomorrow to check his coumadin levels in his blood. Other than that, not much else is planned except to keep moving forward with the house.

Home Improvement/Organizing Weekend

We decided that having a working shower would probably be a good thing after the baby comes, so we started finishing the windows in the bathroom (both windows touch the shower surround). Luke primed them a couple coats, then caulked around everything on Saturday. On Sunday, he started painting, only to realize that the caulk we had bought is non-paintable!! Even after attempting to put primer overtop, we are just left with caulk, the paint will bead overtop of it. I told him, screw it,it's a shower, there is supposed to be caulk everywhere anyways, so he went ahead and did a couple coats of paint on the windows.

Fast-forward to the christening last night...

#1 The fabric shower curtain makes the shower a bit dark.
#2 Even though the curtain said you didn't need a liner, we will buy one anyway.
#3 Apparently semi-gloss paint hates being in the shower, and it started to bubble up on the window from getting wet.

The new plan...

#1 Look for paintable caulk and rerun a small bead overtop of the non-paintable, so it's less noticeable.
#2 Buy all weather indoor/outdoor white paint for the bathroom trim, so we know it can stand up to the constant water exposure.

The shower was nice though! Easier to wash hair in a shower than a bathtub when you're this pregnant.

I went through a small cleaning spell on Sunday, and got the crib cleared out, bedroom more organized, baby clothes more organized. All the floors were swept, 2 loads of laundry washed, dried, folded, and put away. Dishwasher is almost ready to run again, garbage was switched out, and best of all, we bought one of those 9-bin toy organizers for the girls, and went through all of the toys. They now have special places for blocks, animals, cars, track, food, and many other things. Clean up in the living room is now easier, because they don't tear everything out looking for a specific toy. It also helps Lilly tremendously, because when all of the toys are on the floor and we ask them to clean up, we believe she gets very overwhelmed and her brain just doesn't process taking directions. She gets so lost, and we have to give her specific tasks like "clean up the cars and put them in this tote" while physically showing her, and helping her out. She seems to be able to handle this organizer more on her own, so I'm sure she will adjust even further as they learn where all of their toys go.

Still no baby. I've had plenty of miscellaneous contractions, but nothing consistent...

Ugh...Buy My House!

I still have a few posts to do to catch up to this upcoming weekend (we are going to Indianapolis for an airshow), but I just have to vent about today.

We've been running around trying to get things packed up, and the car needed a good cleaning, so Luke was outside picking out trash and sweeping. I meanwhile, started a load in the dishwasher, and a load in the washing machine, and came into the living room to help the girls pickup some toys. Luke comes inside and all I hear are curses. We knew we had a clog in our kitchen sink, because yesterday the water drained really slow...no big deal, we barely use the kitchen sink since we have the dishwasher, so it can wait. Well, the dishwasher and the washing machine drain into the same pipe that the kitchen sink drains into. Apparently the clog was a lot further down than we thought. The entire kitchen was flooded from the washer draining. Chris was in the basement at his reloading bench, and it started raining on him so he came up as well and ran upstairs to turn off the washing machine while I turned off the dishwasher. All of Luke's tools are on the kitchen floor because Jeremy borrowed some of them to make beehives and they never made it back to the basement.

Luke and I pailed out the overflowing sinks into the bathtub and grabbed every rag and towel we had clean to soak up the mess (I think I need some Zorbeez or ShamWow's or something). I think some of the water dripped onto the balsa wood in the basement for Luke's model airplanes, but I'm not sure if it was enough to damage anything or not.

Luke and Chris ran to Lowe's for parts and they are going to re-pipe the drain to a bigger drain that flow's right beside this one. It looks like the little bit of metal drain that was left probably collapsed on itself and clogged the drain, so right now they are downstairs working on replacing it, then it's back to car cleaning and packing! At least it happened while we were home...

Our Washer Nightmare

So, after the Lowe’s trip last week on Monday, we decided to just bust out a piece of drywall behind the washer so we can easily run the new pipe, and Luke would build an access panel to cover the hole, so we can get to the pipes if necessary. After busting out that piece, we find the wires to the 220 dryer outlet and the normal outlet on that wall have gashes in the sheathing. The 220 actually has bare wire showing!!! Needless to say, it’s a BIG fire hazard. Obviously both of the wires need replaced, so we shut the breakers off, and proceeded to knock out another huge chunk of drywall, so we didn’t have to fish for the new wires nearly as much. We didn’t have the wire we needed, so we hung it up early Monday evening, and Luke asked for Tuesday off.

Tuesday comes and Luke and Chris go back to Lowe’s to buy wire. $80 worth of it! Wire gets expensive. The wire gets up through the wall flawlessly; it just takes a little time. Chris had to start getting ready for work at 3pm, so after he left, Luke finished with that wiring and decided since he has all the wiring stuff out, he would go ahead and redo the girls’ bedroom outlet, since it’s needed done for a few months. Check one thing off the list anyways eh? After that he got the pipe assembled, and took a break so we could get the kids bathed and put to bed. I went upstairs with him and watched the new pipe go in while I vacuumed up the mess on the floor, along with 4 years of lint since Mr. Bachelor Chris decides not to ever borrow the vacuum and sweep! Grrr. (That’s OK though, because I brought up my recycling trash bags and took a whole bunch of his glass bottles and cardboard he just has piled in his kitchen and bagged them up for trash…hahaha. He growled at me when he got home.) Anyways, the pipe works, the outlets work, the washer and dryer are hooked up and they work. We mounted an extra fluorescent light we had laying around, so now we actually have a light up there.

That little laundry room still needs some work. We need to borrow a truck and get a piece of drywall, but we also need a big ladder to make it to the second floor, so we can actually vent the dryer outside through a hole, and not through Chris’ living room window. The old light wire is connected to the rest of the old wiring and is still hot, so we just put some wire nuts on it. It needs shoved into the ceiling and we need to patch the ceiling. We also need to install baseboard and then paint everything and we will be good to go. The hardest part is getting a ladder for the dryer vent, and we need to do that before putting up the new piece of drywall. Our home improvement budget is completely drained now, and we even had to tap into the medical savings and use it since wire was so expensive. We also still need to buy some tile for the bathroom, since the local Lowe’s didn’t have enough edge tiles for the shower. I don’t know when we will start that project now.

Here are a few pictures:

In General Life Update

Over the weekend we had our niece's 9th birthday party to attend. The family is doing well. We figured that sometime soon (maybe as soon as this weekend) we need to get together for a newborn photo shoot, so hopefully we will have an entry on the photo blog in the next 2 weeks.

We had a section of our piping to our washer break the other night. Right above that piece of drywall we just put up, so the drywall got wet, and the walls, and staircase as well. Luke is at Lowe's as I type this, picking up piping supplies to fix the leak, as well as picking up trim and tile for the bathroom project. I have an agressive schedule this week to finish the bathroom tile, but I just got a call from Luke that the trim tile we need 40 pieces of is low stock, and there is only 27 pieces there, I'm not sure how far that will get up around the edges, but we will see, and hopefully we get it finished this week.

Lilly had her 18 month checkup today. She is actually 20 months old, but we got behind last fall when school started and all the older kids needed sports physicals. She weighs 30 pounds 2 ounces, and she is 2 foot 9 inches tall. The doctor says she looks great, but if her weight continues to increase at the rate it did from the last visit to this one, and her heighth doesn't match it, then we may have a weight problem developing. I think she is gearing up for a growth spurt, and I'm sure everything will even up for her 2 year checkup...hopefully.

I think that's it for now. Hopefully I have some home improvement updates soon.

Home Improvement Project 1: Downstairs Bathroom

Our first major home improvement project will be the bathroom. We have $250 from Christmas to get a jumpstart on the project, and we budget $50 a month for home improvement. Right now we bathe in a bubble, since the shower tile isn't finished, so the first step will be to get new window trim up, so we can finish tiling the tub surround. After that, we will turn our focus on the rest of the bathroom trim (base, crown molding, backsplash). We also need to buy or custom build a medicine cabinet, build a false wall to hide the shower pipes (but keep them easily accessible), and enclose our shelving to make it look more like a built-in cabinet. I just want to shower without plastic trying to cling and attack, so that is the main focus.

We have some minor projects that need attention as well. The girls' bedroom outlet needs rewired so we can re-position our heaters in the house. The kitchen power is out as well; accept for the fridge, freezer, and dishwasher. We have a trouble light from the bathroom hanging above the stove right now, so we can keep in plugged in, and have a little light in there when it gets dark. We have the kitchen blocked off with a blanket now anyways, since it's so cold out, so the kitchen isn't top priority right now. Keeping warm is! We don't need to buy anything to do the wiring, so the budget won't need adjusted. We just need to find the time.