kids and pets will be the death of me

We got quite a bit done again today. Joe pulled down the carport thing-a-ma-jig and I painted some places that the lead paint was coming up. I have to say that I was not thrilled to have to repaint this stuff. Due to the kind of loan we have, we have to have an inspection at the end of the work, which also includes re-testing for lead paint. We had to pay someone about $2,000 to encapsulate this lead paint, but it hasn't been holding up, so I am having to repaint it all. Most of it is coming off in huge sheets.... bringing all the lead paint with the encapsulating paint.

Today I painted around the bathroom door. I was quite pleased and went to sit and eat some lunch while it dried. I told everyone not to touch it and not to use the door. I blocked it off with a chair. Our dog is terrified to go close to the chairs or baby gates. Well, she changed her mind on that today. She pushed the chair out of her way and got her paws and face in white paint and then proceeded to walk ALL OVER! IN CIRCLES! Amelia helped me scrub all of that up and prevented me from strangling Ramona.

I moved upstairs, where Owen's door had also been chipping. I got all of it repainted. I came down and talked to him about needing to stay out of his room. He needed to not use his door for at least 2 more hours and even then, he was not to close it. 20 minutes later I went upstairs and found that he had shut his door and locked it (I need to take that damn lock off his door) and had "forgotten" that he wasn't even supposed to go into the room yet. The door fits REALLY tight. So, all the work I had just done along the edge is completely undone and tomorrow I need to rescrape it all and repaint.

This home improvement business would be sooooooo much easier without kids! And pets! Of course, then I wouldn't have anyone to fix this home up for. Also, the push to take care of the lead paint would not be so great. Just be warned.... don't eat the paint chips when you come over.

Girls' room is done... and other weekend projects

Finally, I feel like we can do an official "before and after" shot of a room in the house :) Joe and I and the girls got their room totally finished up today. I would finish up Owen's room, but the kid won't keep legos picked up for long enough to do anything.

Anyhow, here are the befores:
(I wish the smell would come through the blog page... it was rank.... cat urine soaked carpet)

And here are the afters:

We have also been doing many little projects. Yesterday, Joe and I built a compost bin out of pallets, so our compost will be all neat and tidy:

I have been also working on touching up some paint while Joe works on putting together different shelves. I sorted cloth diapers that Fritz outgrew during this moving process and spent a good amount of time searching for the television remote that has been missing since our move..... no luck. Tomorrow will involve painting trim and, if the weather is good, we will be taking down the carport thing that is attached to the garage.

Ta-freakin-da!!

Oh, yeah! This weekend we kicked butt and took names. It helped sooooooo much that the older 3 kiddos went to my parents. They got to have summer fun (swimming, eating fudge, learning about homemade ice cream, watching movies, etc) while Joe and I busted our behinds to make the most of the free time.

We got our stairs done! We got our bathroom door done! We got the front deck done! (no stairs yet) We got the shelves in the bathroom closet done! We got the towel bar hanging done! Weeeeeeee!!!!!

Look at our pretty bathroom door!! It is a cranberry color and covered with a red sparkly paint :) It was the door that was in the house, which was a cool door so we just wanted to rehab it. I posted a "before" photo just for comparison sake.

Here are our bathroom shelves! Now we don't have 3 giant boxes in the bathroom. We were finally able to unpack. I will probably sew some sort of curtain for this closet, but that can be a winter project.

Here are our freshly painted stairs. They are colorful!

 This is what they looked like when we bought the house:

This is what they have looked like for awhile now. We had removed the carpet, the lead paint was encapsulated, and the rail had to be fixed so the spindles were closer together for safety. I am so glad they are finally done!

Joe removed the huge posts and now you can actually see our front door. The deck has been redone and we will do stairs once we get a good base built for them.... which will likely turn into us doing the entire walkway to the street.

What the house looked like before:

 This was the front deck. The wood was just rotten and weak.

We still have LOTS of work to do, but we are getting there :) It is amazing what can happen to a house with a contractor, two handy (and pretty hard working) people, and about $35,000. Yeah, we feel broke right now. Broke, but in a home that is in much better condition than it was 2 1/2 months ago!

Getting TONS done

This weekend my parents were kind enough to take our big kids so we could get some tedious work done here at the house. 4 kids + painting stairs just wasn't going to be any fun. We are now 3 coats in on the stairs and need to put down probably one more coat quickly in the morning and then they should be good. I will save the sharing of any photos until they are done. Same with our bathroom door. I want a big 'ta-da' sort of moment for those :)

Joe also got our garbage disposal hooked up. Each time our dishwasher ran, this is what happened:

Gross, right? Now, this is what happens:

Yay! Much better!

Tomorrow I expect we will be done with the stairs and bathroom door, bathroom shelves, and front door steps :) Our big kids will also come back home :)

Notice anything different???

Things are starting to look VERY different around here. Suddenly, our house looks cheerful and bright :)

We still need to do something to make the front door appear more inviting, but we will be taking down the posts and adding front stairs. I want to repaint the front door as well.

Here is the house before:

Look what my husband built for me!

Well, it may not have been for me, but it felt like it! I have a new favorite place in the house and that is our side deck :) I got home from roller derby practice last night to find a very sore, but happy husband who had finished this big project. We sat out on the rocking chairs and enjoyed some frozen yogurt and beer together (sounds like a weird combination, but it was satisfying).

Our 11th weekend

Seems crazy that it has been 11 weekends of fun since we bought this house :) Things are going well, but I will admit that I am starting to miss lazy Sunday mornings of coffee and looking at each other while saying, "hmmm.... honey, what would you like to do today?" Now it is much more, "Honey, what project MUST be done today?"

Joe got the deck all ripped off on the side of the house and has half of it laid again!

The funniest part of this was the way he sunburnt while working. He calls it his "tramp stamp sunburn" :)

It was supposed to be nice out today after some rain this morning, but it is now the afternoon and it has still not stopped raining. So, we ran to Menards and got more deck screws, ran to the grocery store, and got some projects done inside the house. These projects included getting the boxes emptied in our bedroom. Oh, so nice! Now our bedroom feels like a bedroom and not a room with a bed in the middle of boxes.

We got some curtain rod action going on:

Above, you can also see that Edie got a new bed on Friday! She is no longer sleeping on the floor. We picked up a bedframe and mattress and Joe got the bed all put together Friday night. The mattress that she was on went back onto the bunk beds in Owen's room and so now we have a spare bed for when the kids have friends stay the night. The curtain in the girls' room is one of the two that I sewed for them :) They need to get more stuff on their walls though, this curtain hanging is making their room look even shorter than it already is!

We finished laundry, which I won't bore you with a picture of. Although, if you look at our bedroom photo then you can see some of the clean clothes folded there and ready to be put away!

I am quite excited to have also meal planned for the week and cooked. It has been hard to do that because of all the projects and time constraints and general life disarray. We will be using the crockpot a lot this week, which helps. And then we can eat for the whole week on about $75 instead of $35/meal when we go out. The kids and I are all sick with a cold, so soups and crockpot oatmeal seems right up our alley for this week. This illness factor has also slowed me down quite a bit this weekend. Here is proof of Fritz being sick. He does not normally lay down without touching my body and yet here he was too tired to care that I got up to take a few photos:

The other thing that slowed us down this weekend was the fair (in this case, it was good to be slowed down a bit). The kids are involved in 4H and 2 of them had rabbits to show. Amelia got a blue ribbon on hers and Owen got a participation ribbon (he is a Cloverbud, so that is what all the kids in his age range get). Edie would have had the guinea pig in the pet show, but he passed away this last week. We will have to get her a rabbit to show next year :) Joe and the kids also worked the 4H food booth last night while Fritz and I just wandered around looking at 4H projects and such. I am very proud of my big three kiddos and what sort of people they are becoming. It is a long process to raise people, but I feel like we are on a good track :)

And just because I know that my friends enjoy a good ghost story, today Owen heard someone walking in the bathroom when he and I were the only ones home. I heard it too and promptly reassured him that it was nothing..... old floors creak and groan, right?

Just pouring money down the drain

We aren't really pouring money down the drain; it is all going into our house.... our home. However, it feels like it is just non-stop at this point. Now Joe needs to fix the garbage disposal since some small people dumped things down that side of the sink and it is all clogged up. We also need to go to Menards and buy some adjustable screens because the weather is supposed to be decent and we would love to turn off the air.... especially since our windows are SOOOOOOO bad that I am sure the utility bill is going to make me vomit when it comes.

Right now, our bank statement for use of our debit card looks something like this:
Menards
Home Depot
Lowe's
Menards
Panera
Menards
Ace Hardware
Menards
Menards
MGM Liquors

Ok, I made that last one up.... but it SHOULD be on our list to help us cope with all the trips to Menards :)

We are still catching up from the double housing payments and double utility payments from when we owned this home but were still living in the rental. That might take us several months to recover. And otherwise, it is just constant small amounts trickling out to help make this place comfortable and appealing.

I swear, I am not complaining. I am just sharing in the honesty of our current situation. Our mortgage is VERY affordable, but it might be awhile until we feel that affordability due to the $$$ that is constantly pouring out to fix stuff up. Old homes are a money pit, right? We are still very happy with our decision and we understand that the long term benefits will outweigh the short term pocketbook pain :)

Great news: Joe got the light fixture up in our bedroom! Now we have a light!!! If only we could find our television remote, our bedroom might take the lead for my favorite room in the house :)

I am tired

I am not going to lie.... I am exhausted. I am burnt out. I need a vacation. I am not feeling very joyful and positive about life right now. Instead, I am feeling like I am being worked to death. Obviously, we have had a lot of work to do around here. That is just what it is. It is these beautiful, interesting, creative kids of mine that will be the death of me!

Today I banned cinnamon sugar from the house. I am SO. FREAKING. SICK. of cleaning up a mixture of cinnamon and sugar off the counters, table, and floor. It is the messiest creation and has no nutritional value at all. I have banned it in the past, but somehow moving made the kids feel like they should start making it again.... and that I should start cleaning it again. I am about to ban shoes. Yep. I am going to take away shoes forever. Why? Because we have a no-shoes-in-the-house policy and yet I keep finding shoes EVERYWHERE and dirt EVERYWHERE! Apparently, I am the only one who understands how to work a broom. <sigh> I am just going to ground everyone from everything for ever and ever. Everything will be banned. Can you tell that I was up pretty much all night with a fever baby? Soooooooo tired.

Anyhow, in the midst of all of this cleaning and sick baby crying and me not feeling my best, middle child comes up to me and says, "Mom, I am pretty sure you owe me $40 for unpaid allowances. You need to pay up!"

<blink, blink> Do I live with a small thug? As I was looking at my child who hadn't yet showered or brushed his teeth, who hadn't cleaned up his own breakfast dishes, or picked up his dirty underwear off the livingroom floor (who takes off their underwear in the livingroom???), I found it very hard to stay calm. The reason we decided to start paying the kids an allowance was because I gave up my office outside of the home which requires our home to stay extra clean. Instead of paying a cleaning lady, we thought we would give the kids an opportunity to earn a little extra cash by helping keep things clean. They haven't done any of this sort of thing (other than move-out cleaning, which we compensated them for) for WEEKS. So, I am trying to figure out how in the world my son figures that I owe him 8 weeks of allowance for eating the food I buy, using the utilities I pay for, living under the roof I provide, and doing pretty much nothing else. I would have been paying him for turning my house into a pig pen.

I am very much looking forward to the school year starting up again. I also need a break. I need to do something that does not involve any of my children. They are constantly with me and I adore them, but I never get away from all of them. I think I am going to sign up for roller derby.

In the interest of transparency

This might be too much honesty, but I am going to give you all a glimpse into our lives right at this moment. I was so hoping to have a big 'ta-da' sort of post with pictures of completely ready rooms, totally unpacked and decorated and everything, but I am realizing that it might be MONTHS before we get to that point. We are real people who still work real jobs and have real (messy) kids who are living in the construction zone. You will see that one week of living here has not been enough time to get out of boxes. Holy cow, you do NOT want to see our basement. 800 sqft of boxes and clutter. <sigh> That is going to be no fun to deal with. So, look at these pictures and see past the clutter, mess, and boxes. I am still proud of how far we have come on this home!

First up: The bathroom/laundry!

 We need to build shelves for this closet. Once we do, the mess will be able to come out of the boxes and look orderly on shelves :)

 Cuteness break! Fritz feeding himself some dinner!

Joe installed mini-blinds tonight into our living room and kitchen.

This is how much our children help:

I think my office is coming along nicely. It is my favorite place in the house. It is quiet and the kids usually leave me alone (there is no tv in this room).

Obviously, we still need to paint our stairs. We plan on having it done by the end of this month.

The girls' room. They claimed it was "clean." I think we have different definitions of that word. I still need to hang their curtains, touch up some paint, and get Edie a platform for her mattress. We don't make her sleep on a bare mattress, her bedding was just in the wash :)

Yep, looks super clean ;)

Owen's room. We need to get a mattress for the bottom bunk so we have a spare bed. In our last several homes Edie and Owen have shared a room and slept on the bunk beds. Now Edie took her mattress to another room and Owen has his own space. I want to sew him a curtain for his window yet. Again, this is his idea of clean. Death by legos in this room.

Hallway. <sigh> So. Many. Boxes. I don't even want to show you the rest.

 Our room. Again, the boxes! The laundry on the bed is clean and freshly folded. Sorry I didn't put it away before snapping pictures, but again.... we are just regular people here. I have some pretty curtains tucked in our closet to hang over the blackout blinds. I just haven't gotten around to it quite yet.

Hallway closet:

Joe's finished blinds :)

We have started tearing off the deck to get that replaced. That is another job to get done by the end of the month.

The house was pressure washed today to get it ready for paint. It looks rough.

Joe tore off the tiny roof over the front door that was doing nothing. We will take down this tiny deck and rebuild it and also build stairs to get up onto it. I was to paint the front door at some point as well.

Here is our huge-normous backyard. I am showing you this just incase you couldn't remember why on earth we would ever take on a project like this :)