Luck didn't seem to be in our favor lately. It seems that I must've forgotten that we have to actually live when we bought this house to fix up. So it still smells a little, the wall are definitely not in the best shape and ..... Well, I think ..... describes the house quite well. I could go on and on and still not finish with all of the stuff we have encountered since my last post. It's been a month, and I wish I could say it hadn't been that long. Sometimes we plan to do something and forget that life has a way of getting in the way.
Our children have been adjusting to school, we have been adjusting to a new community, it takes a lot of time to shop for a family of five, the kids have doctor and orthodontist appointments, I like to provide my family with healthy home-cooked meals, I am writing occasional devotionals, a Bible study as well as a novel (I'm on page 176 handwritten because I'm a paper and pen kinda gal!) and my husband is working a little more than he had been, so that leaves a lot of responsibility to me. Needless to say, I haven't gotten as much done on the house as I would like to say I had, but I am certainly starting to get a feel for what I want this house to be when we are done.
So, I finally finished scraping the "garage" floor and enlisted the help of my children so we could wash down all of the walls out there. The neighbor told us that the woman who lived here before us smoked like a freight-train out there. If you are a smoker, this is not a big deal, but since we do not smoke, it was very strong and we didn't really want to use it without cleaning the walls and painting it with that stuff to kill the smell. So with the help of three of the best kids in the world (I'm partial!), we got the walls cleaned, with the exception of the baseboards on two walls. We've had a busy few weeks with spring break, lots of appointments, my writing and the like. Oh, did I forget to mention we also figured out that our cat is pregnant so we can't take her for her rabies shot, and we've had to set up a place in the breezeway for her to stay until the kittens are born. So with everything going on, I haven't had the chance to get out there. I finally went out there today, and my small mission was accomplished. I managed to finish washing the baseboards on the last two walls.
Now, I just need to add spackle, sand the spackle flat, and paint and I'll be finished. I will spackle and sand tomorrow, paint on Saturday and be done! Yay! I am so excited to finally be about to finish a project that has been hanging over my head for over a month. So during that month, we have done more than just scrape the floor out there, although that was a grueling job. On March 19, we had three trees cut down, two trees topped and three stumps ground. One tree was a humongous oak at the front corner of the house that hung over the top of the house with a trunk that was leaning significantly toward the house. The neighbor told us that it used to have a twin that leaned the other direction and landed on his house during a storm. He had to rebuild his entire house because the tree destroyed the old house. In some ways, maybe we could have used a windstorm to take that one out when no one was home so we could have rebuilt...
Nah, this home improvement project is so much more fun. That would just be sad. Anyway, the guys arrived early in the day (maybe 9 or 9:30 a.m.) and they worked ALL day. I didn't have to do much for that project, but I didn't get much done around the house because I wanted to oversee what was happening, and once the kids got home from school there was a lot of activity. The tree in the backyard was extremely close to the house and half-rotten. Speaking of half-rotten, we discovered once the humongous tree in the front was down that part of the inside of the trunk was beginning to rot. It really was a matter of time until it fell on its own, so we were glad we took it down.
The kids really enjoyed that project. We also have been working on getting the kids to clean up their rooms to no avail with the exception of our oldest who decided to tackle her closet on her own! I was proud of her even though I had to help her remove the nasty carpet in the bottom and bang out and remove the tack strips. Once the pad was pulled up, there were umpteen (is that even a word???) staples all over the bottom of the closet floor that were used to hold the carpet pad down. Now I understand that carpet pads need to be stapled down, but this closet floor is maybe 12" X 40" or so and there must've been a dozen or more staples per square 4 inches. Now I know that is not a technical term, but that is just about the concentration of the staples. She was not able to finish them that day so she came back to it after her Daddy showed her an easier way to get the staples out than the way I showed her to do it because I've never pulled staples or anything else out. Eventually I may have figured that out, but I'm glad he knew the little tip and showed her.
Anyway, the same day that she tackled that project, she had been complaining to her Daddy that her ceiling fan wasn't working. The light worked but not the ceiling fan. He figured it wouldn't be that big of a deal so he cut off the breaker and set to work pulling it apart figuring maybe a wire had been missed being connected during the installation. Well, that was the understatement of the century. The wires had been connected with duct tape??!!!??? (who uses duct tape in an electrical connection?) and some of them were connected incorrectly. Can you say "major fire hazard"? Wow. So my hubby had to completely reinstall that fixture, which took ten times longer than it should have, but our teen girl now has a ceiling fan, and my hubby has decided that it is just not a good idea to tackle any project in this house unless there is someplace open for business where we could get replacement parts, if necessary.
Now about that ceiling fan. Last night it was rather cold and my daughter was complaining that she was cold. When I went to her room, she still had her fan running on high. I asked her why she hadn't turned it off and she said she tried but it was still going even when it sounded like it was off. She said she even tried to stop it with her fingers, but as soon as she let it go, it started going again. I proceeded to turn it off, step up on the bed and stop it manually. It stayed stopped and she was singing my praises.... Well, at least Mama has one point for the team!
So not a lot of home improvement has been going on, but we are definitely still plugging away at this home improvement project. I think there will be periods of productivity and lulls that come and go, and that's okay with me because this is a life project for us that will certainly help our children become more understanding of others, less me-focused and be less likely to exhibit silver-spoon syndrome. I think they are already realizing that we are not greater than anyone else. And I like that because it helps all of us remember what's important in life: enjoying living and relationships!
Happy Home Improvement!
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