Letter of the Week A-Z

I thought it would be nice to post a list of all the weeks in order from my Letter of the week Preschool Curriculum:

Letter A
Letter B
Letter C
Letter D
Letter E
Letter F
Letter G
Letter H
Letter I
Letter J
Letter K
Letter L
Letter M
Letter N
Letter O
Letter P
Letter Q
Letter R
Letter S
Letter T
Letter U
Letter V
Letter W
Letter X
Letter Y
Letter Z

Christmas Crafting

There's been a lot of craftiness going on at our house lately. Unfortunately, I can't show you most of it since they are Christmas gifts. :)

But this is a fun little craft that the girls and their friend made last week:

The little containers were left over from the pantyhose I bought to make the fairy wings for C's 5th birthday party. We put cotton balls inside to look like snow and then broke out the hot glue gun to attach the accessories. C felt very grown up, as I let her use the glue gun on her own.

Do you see the one on the left? That would be E's. She added a jewel on top and strand of pearls. :) And the one on the far right is C's second one. She came up with the idea to twist two pipe cleaners together. Pretty creative!

Island Fantasy

I had this picture in my head - a fantasy- of an island. A kitchen island. MY kitchen island. It was painted and trimmed out to match our new board and batten walls. And it was beautiful.

My dad? He rocks. My literally made my dream come true:

Love it!

A Method to the Madness

The weekend following my reunion, my folks very generously came back to help us finish our flooring project. I thought I'd show a bit of our installation procedure. :)

The boards are laminate, so there are only a limited number of "designs" or patterns. Ten, to be exact.  The instructions tell you to randomly choose boards from at least three different packages to avoid the look of a pattern. However, I am really sensitive to patterns (i.e. I am anal) and insisted on hand-selecting each board that was placed in our 900 square foot area. I just knew it would drive me crazy to see two of the same pattern boards "randomly" placed next to each other. Or too close to each other. Or in the same row. Did I mention I'm sensitive?

This photo shows how I would make stacks of the ten patterns against the wall. I found that to be the easiest way to make my selections. I even came up with nicknames for the patterns, such as "the bird", "spot", "swooshes" and "the hill."

I would lay the boards out in the order I liked and then Doug would come and snap them into place. I did some installing as well, but I could only go so far before a cut needed to be made. My dad and husband banned me from using the chop-saw thingy. :-(

When we were coming down to the end of the project, Doug pointed out that we may not have enough boards left. In a panic, I counted the remaining boards while Doug estimated how many rows and boards per row we needed to finish. He told me 86 boards. We had exactly 86 boards. True story!

Thankfully we had enough and finished with only 5 full boards left over. We did estimate about 10% waste but I guess we wasted more than average. An unnamed person suggested it may have had something to do with the "selection" phase of the installation being too picky, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. We just ran a highly efficient project worthy of a Six Sigma belt of some kind (engineer joke).

Our floor is beautiful and I am SOOOOOO happy with it! We worked so hard and were able to save $1790 by installing it ourselves. Who knows how much the demo would have cost, not to mention the savings from ordering the flooring online and getting free shipping! I'd say we easily saved $4000 total.

Again, I'd like to point out that my mom and dad were invaluable to our successful project. Dad worked tirelessly and provided sound advice and expertise. Mom was babysitter extraordinaire - taking the girls to the museum, the park, pottery painting, reading hours of stories and playing hours and hours of games and puzzles. She has the patience of a saint!


Will post some "after pictures" someday. Hopefully this year. Am waiting for our new camera as our current one does not have flash and really doesn't do it justice.

The Straight and Narrow

Everything you read about installing laminate flooring tells you to start in the far right wall and work your way to the left. This would mean that we should start in our dining room. However, since we were flooring our entire first floor, my Dad suggested that we start in the front hallway instead. Our house was not built by perfectionists, so the walls are not perfectly straight. This would be most noticeable when you first walk in the front door. So that's where we started.  It took a long time of discussion and some last minute panic doubting from me (Am I really going to like this flooring? Are we making a big mistake???) before the first row went in.

By the time my parents had to leave, this is the progress we had made:

My dad left us his tools, and we were able to make some more progress during the week in the evenings.  As you can see from the above photo, we decided to remove the island, place the flooring in the whole kitchen and then re-install the island.

By the weekend we had the kitchen completed. The pantry closets were quite a chore! Doug did a fantastic job. But there still was a lot left to do...

Flooring Demolition

With the painting done and the boxes of laminate acclimated, it was time to begin the major part of the renovation - the flooring. My parents came down to help us kick things off. The carpet removal from the living/dining room was cake. Rip up the carpet and pad, pull up the tack strips and some large staples around the perimeter and boom - you're done.

But once we started to tear up the flooring that was in the hallway, we realized that we were in for a long haul. The floor that we were told was a type of laminate was actually linoleum.

It was glued onto a plywood underlayment that was stapled to the subfloor with thousands upon thousands of staples. Doug had to pry it up into splintery sections while I came behind him with a hammer and pounded in the staples. We spent about three days doing nothing but this. THREE SOLID DAYS. My ears were ringing and my wrists were aching. My dad had a great tool to help cut the staples off in the hard to reach sections.

Oh yeah, and then we found that the sub-floor had rotted through by our front door due to water damage.

My dad took charge of cutting the bad section out,

and replacing it with a new section of sub-floor.  We will have to replace our front door and also a board underneath it, but that will have to wait for the spring (and more money!).  In the meantime, we will do some major caulking on the outside and pray that it does not leak over the winter.

What a mess! Sadie was very stressed out during this process with all the noise and being kept in her kennel all day (to avoid getting splinters or nail punctures).

We eventually got all the flooring removed and were able to start laying down the laminate.

This is how we lived while the kitchen was torn up. In addition to our family room furniture, we also had Sadie's kennel, a piano, kitchen cart, kitchen table and six chairs, plus the refrigerator and trash cans to work around.

Good times!

A Piercing Decision.

Out of the blue, C announced she wanted to get her ears pierced. I have told both the girls that whenever they want to do it, they can. I waited until I was sixteen due to my fear of needles and always wished I had done it sooner.

C was very nervous, but determined. I was SO proud of her!

However, by the time we made it outside the mall the pain was gone and she was feeling quite happy and proud of herself. And rightly so.

Beautiful!

Paint Dilemma

I had a very difficult time making a paint selection for our hallway and living/dining room. After totally loving the green that I used in the family room and kitchen, I just couldn't find a beige that I felt the same way about. So, we went through three paint colors until I was happy!

Again, sorry for the phone picture, but you can see our wall looking like a camouflage treatment with all the paint colors on it.

The winner was Relaxed Khaki from Sherwin-Williams. This paint, their Duration matte, was our favorite paint from the whole project. It covered extremely well and was great to work with. Highly recommend it (especially when it's 40% off).

Here it is on the walls:

Apples for Everyone!

Each year when Sharon and Chaz come to visit, we end up buying more apples than the previous year. It's becoming an obsession!  But it's always a good time.

On their way to the funny farm:

Someday the girls will be too little to pick up. But not this year! 

You can see the rain moving in - luckily it held off until we got in the car.

We enjoyed a family game night with Sharon and Chaz. I have to give Chaz props for being E's partner. If you've ever seen her "sit" through a typical game you will know why... 

I'm Floored!

We found an amazing deal on our Shaw flooring online. It even had super cheap shipping, provided we could have it delivered at a commercial location. Doug's office was perfect.  He drove the van to work on the day it was set to arrive, but it was a no show. Our contact called the delivery service with Doug on the line and lit into the person about it. Doug said it was one of the most uncomfortable conversations he's ever had to listen to! Unfortunately, our advocate's persistence didn't make much of an impact as the flooring was a no-show the next day as well, but at least we got a full refund of the shipping cost.  Finally, on the third day I got a call that it was in. And it would take two trips. Cuz it weighed 2,000 pounds. Yeah.

Luckily, Doug found a friendly forklift operator to help unload the skids from the truck. Our van hitch was 4 inches from the ground with half the flooring loaded! But we got it all safely home and stacked in the garage.

This is what it's supposed to look like (excuse the phone pic). It's called Sawmill Hickory from Shaw's Timberline laminate flooring line.  I am somewhat nervous about having laminate in the kitchen, but I love the durability of this product and the look. It has beveled edges on the individual planks and some texture and distressing that makes it hard to distinguish from the engineered products. Not to mention the price... We paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than the $3.99 "sale" at the flooring store.

I've got to make a decision on the paint color for our living room/hallway/dining room area before Friday. We plan to do the demo and floor installation ourselves. Can't wait to see it all come together!

Renovations - Part Two

And it just keeps coming! After finishing the family room and kitchen, we spent a good day going through the wall until to organize and empty it. It is incredible the amount of stuff we had in there!

The office desk got a similar treatment and the computer has been temporarily moved upstairs to the guest room:

This is an example of the damage on the walls in the dining room. When we bought the house (11 years ago!) this room was covered with wallpaper that did NOT want to come off.  Doug spent hours and hours and hours with a steamer and every conceivable concoction to remove it. It was a nightmare.  After all that work, it left us with some damaged drywall but not enough motivation left to repair it. So, we painted right over the mess and it's been peeling and bubbling away ever since.

Drywall Doug to the rescue!

My hero! *swoon*...

To truly repair this wall you'd need to skim the ENTIRE thing with drywall compound. We're just hitting the worst areas with the knowledge that at least it will look better than it did before.

Who really notices drywall imperfections, anyway? Nosy busybodies, that's who!

Back to life uncover. Sadie's kennel is in the middle of that mess. She has not been too keen on all the upheaval in her house. Wait till she sees the flooring...

I'm Feeling Blue...

for blueberries!  Who doesn't love fresh blueberries?  After doing some online research, I decided to give it a whirl.  Our local garden shop was selling their blueberry plants for 50% off and told me it was a perfect time to plant.  They look like dead twigs stuck in a bucket, but I am hoping that they develop into leafy bushes of deliciousness.

They sell two varieties of blueberries in each container for cross-pollination.  I am now the proud owner of a Blueray and a Bluecrop plant.  I know that they like full sun and acidic soil.  They will likely need some special fertilizer and I won't be able to harvest any berries until the second season. The bluecrop variety is supposed to grow 4-6 feet tall! We spent quite some time debating the perfect location for the bushes.

Here is a glimpse of my garden to date. Very green! The oregano has bolted (lower left) but the basil keeps on coming (lower right). With all the rain we've enjoyed, the lettuce and green onions have sprouted and are on their way. Hopefully we'll be enjoying those in salads in the next few weeks.

The boards are battened.

(Sorry for that title, but it's more original than "Board and Batten Completed.")

Yes, we did it! After several weeks (yes, weeks) of living with dropclothes and drywall dust, our family room is sporting a brand new look.  I love it - crisp and clean and updated.  I'm really loving all the farmhouse decor that is in style now and this is our attempt to bring a bit of it into our home. Doug likes that it is comfortable and not "froo froo".

I picked up an old window at an antique store. Not sure where it will end up, right now it's on the mantel. We are still thinking about painting the brick. Right now I am considering painting them all to match the dark brown bricks. Other option is to whitewash them all. Your thoughts?

We rearranged the furniture in here, too. Did you notice the "new" couch? It's my old apartment sofa with a twill slipcover. And now I'm going overboard by putting a blanket over the slipcover to protect it... Yesterday I took advantage of the Labor Day Sale to order a comfy chair and ottoman for the corner opposite the blue chair to make a nice little reading nook.

In the kitchen, the green really does pop the cabinets. We also painted the ceiling in both rooms, so that also did a lot to brighten up the space.

Can you tell I bought some new knobs for the doors?

We splurged a bit on these fancy switch plates, but I think they were worth it.

I removed all the photos and things on the fridge and have been asked at least four times if we got a new one! It makes a big difference.

Well, that's it! Wish my camera was operating better, but this is the best it gets.  We have hickory flooring on order and have already begun doing some drywall repair in the dining room, prepping to paint. Stay tuned...