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!