Category: Uncategorized (Page 68 of 201)

Eeeeek!  Isn’t it beautiful?!  I’m so excited.   Oh, and do you want to know why Josiah has his hands over his ears?  Because Tim was doing this… the tool is very loud.

That’s right–Goodbye tile!  We have the new flooring purchased and sitting in the basement getting acclimating to the house temperature, but it’s a floating floor, so it will go in after the cabinets.  Those should be arriving on Thursday so we can start to assemble them… He sure is keeping himself busy this off-season, eh?  🙂

Tim worked hard this weekend and finished sheetrocking the basement kitchen.  That was a huge project which also included carrying down large heavy sheets of sheetrock… not my favorite part.  But we persevered and now it’s done!  Whoo hoo!  Onto the mudding and sanding….

I’m not sure why, but this week has seemed particularly long to me.  And apparently to Chloe too.  When we all woke up this morning and started to get ready for school she lamented that today was ONLY Friday and not Saturday.   (The proclamation came hand-in-hand with a dramatic flop onto my bed.)

But tomorrow is going to be here before we know it!  And we have big plans of relaxing and watching the new Cinderella movie (we borrowed it from a friend) and working on the basement kitchen.  See?  So much fun to be had!  I know you wish you were here with us.  😉

In other news, our church has decided to add a Saturday night service starting in February.  Since I’m in charge of lining up volunteers for the nursery area, I’m now in charge of making sure that service time is covered too.  Luckily we have people who have specifically volunteered just for the new Sat. night time, but it’s still going to keep me busy for the next few weeks getting all those new volunteers trained in and everything organized.  My hope is to have everything squared away before the chaos of piano contest gets overwhelming.

And in other random news I ordered a new piano book to try.  I had never heard of the composer, but that’s not all-together surprising considering the THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of composers that are out there.  But I’m excited to see if I like it.  The book I ordered is called “George Winston Piano Solos.”  So I’m off to try it out!

In case you haven’t heard, Tim decided to give up his Train Room and finish off that space–even taking out the wall and bar area, which totally opens it up.  After much deliberation on how to finish that space, it made the most sense to make it into a kitchen.  We couldn’t turn it into a bedroom because there was no window access, and just finishing it into an open room seemed like a waste of space.  Plus with the amount of entertaining we do it will be awesome to have a place to put food downstairs.  Plus the kids are excited about having more space to play and having hard floors to roll their cars and stuff.  They often want to do that on the main floor and I always send them downstairs because it’s too noisy, and then they complain that there’s no hard floors downstairs… so it’s a win win.  😉

Tim is making outstanding progress on the new kitchen.  He’s torn out the old bar area and wall and run all the wiring (not actually hooked up, but all ready).  He’s also run the plumbing for the new kitchen sink as well as installed the new recessed lights.  We’re waiting on the inspection and then he’ll start putting up sheetrock.  Yippie!

Wanna see a picture?

First let me refresh your memory with a before picture….

And now (drum roll)… (this picture is a couple of days old)

On Christmas Eve Tim had to sing at all 4 services at church, so he left early in the afternoon to set up and rehearse.  I used that time to quickly work on his last Christmas gift that I couldn’t do when he was around–a painted sign!  He had actually mentioned it months and months ago, and was just too busy over the summer (with a newborn) and then plain forgot about it this Fall.  And now that he’s off of work he’s home all the time, so there’s no “sneaking” off to do something without him seeing.

So, I leaped at the opportunity to get it done while he was away.  (Nothing like putting it off until the last minute, eh?!)  I worked like crazy painting the sign between when he left and then when we left to go to the 5:00 service (and then worked like crazy after we got back before he got home!).  But it turned out really well, and he was really surprised.  🙂  Worth it.

Well, back home just in time to discover a wet ring appearing on the ceiling in our living room… so we called the plumber who cut a hole in the ceiling and discovered a very slow drip (that had been dripping for quite some time it appeared) that had finally soaked through the sheetrock.  We were happy it wasn’t anything more serious, but also frustrated at the bad solder job done by the previous plumber…. which makes us question any other bad plumbing that might be leaking at this very moment that we’re just not aware of yet.  Ah, well.  Tis the price you pay for home ownership I suppose.

Either way, the pipe is fixed.  And Tim worked on patching the hole in the ceiling today.   Now we have to finish mudding and adding back the popcorn.  I’m sure it will be impossible to blend it well, but we can try.

I’m just glad it wasn’t anything more serious and that we caught it right away.

Somehow the days are slipping through my fingers lately.

We had a really great weekend full of nothing special in particular, but busy nonetheless.  We did a deep cleaning of the house (things that needed to be done but had been put off for a while: a.k.a. mopping bathroom floors and vacuuming stairs) and got the yard all ready for snow.  That meant picking up all the toys and storing them away as well as getting the snowblower ready and the lawn mower stored.  We also bid farewell to the bikes for another year and hung them up in the garage.  And while we were in the garage we spent some time getting the next batch of clothes out for Maddie and swept the floor and cleaned out the garbage.  It feels great to have all those things done.

I’m starting to get anxious about remembering everything I need to pack for our trip next week.   I’ve started a massive list of things I need to bring.  The good news is that I’m sure we’ll be in driving distance to some type of store while we’re there in case we forget anything.  It’s just a lot of those little items that I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I’ll just bring that the next time I see you” that are really random and I don’t want to forget them.  We hung up a paper chain the other day and are excitedly counting down the days.

Maddie is completely over her ear infection and back to her delightful self–sleeping like a champ again at night.  I’m very happy about  that.

Tomorrow is surgery day for Shannon’s little boy Xavi.  He’s having a variety of things done (the main one being tonsils and adenoids removed).  Prayers for him–and Shannon–would be greatly appreciated.