It’s glorious today. A lovely 63 degrees and sunny. It’s wonderful.

My studio gets the afternoon sun, so it gets quite stuffy and hot at about 3:00 with the sun streaming in. I’ll admit that I’ve already had to turn on the air conditioner a little bit to cool my studio off… tee hee!

The kids are off of school today so they’ve enjoyed a trip to the park. It was just the perfect day for it. I really need to get outside and start cleaning up the flower beds this weekend. I also think I’m going to pay the kids to rake the yard this year. They are totally old enough to do it and we need a little “fluffing” to our grass

I can tell I’m really out of practice writing. I’m quite disjointed. I’ll work on it.

I’m helping pull together a ladies event at our church this month (on May 21st). It’s a women’s conference with speakers streamed in from the I.F. Gathering that was held in early March in Texas. It’s a great combination of inspiring speakers. I’m also helping lead a small worship team at the event. It should be awesome. And now that it’s finally May, officially, I feel like I can start getting things rolling.

Well, hello there!

It’s May. We’ve finally made it through the depressing and long winter months. My one tulip in the front flower bed popped up this past week. I enjoyed the vibrant green leaves… right up until the rabbits munched it down to the ground. Now I’m sad. I need to invest in some chicken wire apparently.

I also noticed our trees have finally started to get some buds. Oh, and the box elder bugs are back in force. A true sign of Spring. 😉

Today was the day!!!

The kids moved into their rooms today, and I did my very first load of laundry upstairs!

Tonight will be their first night sleeping all in their separate rooms.

🙂

There is still stuff for us to finish (trim, doors, move up the dryer, put up curtains, finish patching up the old laundry room, etc….) but it’s getting so close now!

Pictures to come!

Carpet is going in right now! And we squeezed in all of our painting just in time. It was a couple of late nights, and sore backs, but we did it!

Look how amazing Chloe’s wall turned out!

And look at the amazing flooring that Tim put in the new laundry room!

Oh, and yesterday they also came and installed the mini-split units in the bedrooms to control the heat/air conditioning. Oh! AND the electricians were back and put in all the finishing fixtures and outlet covers.

It looks amazing!

(Added: They also picked up the port-a-potty today!)

I haven’t posted much about the house or anything for a few days, so this morning I went back and posted a few of the things that happened on the house this past week (scroll down).

It’s been hard for me to sit down and write.

This past week our friend Jerry passed away. He was 65 and had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks. He had been sick and his heart was doing funny things, so he was scheduled to get a pacemaker in. He was doing better… and then worse… and then better… and then he passed away. It felt really sudden since the last time I heard he was doing better and they were expecting him home in a couple weeks.

We are close friends with the whole family. Josiah’s two best friends, Zeke and Toby, were his grandkids. He was over almost every weekend watching football with Tim and the gang. He helped us with home projects–he put in a new front door and replaced all of our trim on the main floor to white. But more than all the helpful things he did, he was such a integral part of our church. He was on the leadership team with Tim and a greeter at church–he always made each and every kid feel like they were important and loved.

At the funeral on Friday I was overwhelmed with the pictures they had taken. It was amazing.

He really lived life to the fullest. We will miss him, and look forward to seeing him again in heaven.

Today the popcorn ceiling was put up in the hallway–so it matches the rest of the upstairs hallway. It was done pretty quick, but boy did it SMELL BAD.

We’re not sure why it smelled so bad, but we had all the windows open, fans blowing and candles in every room. By the time we went to bed it was finally bearable. It was just the strangest thing.

This is picture to remind myself someday of the smell and the massive fan we had set up upstairs. Tim even ran out to the store to buy a big candle in the middle of the day! I took this picture as we were getting ready for bed. See the popcorn ceiling? Another step to being almost done!

Tomorrow the sanders are supposed to come so we can get to painting! We only have a day and a half to finish painting so it’s going to be tight! The carpet in the new addition goes in on Thursday morning. Yippie!

This weekend we painted ceilings and trim!

They texture guys came today and put “orange peel” on the ceiling of the new rooms. The hallway will be popcorn like the rest of the upstairs so that it will blend, but that will be done next week.

Now I can paint most of the the ceilings this weekend!

The outside is done–it was finished up on Monday, did I mention that? Here’s picture. So pretty!

Mudders came for a second (and final!) coat. Whoo hooo! We had given up hope that they were coming today, but they showed up at 4:15 pm and worked for a couple hours to get it done.

We have sheetrock and our first layer of mud/taping! We’re getting close folks!