soooooo far behind!

I'm woefully far behind on updating here, we have been crazy busy! Mother Nature is seeing fit to give us wild and wacky weather extremes (70 degree days followed by 30 degrees and snow *sigh*) so we are grabbing time to work on the outside shop and prepping for concrete work whenever the weather is being good for it! To add to it, I've had more business for Flutterby Designs in the last couple weeks that is keeping us hopping, too. I've got gobs of pictures to load up and lots to tell you all - hopefully over the weekend I will have a chance to do so!

These are sanding out nicely!

The upstairs bedroom, which I think we are going to use as a tv/reading room instead of a bedroom, had some seriously dusty and furry carpet that we have already yanked (should have taken pics, but we were both wheezing too bad to bother - holy cats, batman!) The floors were pretty beat up, but it is wonderful what some 16 grit sandpaper and a drum sander can do! I love this built in desk- IF we can figure out how to get electricity to it, it will make a perfect little laptop area, as well as a writing desk, and maybe even a scrapbooking nook...which I'm sure to do in all that abundant spare time I gave away by opting for this house LOL!

Why, oh why....

...is there linoleum over this hard wood? And why oh why are there no shut offs for any piece of plumbing in this house? It makes it ever so much tougher to take toilets out to sand floors when flooding the house is also an issue *sigh*

Shed Demo!

First off, let me say I was really sad to see this go - it was such an adorable shed! We really tried to figure out some way to keep it and just add on for the bigger shop, but it was already two slabs of concrete patched together, neither of them with a deep enough footer, plus the roof slope went the wrong way. We did save the windows out of it, and some inside cabinetry, but the rest of it had to go! The boys got out the bigger equipment for this one, and I think they had more fun then they really should have with squishing it ;-) We have sorted the scraps for usable lumber, etc. and now the rest is off to the dump truck. It seems so bare back there with it gone now!The camera hogs posing with the dump truck!

We've been busy!

Busy enough to not have time to blog ;-) Sorry about that! So, to catch up a bit, I'm going to do a few posts in a row today. David is out doing deliveries, when he gets back we need to go see two clients this afternoon, but in the meantime, I have a few minutes to sit and breathe!

We did lots of painting last week, it was a bit chilly and dad has had the coughing crud, so we didn't do much outside until the end of the week. Turns out the kids like to paint (or at least Sara does, Alex tires of it pretty quick) so we painted the Hidey Hole BRIGHT high gloss white (the better to wash walls!) We're leaving the tile in here, but planning on having a chunk of carpet bound to fit the room (Denver Rug Binding - yay!) I'm debating on a grass green or a sea blue, I'm hoping mom and I can go look at carpet pieces so I can get another opinion on colors! We also painted most of the "classroom/craft room" last week, in a beautiful Butter Cookie yellow, I still need to finish the white trim in there one day soon. I think we are going to leave the floors in there, they are funky "school" tile: taupe and tan, with marigold orange and charcoal gray streaks - it will be easy to clean up paint, crayons, etc. as the kids create in there, and it even sort of fits the theme...I think we are going to ask mom for the little attached desks in my grandmother's basement to put in there, and there is already a fantastic bigger built in desk that was built by the previous owner (Frank) . I need to figure out a light for here still....

Darn cold...

The darn coughing crud finally caught us, slowed things down for a day or two. Why is there carpet in the vents? Sara and I just had to take a picture, it is interesting! We finished up the tack strips and removing carpet from upstairs - that leaves the "master" bedroom that we are still debating on leaving.

And just in case you were wondering how much work it is to remodel a house...the kids were in our bed to watch a 15 minute video before bedtime- I came in to tell them it was time to go to sleep and found this - two very zonked out kiddos LOL! Apparently they had done their fill for the day :-)

No more Green Grass :-(

Well, maybe it isn't really such a sad thing...it definitely changed the look quite a bit all in one swoop! We have almost all of it pulled up and the pads pulled out. Now to the ever so fun task of pulling up staples and tack strips. I lost count somewhere around 500 staples, and that was before we started on the stairs!


Charlie and both kids had to get in on the action this time around- Sara actually does a pretty darn good job of pulling staples, as long as they aren't in too hard- and she did a bang up job of gathering the little bits of carpet padding left on the staples and putting them all in the trash can. Alex, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to climb on our backs every time we were sitting down somewhere ;-) We still need to finish de-stapling the upstairs room and carpet and all in the "master" bedroom, then we'll be ready to do some sanding.

Might be a day or two, though, because the weather is good enough this week to work on the outside - yay! My dad started tearing out the coop area on Sunday, we are planning on building the shop out there -if all goes to plan it will be somewhere around 16x32'- I don't know how I will function will so much space- WOOHOOO!!! I'll post up some pics of the progress on that tomorrow - for now, happy March!