Remodeling Purgatory

I mentioned the title of this post to a friend this morning while discussing how things are coming along with the remodel. I say that it's like purgatory because we are completely in limbo with things. We've moved things out of most spaces to be redone, but the contractor hasn't actually started yet. They've (he and his framer- that's framer not farmer) worked up their plans, measured some things, given us a contract, and ordered trusses but as of yet that's the extent of their work. We are all sort of on hold until the trusses get here then it's full steam ahead.  They did have this lovely dumpster delivered. It makes parking in the driveway a treat. It also makes it interesting to get in and out of the front door because it's unfortunately right in front of the sidewalk, but that was necessary to ensure that more of the debris got into the dumpster than on the driveway when they rip the roof and part of the side of the house off. *WoopWoop raise da roof!*

 As far as any other work, we rented a storage unit and have started packing it full and Henry has taken the liberty of starting to gut the office area. That's not really part of the contracted renovation on the house, it's more of a no time like the present thing. The ceiling will be removed as part of the renovation anyway and the drywall and insulation in there really sucked as did the fake framing that they put up to hang drywall- seriously, you couldn't find a stud to hang a shelf which is a HUGE thing to me. It all had to go. It smelled funny and it was old and weird and the electrician will need access to put in the million plugs for all my equipment. #BuyAllTheThings!!! That room will have its own dedicated circuit which means that it won't be tied into the exterior GFI circuit. That was a really stupid and cheap move by the previous homeowners. I'm pretty sure that's not to code. Anyway, when we explained to the electrician that we wanted four new circuits with this he was kind of shocked and obviously asked why since that's not really how it would normally be done. We had to explain that we both work from home and have special equipment and that we will each have an office for said equipment so it's a necessary evil. So anyway, here's what the office looks like all naked and such.

 As for the rest of the house, it looks pretty much the same. Here's one last shot of that. It's not really the most current picture but the shape of the house is still like this.

Some of you might wonder what our end goal is with this, so for all you visualists and those with inquiring minds, I've worked up some drawings. Pretend that I'm good with photoshop.

 Here is sort of what the house will look like when we're finished. It will get all new wide plank vinyl siding. We're still looking at samples and trying to choose a color but it will probably be something fairly similar to the current color. If you're more of a technical person, here's a rough (very rough) sketch of what currently exists as well as what will change. The dimensions are all wrong but that's ok. I also just realized that the closet in what will be Jonas's room shows that it juts out into the room but it doesn't, it's actually over the stairs so he will have a little more room than it appears.

We still have to gut Colin's room which is the one downstairs behind the office and off the kitchen, and we still have to move all of our things out of the master bed and bath. Colin and Jonas will be bunking with Kinsley and Henry and I will be bunking downstairs in the living room on an inflatable mattress. Sounds delightful am I right? You guys know you're jealous. My office and Henry's office are/will be in the dining room. I am thankful for super yards to keep babies out of places they shouldn't be. It's cramped living already, but it's gonna get worse before it gets better. As I said before, we are all on hold until the trusses are built and delivered. I am trying to enjoy having my master suite as long as possible to maintain whatever dignity I have until this is all over. They estimate like 3 months before it's all completely finished. So there you have it so far, that's what's going on here. It's a good thing that everyone will have their own space when this is over because we're all going to get sick of each other. If you guys think of it, y'all pray for us!  ~Kellie~

Cutting Slack

When I think of how I want to see my kitchen, I see this:

Sadly, that is not how I saw my kitchen this morning. In fact, it's not how I see my kitchen most mornings. Most mornings, this is how I see my kitchen:

I had already started to clean up a bit when I took this picture, and you can tell that I had to take the trash bag out of the can in order to put more things in it. I had already started to load the dishwasher, and I had already put away some of the things I had gotten out to make the boys lunches for school. I wish that I had some excuse for why it looked this way, like a party or a crazy night of having to shuttle the kids to practices or having had friends over, but none of those things happened, this is just my reality almost every single day. Let me say here and now that I am not whining about it or complaining about it or wanting sympathy in any way, I am merely sharing something with you that I think is important. One would be tempted to say "If you'd clean up after dinner, you wouldn't wake up to that every morning" and that is very very true. I've even said/thought that myself when other people have messes like this. Some might say that if Henry would help, things could be different, and to that I say let me tell you that he helps tremendously with cooking and cleaning and child rearing so that's not it either. Others still might say that I should get the kids to help clean up, and my reply to that is that I'm just glad that they got their homework done, their plates to the sink, and showers. So why don't I clean it up at night? Well, the truth is that after I've dealt with the kids all day in various combinations as well as made an attempt to do some business things and manage other household tasks, there's little energy or desire to deal with this. I spend my evenings after dinner trying to chill out for even a few minutes before bed. I'd rather deal with it in the morning when I'm not fried and the kids are happier.

The "ideal" picture that I posted first was actually the "after two hours of cleaning picture". Two hours seems ridiculous to spend on one room, but here's how that breaks down.

 I really  loaded the dishwasher, and I really (much to everyone's shock because it is known how I loathe hand washing dishes) washed dishes by hand because they wouldn't all fit in the dishwasher.

I then really hand dried them and really put them away. I didn't just shove things somewhere so that I could take a cool "after" pic. 

I also put a bag back in the can much to the delight of my friend Heather, and I finally went through all those school papers that have been hanging out on the counter. 

After I was finished with all that, I took a few minutes to gather the laundry and sort it. This is just one week of laundry folks, I haven't been slacking on that either.

I'm not one to cut people alot of slack, and I am awful about cutting myself slack, but I really think that I need to try to be a little easier on myself. What I did so far today isn't that big of a deal, but when you consider that I have to run full tilt to clean things up before the baby can undo what I just did, I don't think it's that small of a feat. So when people ask what it is that I do all day, I keep aaaall this from being seen. ~Kellie~

Remember that summer?

In ten years, we'll all sit around and say "Remember that summer we...? Good times, goooood times." The summer I speak of is this summer and the thing we did was get a "pool". I use the term pool loosely since Henry and I jokingly call it the "water tarp" because it's one of those cheap pools from Wal-Mart with the metal framework of powder coated tubular steel that supports a large cylindrical glorified vinyl tarp. Although now that I think about it, it's kinda more like a "naked pool" because it's essentially a pool liner without the pretty shell on the outside so I guess it is a real pool. Anyway, I had the idea to get one because the kids always want to go "swimming" in the summer and I only have two hands and four kids, none of which can actually swim. This is further complicated by the fact that the little two need to be in the baby pool and the big two are too big for that and I definitely can't manage two kids with water wings and two kids in floating rings in the big pool because I am not an octopus.
The pool was part of the boys' Christmas gift, an attempt to get them something useful that won't lose pieces all over the house. I figured that a pool was a great thing since we could all use it, and it's outside ergo not a video game, and it requires them to move instead of just sitting. Besides, a little time in the sun is good for them and they might just learn to swim, a useful skill indeed. The pool is only fifteen feet across and three and a half feet deep so they can stand in it to play basketball or if they try to swim and it's not working out they can just stand up. Even Kinsley can stand up in it, so that's a bonus. It's big enough for us to all get in but not so big that it takes up the entire back yard or takes forever to physically clean. It's also a good "starter pool" because I have a healthy fear or water/drowning, and if the kids can't respect the pool/follow the rules, we can just take it down and be done with it. Since I got the pool at a steal on clearance at the end of last year (Regular price: $249, Clearance price: a mere $75! WOOT!) I knew that if things didn't work out the money lost would not be a huge deal. 
Here's what's happened so far:
1. We had to move the back fence to make room for the pool which we had wanted to do anyway so this was a good excuse.
2. We had to borrow a tiller to somewhat level the ground.
3. We had to get a load of sand to protect the bottom of the pool from anything crazy that might work up through the ground. Dirt+ a tarp+sand+another tarp= piece of mind and hopefully protection from rocks, sticks, damage to the pool, damage to feet, etc.
4. I read up on and decided to use a saltwater system instead of just dumping chemicals in it all the time. I ordered a saltwater system.
5. I visited a pool supply store, purchased salt, did the necessary steps, took my water sample back to the pool place for analysis, determined that I needed to add more salt. I also learned that a pool is like a puppy and that you have to train it well in the beginning and keep at it or it will misbehave.
6. I decided that I wanted to switch to a sand filter system instead of a cartridge filter one. I ordered the sand filter. (This hasn't arrived yet)
7. It rained.
8. It rained more, followed by high winds and hail. 
9. We had to drain hundreds of gallons of water from the pool because it kept raining. Had I known this was coming, I could have saved a fair amount of money
10. I temporarily gave up on the saltwater system and got a floating chlorine dispenser to use until it stopped raining.
Remember that summer that we got a pool and the only thing we spent was money and time maintaining it because June decided to pretend to be April and it was too rainy or cold to get in it and mom got those huge biceps from all the sweeping and vacuuming she had to do to keep it clean? It's a great workout I must admit, but it's not the one I had in mind. I'm sure that it won't be this way all summer as the weather will get dry and hot and I'll be able to sort out the chemical levels in the pool and maintain them instead of just hoping for the best until things level out ie. it stops raining so that I can figure out what's going on, fix it, and keep it that way. We have actually been in the pool a few times so it hasn't been a total loss so far, but I look forward to getting a tan while floating in it. ~Kellie~

Fun with laundry and cleaning

A couple weeks ago I stopped telling the boys to pick up the laundry in their room. It's not supposed to be in there and I got tired of asking for it. If they run out of clean clothes, that's their problem and they will learn eventually. I say that it shouldn't be in there because they really shouldn't be changing clothes in there unless it's to take off pajamas. They should be taking off dirty clothes before a bath where there is a hamper right outside the door. If they should need to change during the day they have to walk by the laundry room to leave the house so again, no excuse because there's a basket in there for dirty laundry as well. I also do not fold and put away their clean laundry. I wash it and put it all in a basket for them to sort and put away. Do they fold it? No, but if it were folded they would certainly un-fold it while they were digging through the drawer like a rat so I don't care, it's in the drawer and I'm good. Some will say that my theory on laundry is bad because they are only children, but it is a very simple thing that I ask for them to put that where it goes and I feel that they should be able to comprehend this. Obviously they don't, but I'd like to believe that one day the light will come on regarding this. I did laundry yesterday and today I told them that I hadn't been asking for their laundry for two weeks and that all of that laundry in the floor would now be dirty for another week. I got a shocked look since those were some of their favorite things to wear that they will now have to wait a week for. I had fun with that.
On Monday I started a new thing to get them to clean their room since I am also tired of telling them to do that and if they want to live in filth and get hurt stepping on Legos, that's their problem. I do sometimes make them clean it all up at once so that I can vacuum and such, but in general I just let it roll. My room was a disaster as a kid and now I hate messes. I think it's because I saw that I could find things in the rest of the house which my mother kept immaculate despite what she says, and that I could find nothing in my sty of a room. I'm not sure that was a lesson that she intended to teach, but my sister and I both got it. Eventually she would go in and clean up our messes and I have to say that I really really fight the urge to do the same. It drives me nuts and sometimes I have to do what she did and just close the door and walk away. So what is this new thing that I am trying that is working? Each morning before school and in the evening around dinner, I tell them each to pick up three things and put it away. If they do Legos or something small, one handful= one thing. It's going to take days for it to get cleaned up, but they don't feel threatened or overwhelmed because it's only three things. I laugh to myself because they think they are winning by only having to pick up three things. They don't see the snowball effect that I see, and they also don't realize that I'm having them do it a couple times a day.
I feel like a better parent for these small victories because I'm not nagging them or yelling at them. I have a huge issue with doing that, so anything that helps me not do that is a win in my book. It's saving me from doing it myself, hopefully teaching them to do it themselves, and no one yells or gets yelled at. WOOT!  ~Kellie~

The Finished Master Bedroom

I just realized that I never posted pics of the master bedroom after we finished it. It's been busy here and I've had other things that I've been trying to do , like get ready to register for a craft fair and stuff like that. I was going to start this post with a demo pic from the master bedroom, but then I remembered that I had a pic from waaaay back, like when we bought the house back, so I thought I'd share that just to let you get a sense of where we came from.
So here's what the master bedroom looked like when we bought the house. Green walls and all that floral wallpaper glory. I'll just pause a moment while you take all that in. Go ahead, I'll wait. You good? Great, moving on. So we actually removed that border and left the walls that green for a while. The very first thing I did in the house was to remove wallpaper, even if I didn't do anything else to the room, I just want to put that out there. So our room was probably one of the last to get any attention and when we got to it we decided that we wanted to do something a little different than what we had going on in the rest of the house. That was before we had four kids so a little chaos in the house didn't seem to be a bad thing. Each room was a different color, some of them crazy colors, some had stripes painted on them. We look back at some of that as an "it seemed like a good idea at the time" kind of thing. We kind of feel that way about the faux brick paneling that we put up in the master. We really liked it at the time, it gave sort of an urban loft like vibe that was different from the rest of the house so it made it sort of an escape because the feel of that room was so different. But, as time went on we discovered that the kids provided enough chaos and the house needed to be taken back to a more neutral feel, so we slowly began to go from interesting colors to more soothing ones, and not only that but we let those colors just extend from one room to the next for a calmer feel. We're not back to "builder beige", but we are definitely digging the "coffee and latte" thing we have going on. The best part is that if the paint in the main parts of the house get messed up, we only have to deal with two different paint buckets, winning! So anyway, here's an after shot of the master bedroom. We still sadly haven't made it to IKEA to get our bed (though I did get a new quilt and the shams that I embroidered/monogrammed last year are a nice touch), so there's not much going on on that wall, but there will be eventually. The paint color may seem familiar, and that's because it's the same color from the living room and hallway. We bought a five gallon bucket of that paint because it was cheaper than three one gallon cans and that choice has served us well. Neutral, that's what we're going for these days. Incidentally, the master bath is painted the same color as the kitchen. So  you may notice that we added some upgrades when we repainted. We put in a new ceiling fan that doesn't wobble and flicker and try to kill us in our sleep, and we switched out the outlets and switches to the sleek square ones like we used in the bathroom, and we added crown molding! We had never installed it before, but it meant that we'd get to buy a new toy tool toy that we'd been eying. Say hello to our new friend, the compound miter saw-------------------------->
Nice, huh? We also got that little blue jig thing there on the saw. That's a Kreg Crown Pro and it's supposed to help you cut the crown with less hassle but we found it to generally be a hassle so we just cut the crown without it. We think that when we eventually get to installing the crown in the rest of the house we'll study it a bit more and maybe not have the same issues. Anyway, we think that the crown is a nice upgrade and adds just what the room really needed to finally grow up. A quick word on crown molding: the difference in an ok crown job and a pretty good one isn't perfect cuts, it's caulk! Your wall and ceiling aren't going to be perfect, but once you add a little caulk to hide those little dips, they just disappear like the money in my wallet when I'm in Joann. So anyway, we re-purposed the shelf from the bathroom by using it to hold our t.v., and I solved the issue of the "dirty but still clean" clothing issue by installing hook units beside the closets. One for me, and one for him, though his clothes oddly enough usually end up on the floor beside his side of the bed anyway even though the hook thing is right there!! I think it's a boy thing since the boys also do this.
I just overlook it and hang his clothes up when I go by. These hooks are also great for parking your pajamas so that you can easily find them, and for holding the jacket that you frequently need because the weather here is on crack or something. I like them because they functionally take up wall space. They look cool when they are empty, but honestly I think they are kind of neat even with clothes hanging on them. It's a lot neater than a miscellaneous pile of clothes in the floor, or on the chair, or on the treadmill, or just pitched on the bed. We are really digging the new master suite. It's grown up and upgraded and finished feeling. It really does feel like we're in a hotel every single night, which is pretty awesome. The kids generally aren't allowed in our room but occasionally one will stumble in for something. The other day Colin needed a bandaid so I invited him in while I patched him up. He stood in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom with this wide eyed look on his face while looking back and forth between the two rooms. I just kinda watched him to see what fantastic nugget of information would come out of his mouth. Sure enough, after a few times looking back and forth he said "Wow, it's really nice in here! This is really nice, it's like a hotel or something! Did you guys do all this yourselves because it's really nice! It's like we're rich or something!" I just kinda chuckled and told him that we did it all ourselves and that eventually the rest of the house would catch up and for him to try not to destroy it when that happened. Those kids, they say the darndest things, and sometimes it's even true. ~Kellie~

 

The Master Bedroom (so far)

Since we seem to be on the remodeling band wagon again, here's yet another post about our crazy shenanigans involving power tools and paint.

This was a tight fit.

As you know, we recently redid the master bathroom. If you missed all that craziness, you can read all about it here. We were so pleased with how that room looked that it made us heavily consider upgrading the adjoining master bedroom to kind of extend the awesomeness. To be honest, we had been thinking about it before the bathroom remodel but after we fell in love with that room it was time to act. After we moved in and demolished redid some of the other rooms in the house, we did get to the master bedroom. We painted the walls and I chose to paint the trim gray instead of white (it had been off white?) and add a "feature wall". We hadn't gotten to that whole popcorn finish removal thing on the ceilings so it stayed as did the crazy ceiling fan that threatened to kill us every summer when we turned it on.We started this party by cramming ALL
of our bedroom furniture into the master bathroom. I forgot how

The last complete before pic

Thin faux brick paneling

much I hated digging through the laundry basket like a rat in order to find clothes until this. Over the years, we've had several people ask us if the brick wall in our bedroom was real or not. The answer to that is "no", it was paneling. We really liked the brick for a while. It was different and gave sort of an urban loft like feel to the room that was very different from the rest of the house. We liked the kind of ice blue paint paired with the light gray trim, again very different than the rest of the house. It was sort of an oasis for a time, but that time had come and gone since we kinda started taking the house back to basics. So after the room was cleared out I started by taking down said paneling. I had forgotten what color the wall used to be, and also that there had been that crazy border in there. I was glad that we hadn't used more nails to secure this paneling to the wall because it came down fairly easily after I got the edge started. I would later come to hate all of the holes that I had to patch in preparation for paint, but it was all for the greater good.
Knowing what a super mess all of this was going to make, I took out a little insurance and bought some cheap plastic sheeting and covered everything that I didn't want to clean up later, including the doors and window. I was reading the Young House Love blog (I wanna be like them when I grow up) and they mentioned (just the other day in fact) that they were doing some painting and needed to contain the mess.

Tarp it instead of cleaning it!

That perfectly timed post led me to buy this crazy tarp zipper  thing seen in the picture --->
That thing was awesome! It was 110% worth the $10 that is cost. It totally kept the drywall dust and all that crap inside the room instead of letting it filter out into the rest of the house. If you have a super messy project like this that you're going to do, get you one of these bad boys! Ok, so skipping ahead a little you'll see that I got to the popcorn removal phase of this.I can't tell you how messy this is. I use the wet method of removal which means that I spray it with water using a garden sprayer to loosen it up and then I just scrape it all off back to the original drywall. This method is fairly fast, fairly easy, low dust, but again, it's wet. After I got all that mess down, we tag teamed sanding any residual stuff from the ceiling before using screws to suck the drywall back up to the ceiling and applying fresh mud to the holes, scratches, and taped joints. We have put screws in each time we have scraped a ceiling because back in the day they used nails and over time they kinda let things sag a little so we just go along side and put in screws and pound the nails tight again and move on. We're already going to be there mudding anyway, might as well do two dimples instead of one and get a better finish. Now let me insert a disclaimer here and say that we are not professional drywallers, but after the quote that I got of $500 to remove the popcorn (which took me about an hour) and $1500 to refinish it (we already had most of the stuff we needed) I don't think that it looks half bad for the $20 bag of mud and the few days it took. I'll be posting some after pics later so stay tuned. ~Kellie~

Why I'm a Swiffer Believer

Swiffer Sweeper

I hate cleaning up the house. I mostly hate it because we have 4 kids, 2 of which are home all the time, and as soon as I clean something up it's dirty again. I used to have a very clean house, almost to the OCD point, but then I got real because the number of kids in the house made it unrealistic to attempt that level of cleanliness. These days, I'm just glad if there's a path through the kid clutter and no one dies. Recently I've started to rethink the level of clean in the house, mostly because the baby is somewhat mobile and he eats a lot of crackers and such and there are far more crumbs on the floor than there should be. It's like Logan's in here only it's cracker crumbs instead of peanut shells. I decided that it needed to be cleaned more often, but in keeping with my realistic side I determined that whatever method I used needed to be quick and easy because daily use was a must. I want to insert a little disclaimer here and say that I tried to use reusable microfiber stuff to dust and clean the floor, but then I had to clean what I used to clean and that meant more cleaning and they never came all the way clean anyway and so I just stopped cleaning so much. I finally just gave in to the notion that whatever I used to clean needed to be disposable so that when I was done I was done and I could move on and not deal with that particular mess again. I started with the regular Swiffer Sweeper thing, I think it's just called a "Sweeper". I gotta tell you that with the messes in this house, that poor thing didn't stand a chance. I actually felt sorry for it. After cleaning about half the floor, that thing was not only too clogged to pick up anything else, it was pushing a huge pile of crumbs and miscellaneous that I then had to clean up and dispose of. Remember what I said about hating to clean up after I clean up? It was time for more aggressive action. I pondered other Swiffer options because I like how light and easy and fast it is to clean up

Swiffer Sweep & Trap

what you need to clean up. I pondered the jumbo size of the Sweeper, and though it was larger and would clean more of the floor at a time, it saw still going to be pushing a pile of crumbs. Not what I was going for. I thought about trying the Swiffer Sweep and Trap which has this little rubber paddle thing in it and the cloth thing rides along behind and gets the little stuff. In theory this would work because it's the equivalent of those little sweeper things that restaurants use on their low pile carpets and they seem to do ok, but the thought of all those crumbs stuck to the rubber thing and having to clean that off... nope, not going there. I then pondered the Swiffer SweeperVac but I wasn't sure if it would work either.

Swiffer SweeperVac

I stood in Wal-Mart staring at it wondering if it was worth the $40. I'm cheap, I don't want to spent money on something unless I know it's going to suit my needs. As I was standing there pondering, baby in cart, this older lady cruises up with her cart, grabs one of the vacs and tosses it in her cart. This was my chance! As she took a few steps back to the handle of her cart I asked her if she'd ever used one of them before. She said yes, she'd had one for six years and it finally died so she was replacing it. She stated that the battery was made into it and that it had a cord to charge it and that hers just wouldn't charge anymore. I figured six years was a pretty fair length of time for something that cost $40, and the fact that she was buying another one spoke volumes. Since we had this conversation going, I asked her about the vacuum ability, mainly does it work? She said that it was great for crumbs and little things, and that while it wouldn't pick up a pebble it certainly had enough power to be a first line of defense for little light things. SOLD! I've been using this product for a couple weeks now and I love it! The battery stays charged long enough for me to do all of downstairs before it dies. We have a pretty big area to do so I think that's pretty good. I haven't timed it to see how long it really works non stop, but I'd guess a good 15-20 minutes? I'll have to time it next time and report back in. I'm loving that it really does pick up grass clippings, crumbs, hair, lint, dirt, etc. It certainly helps prolong the life of the cleaning pad which saves money. I also love that when I'm done using it I don't have to sweep up a pile of crap that it's left behind so that's less of a hassle. While we're on the subject of cleaning up

Swiffer Wet Jet

I will add that I also posses a Swiffer Wet Jet and I love it too. It's great for cleaning up splattered milk when the baby throws his sippy cup off the high chair or leaves it tipped over so that it dribbles on the floor. I'm loving not having to drag out the mop or get out paper towels and a spray cleaner for 3 drips of milk. Since I am cheap, I will admit that I refill the bottle with my own concoction of cleaner which seems to work just as well as theirs. Floor cleaner and water, yep, that'll do pig. Now I'll admit that while I do think that the vac thing replaces a broom for most applications, and that the Wet Jet takes care of spot cleaning fabulously, I do not think that you should "get rid of your old mop and broom". Nothing replaces a real mop, and the vacuum and pad on a stick isn't going to do great with getting junk out of corners and such, or cobwebs off the ceiling. That being said, there is another Swiffer product that I'm about to try out, and that's the Swiffer Duster. They even have one on an extension stick for cleaning the ceiling fans and those darn cobwebs! I've used them before and I was pretty happy. I stopped using them because I went to the microfiber cloths, but we've already discussed that.

Swiffer Dusters

The bottom line of all this is this. While I agree that the level of clean that one will achieve with these products probably isn't equal to more old fashioned techniques such as real scrubbing, mopping, and dusting with polish and a soft cloth, it's better than nothing which is pretty much where I was before. I mean I cleaned up, but only like once a week instead of every day. In my opinion, knocking it down every day with a simple, easy tool is better than letting it pile up to make getting the big vacuum and mop out worth it. So there you have it, my shameless solution to cleaning. ~Kellie~