The Long of It

First off, these image may make a person want to either wretch or cry, or both. Consider yourself warned. (Maybe I'm not ready to write this post just yet . . . ) But the story must be told. I am putting my happy face on.

The image you see above was discovered in the boys' room on Friday night after pulling up their carpet in anticipation of the carpet install that was not. Our contractor stopped by on Saturday to take a preliminary look and began work on Monday morning. As he pulled off board after board of siding the dry rot continued down the wall. It actually looked pretty good in the middle, but he wanted to make sure the nightmare actually had an ending point (I'm still not convinced we have reached that mystical point). At the bottom of the wall his hand went straight through the plywood and we discovered a rotted out support beam that was holding up my boys' bedroom. This was a bad thing. It required jacking up the house. Very nerve-racking.

We also discovered this lovely nest of mold (shown below) that is currently attached to the sheetrock in my living room (we have not begun the removal of this exciting piece just yet). I finally asked my contractor how many thousands of dollars it was costing me every time he talked to me. He just laughed and said: "Oh, it's not thousands, just hundreds." Is that supposed to make me feel better?

By Monday night all of the dry rot was replaced and Sean only had one teeny section of carpet left to remove from our closet before the scheduled carpet install on Tuesday morning. So, at about 9:30pm Sean bravely pulled up the carpet and found this:

Oh, yes, there was more of that nasty stuff. Our contractor was coming back the next day to finish up the siding. We figured we would just have him deal with the dry rot first.

So, Tuesday morning arrives. The long-awaited day, and "what to our wondering eyes should appear?" but carpet that falls apart in the carpet layers hands. Yes, you read right. The brand-new carpet - straight from the factory - disintegrated in the carpet layers hands as he was double checking the color with Sean. Admittedly, this was the lowest point in the whole ordeal. My house was torn apart, mattresses overflowing in the living room, a house full of tack strips, and the prospect of another two weeks without carpet. Bad day.

We cancelled our order with Home Depot and found a nice local carpet company in town. We found carpet that we liked much better and just swallowed hard when we looked at the price tag, but said yes. (The tremendous amount of frustration that had accompanied us by this point made money seem like a very irrelevant thing.) Sean rolled the old carpets back out, moved all the mattresses back into make-shift bedrooms and we sat tight for two more weeks. Aside from the general mess of it all, the only dangerous part was traversing the stairs that were covered in tack strips. It was rather nerve-racking. It is all over now, though (except for the mold in the wall in the living room, and a number of plumbing problems), and we are all grateful to have something so luxuriously soft and beautiful underfoot. As soon as my camera battery recharges I will post pictures. Happy, happy day.

One Day More

It could make a person cry. Looking at the present state of my house. A state that we have been living in for two solid weeks.

I can't believe I have been smiling through most of it. In a little over 24 hours my house will be put back together and I will have a new lease on life.

I'm sure I will cry tomorrow. Hopefully I won't blubber all over the carpet layers in effusions of joy and gratitude. If I have any dignity at all I will go hide in my closet, lie down on my new carpet, and cry there. Oh, happy day!

Next post: images that are not for the weak of stomach. I'm just warning you . . .

The Short of It

We are in the middle of a three thousand dollar house project (budgeted and planned for) that has rapidly more than doubled (and I fear is near tripling) that price. Yippee for dry-rot. Yippee for more dry-rot. Yippee for contractors (actually, we really love our contractor). Yippee for brand-new carpet that falls apart in your hands. Yippee for delay after delay. Yippee for holes in the walls. Yippee for having to repaint the exterior of our home. Yippee for sleeping in the living room. Yippee having one more week to go (praying like crazy it is JUST one more week). Yippee to be eight months pregnant through all of this.

Actually the good part is the computer is in the living room - the same room as the couch. I sat on the couch and watched two whole movies today. Pure indulgence. (We do not have a television. Movie viewing via computer is our sole form or digital-visual entertainment.) Really I am okay. I just lack the sense of humor to post actual pictures and go into the details of this whole mess. Maybe later . . . after my movie is over. ;>

Thanksgiving Aftermath

We had two wonderful Thanksgivings, and I'm not actually going to blog about them, although I probably should. I thought I would take a moment to mention the Thanksgiving aftermath, however. The day after Thanksgivagain (Friday Thanksgiving with the Wilcox family, as opposed to Thursday Thanksgiving at the Hawkins' home) revealed the potential damage of preparing Thanksgiving dinner using an ill-fitted range. I won't go into all the details, suffice it to say our inherited stove is sort of a hodge-podge of inappropriate parts. To say it drives me crazy on a good day is an understatement. I am a woman who likes to cook, and likes to do it "right".

Back to my little story. Saturday evening I put a batch of cookies in the oven. After one and half hours the oven had achieved a maximum temperature of 330*. The cookies baked a little longer than called for (at a lower temperature than called for), but turned out okay. We resigned ourselves to replacing the element in the stove and continued to use the cook top. Until last night, when Sean thought he would take a look at the element needing replacement and get it ordered (still not done). In the process of removing the element (which for some scary reason seemed to only be brushing up against the necessary wires, as opposed to completely, tightly intertwined with the necessary wires), the element started breaking into pieces. It also gave Sean quite a little shock (electrically speaking) and he has decommissioned the stove until further notice.

Dah!!!! Suddenly my kids are asking for sweet breads, and I just want to make dinner, and maybe a batch of rolls or garlic toast. No dice. Stir-fry is not even an option. Oh, and pasta! But that's not stopping us. Oh, no. We can make waffles. We have a crock pot. I have even been considering pulling out the reflector oven from our emergency kit and whipping up some biscuits. (Don't anybody hold your breath on that last one.)

So, as far as Thanksgiving goes. I just want to say that I am grateful for a working stove - when I have one - and the possibility of a working stove on the horizon. I'm so thankful to have something to look forward to.

Hurry Up . . . And Do Nothing

Oh, the state of things around these parts - it makes one want to cringe, or cry, or both. What you see in the picture above are prints that we hurried up and got printed, in mats that we hurried up and ordered, surrounded by frames that we hurried up and bought. How long, you might ask, have those lovely photos been adorning the floor of my bedroom? A solid month! Why the rush? Who knows. Why the lack of subsequent activity? Who knows.

The picture above represents another hurry-up-and-do-nothing project. In June we moved the boys out of their room and into the spare room. It is much bigger and better suited to their needs. Their old room is now my craft room. But, as you can see, it is in dire need of paint and organization and style. Not to mention, the boys room has not yet been put together and it is in a state of constant mess.

The bathrooms - ah, the bathrooms in this house. Every bathroom needs to be painted. My bath has had paint samples brushed about on the walls for 4 months. I finally decided on a color for the kids bath (pictured above), moved all of my supplies upstairs and got ready to dig in, when something came up. That was the end of June. Dah!

And my final picture today. We have a lovely display area above the front door. The current display boasts platic play-doh scissors, a pirate earring and a pull-up. Yum! That lovely arrangement has been stirring passion within me for a whole four months. It is virtually untouched since three days after moving in. The good news with that one is that my kids (read: Erik) have stopped throwing things up there. The bad news is we've been staring at it for four months and still haven't done anything about it.

This summer has been so crazy. And now that things have slowed down just a touch, I just want to sit somewhere and catch my breath. I have so many great projects and things to do; things that are all ready for me to just walk over a pick up a paint brush, or hammer in a nail, and I haven't done it. I must not have caught my breath yet. I hope I do soon.

A Break

Tonight was unusual in that we all walked in the door at the same time. Coincidentally we were all hungry, tired and cranky. Oh, and I forgot to mention, the house was messy (surprise, surprise). As we all stumbled into the living room, tripping over coats and backpacks and unfinished homework and mounds of Valentines and candy wrappers (does anyone else find the extent to which Valentines are carried these days absolutely ridiculous - remember when you only got candy on Halloween?), patience wore thin and frustration began running high. Everybody started to lose it - not a pretty sight.

I am an escapist. I learned the art form from close examination of my father when I was a child. As I have matured I have honed it into a skill that I employ from time to time when my coping abilities are stretched beyond comfortable levels. Usually this means I escape either before or after dinner to the library or the fabric store or just an empty parking lot down the road where I can hear myself think. Tonight I thought it best to bring Sean along for the ride. "Honey, let's call Jen to watch the kids, and go out to dinner."

I have never been thanked so much for spending money! It was just the break we needed. While we waited for our babysitter to arrive (she was still at school - after school), Sean calmly made dinner for the kids and the babysitter, and I calmly helped Djeryd with homework. Just knowing we were on our way out the door - escaping - helped us to calm down and deal with things in a loving, rational manner. We knew that by 6:30pm we would be the heck out of Dodge. So we could be cheerful and calm for the hour that we had left.

I don't think we give ourselves permission to take real breaks often enough. I know that sometimes in the middle of the day I will take a break, but I am not mindful of it, so I do not revel in the break. I do not emerge from 20 minutes of reading, or knitting, or staring out the window refreshed if I am not conscious of the desire to be refreshed, of enjoying my task thoroughly because I may not get another 20 minutes to do exactly what I want to do until tomorrow.

Sean and I were fully aware of tonight being a break. Our lives have felt so stressful lately for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is moving). We are stressed out with ourselves and our kids and circumstances and a house that has to be ready to show to perfect strangers at any time. We chose tonight to take a full, conscious break. We savored every moment of our escape (and the most amazing spinach and artichoke dip I have ever had!). And I feel refreshed. I feel ready for tomorrow, and excited to spend it with my children (and my sister - yea!!!!!!). And I am grateful to our dear little babysitter who squeezed us into her hectic schedule so we could take a break.

Crying Over Spilled Milk

Within minutes of tromping downstairs for breakfast this morning, I stepped in a small puddle of milk on my kitchen floor. Djeryd said Annaliese had spilled it while transporting her cereal bowl from the kitchen to the table. He then promptly cleaned it up.

Approximately one hour later I was in the middle of a math lesson with Djeryd. Papers, books, and schedules were spread across the table. Anna climbed into my lap to color (for some reason she cannot sit in a chair all by herself to do this) and accidentally spilled her milk-filled Minnie Mouse goblet all over herself, me and the floor. Spill number two.

Three or four hours later, Anna decided she wanted a drink of milk. She pulled the milk out of the fridge, carried it to her small kiddie table (on the carpet), and proceeded to pour the milk into her brother's blue Spiderman cup. She poured just a little too much and a small spill appeared on the table. Luckily this table has a slightly raised edge and the milk was contained. Spill number three.

Within minutes of cleaning up the previous spill (which Erik was kind enough to wipe up), Annaliese insisted on fitting a sippy lid onto the Spiderman cup. Of course, the Spiderman cup and the sippy lid were not made to work together in a spill-proof manner. Anna, of course, was not aware of this lid-cup defect (despite Mommy's gentle, kind, firm, insistent warnings). As I'm sure you can guess by now, Anna sat down on her chair, lifted the cup to her lips and drenched herself, the table, the chair, the carpet, and the wall in one last splashing milk spill for the day. Spill number four.

And you thought bad things only happened in three's.