This Is A Test.....

A test of my strength, I say.  One third of the way through with this project finds the living room and hallway ready for mud to be blown upon the scraped and sanded ceilings.  The walls are ready for paint once the ceiling mud gets done.  I say one third because I'm counting both demolitions as a third each and the "new" part, painting and putting down new flooring as one.  Because I think believe it will be so much easier I won't mind it at all.  I need to believe this.  Do not bring me down.  Not at this point.  I beg of you!

So we decided the smart thing would be to just go ahead and get all the dirty stuff over with.  Which is why tonight finds me throwing everything I don't really, really need in boxes and storing it in the garage for the duration.  By "duration" I am unclear on whether I mean the duration of this project or the duration of my life. I am not washing any of it. I am in no mood for that now.  I am  Just stuffing it in boxes and getting it out. \

I've been so tired I told them at work that I was pretty sure I was approaching zombie-hood.  It's like my life is exploding, which normally I can handle.  But it's happening on all fronts and I'm behind everywhere, and I can't find anything but my tools, my purse, and the bills.  That's it!

My car has been recalled for a starter, which GM (whatever THAT means now) was kind enough to send me a letter.  It said to call a dealer.  So I called a dealer, and now it will take several weeks to get the parts.  That would work perfectly for me because I really don't have time to deal with this anyway, except this means that I have to keep the papers in my purse and they are getting frayed.  And I'm afraid I'll lose them too.  I used to be organized.  At least I used to believe I was organized.  My perception of reality is being revised.

All this being up past 8 pm is very hard on me.  Last night I went to sleep at 6 pm.  Seriously!  Yeah, I woke up about 7:30 but only because I sensed someone on my porch.  Turns out, I can sleep through the
Angel coming into my house, talking to my dogs, yelling downstairs for the boys, and then sanding quietly for I-know-not-how-long while I sleep like the dead.  I guess I really needed the sleep!  Oh well. I think they were all just normal sounds.  I only wake up when something different happens because I am a well trained machine, but only when it's necessary.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Welcome to my crazy life.  Don't take off your shoes.  Really.  It is for your own safety that I say this.

And yes, that is a piano in my kitchen.  Don't ask.  Not that those of you whom have ever moved a piano would.  

I assume that later, when everything is new and clean and.......blank, and I can again lift my arms and find the dish soap and stuff, I will find renewed strength for duties such as these.  I believe.  I can pass this test.  I think I can, I think I can.

If not, I guess the kids will have to go through it when I die.  This seems perfectly fair to me because if it weren't for them, I wouldn't have all this stuff anyway.  Which reminds me, Rockette, I have a lot more room in the garage for storage than it looks like.  Luckily, I have kept my box cutter safe and now need to go put it to good use getting rid of empty boxes stored here for safe keeping by our own Rock Star.  Say goodbye to those empty boxes for drum kits and GPS systems, Rock Star.  Unless you show up very soon to plead for their lives, they are ending their time on this earth.  It's not too late if you pick up the phone right now, but the best you are going to do is to have them safe and filled with the debris that's been hanging on the fridge for the last several years.  Or cake plates.  I have, like, 6 of those suckers and I know for a fact that I just took the magnet of you in kindergarten off the fridge.  It could be much worse......you should know that I even got rid of those empty jars I was saving for pinterest projects.  ( I can hear various women friends of mine moaning and wondering if I still have them right now.  Can't you?)  Hurry on over, girls.  I've got stuff everywhere I would just love to send home with you.

Onward.  Tomorrow we will don our trusty trash bags and filter masks and reduce our kitchen to a blank, if not a clean, slate.  That popcorn is not going to scrap and sand itself!  I am quite excited with my new shop vac.  I carefully dust it off every night after I sweep the floor with it 3 times.  Or so.

And to all the mother's out there, Happy Mother's Day!!  Whether you are one or have one, or both, I hope you have a most blessed day and weekend.

Demolition Phase II

Tonight we scraped the popcorn/glitter ceiling and started tearing out bad places in the drywall for repair.

This is my demolition outfit.  I knew enough to wear a hoodie but only after starting to scrape did I add the safety glasses and bandanna.  I was like a ceiling scraping ninja, I tell you, and then we took turns.  It didn't take that long, but the dust.......remember in my dream home I had a removable roof?  This is one of those times then it would really come in handy.  We couldn't even figure out how to get the kitchen table out of the doors.  So not my kitchen hosts the piano, all of the flooring and the kitchen table.  We just work around it.  You can't even get into the Beautiful Redhead's room, but you can shut the door.  I continue to feel completely at ease with this state of construction.  I don't even wonder why anymore.  Just come on in.  Don't take off your shoes.  Drop a big glop of stuff on the floor?  HA!  No problem.  Just let it dry.  If we have to we can SAND it off!

I really should have bought some masks......but at least I was patriotic.

Scraping that glitter and popcorn off made me think of the sweetest 6 year old boy, who had cataracts, that I babysat when we first moved here.  He looked up and asked me if they were stars.  He had such a magical way of seeing things, and I've always had a fondness for that crappy glitter ever since, because I always thought of his little voice asking that sweet question.
Babies always liked it, also.

But enough.
Goodbye, glitter.  Thanks for the memories.  Those I will keep, you, not so much.

We continued getting everything off the walls and then we started pounding in nails and mixing up the mud.

Real men at work.
Before long the cracks in the walls and ceilings looked like this.

That is the ceiling.  It looks vaguely like Texas from this angle.

After cutting out all the cracks and HOLES in the walls, made by boys and hammers, we were ready to mud and tape.

After being filled, taped and mudded again.

The boys learned how to cut a square around the hole to be fixed.

 For some strange reason, people apparently come into our house and knock holes in our walls.  It's a mystery how this occurs, but it has happened quite a few times.  How lucky that I have boys to fix them.  Ahem.

Then they inserted a small piece of board behind the hole, which was screwed right behind the bare spot, to serve as an anchor.  Then they cut out a piece of drywall about a 1/4 of an inch smaller than the hole, and screwed that to the anchor piece behind.  From there, mud was packed into the cracks and covered with mesh tape, and then covered again.  The cracks will take about 3 layers of the mud, with sanding in between layers.  I am recording this because according to The Angel, this is the right way to do it.  We are not going to waste the time not to do it right.

So now we are all covered in drywall dust, and I do not believe it would be an exaggeration to say we even have drywall breath.
I am buying masks tomorrow.  I may even wear two.  Not that that will help the damage done to us all today, but what can you do.  The boys acted like I was over reacting with the masks until The Angel backed me up.

I do not know why boys (or girls, they are even worse-ai yi yi.  Not that you don't still love them) of a certain age don't think their mother knows anything.  But I don't fight it.  I don't really even care anymore.  It's a phase.  It will pass!  This is not my first rodeo.  All I have to do is to arrange for men they respect to throw in a word here and there.
Thank God for Angels.
And good night.
Tomorrow is coming, and we have much more demolition and reconstruction waiting for us then.

In Which I Confront My Fear of Color........

We tore out carpet in the living room and hallway last Sunday.  I am shamed to admit it was Easter Sunday, but that is just the way things worked out.

 Real men at work again.  Man am I ever glad we all survived their early years.......

Our yard hadn't yet been mowed either.  While all the neighbors had beautiful yards and their families over to take pictures in their nice Easter clothes, we were carrying out big wads of carpet neatly duct-taped into rolls and putting it on the curb.  Then, for added fun, while the rest of the neighborhood barbecued, we swept up dirt, using the new snow shovel for a dust pan.  Sigh.  I guess we should just stand behind who are.  We can't seem to change.

We played a fun game called "name that stain" and see the gray stuff?  DIRT!  We wrote our names in it with the shop vac for fun.  I am even kind of proud to report both boys are seriously anti-carpet now.

We had a shower for Charli the Saturday before and it is just the way things worked out.  Sorry neighbors, but I think it cannot be denied that we were certainly in the spirit of re-birth.  The worst and dirtiest early stages, to be sure, but the spirit, undoubtedly!!

               

Is this going to be one lucky child or what??

On the upside, I have never been less embarrassed to invite people into my house.  I just open the door wide, smile, say "Come on in!  Everything is a mess!  Don't take off your shoes!"  I have found it freeing, to say the least.  You would be surprised how nice life is when you quit worrying about how your house looks......and smells.
Actually, I have seen big improvements in both of these areas already.

Me and my girls.  :D

So I have been trying to decide on color for the walls.  I am doing beaded board (fake, cheap, and paintable) half way up, and I am 99% certain it will be a navy blue.  The flooring is in and it will be light.  Kind of gray, kind of honey, the kind of floor that just gives a general impression and light overtone that hopefully no one will notice much at all.  It won't show dirt or dog hair and I may well do my vacuuming with a shop vac from here on out.  Durable, low maintenance, cheap yet homey: this is my goal.  How can I fail?

I was stuck between a navy blue, a dark green and a color called Dark Vermont Currant, which looked to be very deep red or brown, or even purple, depending on what it was beside at the time.  But I think I'm too scared!!  So then I told myself that while you can liberally slop paint all over the floors of plywood now, at least pick a color for the top of the walls.  So I think I did.  For the kitchen I want a soft butter yellow, which is adorable with the navy blue on bottom, and then for the living room and hallway I think I'm going with a color that is called Flying Dove, which is a little blue but really looks like another version of white unless you put the navy blue beside it, and then it looks very light blue.  It all goes together and I'm so tired of trying to decide I'm just going to do it.  Frankly, I have so much stuff that hangs on my walls I am not even sure how much of the top will show anyway.  At the end of the day, I seriously doubt anything I could possibly do will look worse than this.  I mean, come on.  Nowhere to go from here but up!

Seriously, folks, this is the TOP of my wall in the kitchen.  Can you see those stains?  Were they shooting cool aid in water guns or just water?  You decide.  I won't find out for another 6 or 7 years at least. 

This is what we are living with now and to tell you the truth, it simply does not look any worse, and it smells 100% better!!

I could have had all this done this week, easy, but I was terrified of making a choice.  I remembered when my mother was building her house, and she was talking to the wife of the man who made her cabinets.  They were Mennonites, and apparently used colors on all their walls, because she said to my mom, in discussing another house, that their "walls were white, like your people's".  We collapsed in laughter when she reported this to me.

I have been wondering ever since just who are our people, and why are we afraid of color?  I didn't know, so I called my other mother, and we spent the next 4 hours drinking coffee and comparing colors and laying out floor tiles to compare, and danged if I haven't decided now it will be the Dark Vermont Currant on the beadboard.  In a shiny kind of paint, whatever that is called.  I forgot to ask, but it doesn't matter.  That is a detail that I will worry about later, when it's time.  Right now it's time to mud some walls and throw something that goes with it on the top half of the wall before we have to worry about protecting the new floor.

What color?  "Answer cloudy, ask again later".  Ok, that's a Magic 8 Ball answer but it works, and it doesn't really matter that much, because my walls will be full of stuff anyway and it won't show that much.  In the kitchen the walls will be a soft butter yellow that matches the currant color beautifully.  It will probably be a version of gray in the living room and hall, although I did see a kind of paint that included metal that was really pretty.  I liked it but immediately started thinking of all the ways I could mess that up and figured I would spend twice as much when I had to cover it up with white after it didn't work out.  I cannot escape the realism.  I've tried.  I just cast my mind back to the hot glue burns from the handmade Christmas gifts and decided not to go there.

Nowhere to go but up.  I just keep telling myself that.  Stay tuned for improvements as they come.  I'm just going to jump in and keep going, because soon I will have a grand baby to take up my thoughts and my time.  I just can't see the color of my walls taking up a lot of my mind in the future.  I'm very thankful to admit freely that I am just not that kind of girl.  I will be the girl with the gorgeous Dark Currant Simulated Bead Board.  You know, Charli's grandma.