This and That

Long time, no blog. Again.
It doesn't look like things will slow down anytime soon so I might as well get some stuff down here while I have the chance.
Let's see...
I mentioned a while ago that I was going to try to grow a square foot garden inside of a dog run to keep the deer out. Unfortunately, that plan never got beyond this...

Turns out that the best place to have a garden in our yard won't pass the HOA's approval unless we install a vinyl fence around our yard. Which is A) not something we want to do. And B) would make the dog run unnecessary anyway. So we sold the dog run for just what we spent on it and decided to join the local community garden instead. We just got things planted today. So delayed because of this late Spring we're caught up in. We also planted just a small box in the backyard mostly for salad greens, snacking tomatoes and fun stuff for Jaxon to experiment with. Hopefully these solutions will work out.

The newest grand sons are well under way.

Can't wait to meet them this fall.

Last weekend we participated in the Great Strides National Walk Event for Cystic Fibrosis.
It was a perfectly gorgeous day sandwiched right in the middle of days and days of rain. Great timing!

The walk took place in downtown Salt Lake City which is becoming a place that I really enjoy exploring after all these years. Go figure. We were walking at a pretty brisk pace that day so I didn't get a chance to snap many pictures (With my new Mother's Day camera! Did ya notice the improvement in pics lately?) but here's just a taste of the beautiful weather we were treated to.

 At the end of the 5K walk there were some guys handing beautiful red roses to all the ladies.

There was a card attached that explained that children with CF sometimes call their condition "Sixty Five Roses" because it's easier for them to say. So sweet. We were happy to help support the event.

Roger and I had a date night last week. We saw The Hasty Heart at Hale Centre Theater. Great show! I seem to be getting mushy in my old age because this one had me crying at the end too. I think this is the second one in a row to reduce me to tears. Oy!
Before the play we had dinner at a favorite restaurant downtown. The Blue Iguana. Yum!
Right outside the restaurant, beside Capitol Theater, there is a new art installation. I'm not sure I really "get it" but it's interesting anyway. Roger said he had read about it in the paper recently and I was able to track down the article online. The piece is titled "Sway'd".

Huh. You never know what you'll see downtown. LOL
Speaking of that...a few days later we were downtown again and I noticed this building as we were walking a different route back to the car.

Hmmm...I wonder what they manufacture there? Donkeys?

We've had a couple of small projects going around the house.
When I had my very first house built 17 years ago, I had this idea to make a curtain rod for the master bedroom out of a tree branch. I'm not sure why it never happened. But Crystal recently moved into her own place and she was looking for curtain rod ideas. While looking for some ideas for her I was reminded of the tree branch idea and I decided to go for it. So we found some branches at Crystal's new place and brought them home. After some trimming and planning we had them just right. Roger helped me get them up on the wall and I sewed some crushed voile panels to hang with lengths of ribbon.

I love how they turned out. I think there's a fun contrast between the rustic branch and the silky, breezy curtains. Softened up our bedroom windows really well.

We've been in the new house for almost one year so naturally it was time to tear something up. :)
This thing had to go!

I've never had a pedestal sink before and I never will again. What a pain! No place to put a bottle of hand soap. And it was originally installed just a fraction of an inch too high so it was constantly pulling loose from the wall no matter how many times we had the builder come and fix it. ugh! So we had it ripped out and replaced with a vanity and granite counter top to match the rest of the house. So.much.better!  I didn't think to take an "after" pic though. Trust me. It's better.

Emily is off track so we've been trying to find some fun things to do. This week we made paper flowers. I can't believe we've never done this before. So easy, cheap and fun.

We'll hang these in Emily's room for a fun bit of color. But we might use them to decorate for Kenzie's graduation party first.
We had a couple of failed attempts too. Emily wanted to make one without trimming the edges. Just the straight edge of the paper. Even crumpling it up didn't help.

And I thought this polka dot paper would make a fun flower.

Not so much. It was thicker and stiffer than the solid colors. And it's only printed on one side. duh!
Oh well. As my Dad used to say, you win some, you lose some.
This orange one is my favorite.

Well, that's a bit of what we've been up to. Yesterday we went to the zoo and out for dinner but I'll save all those awesome pics for another post.
Bet ya can't wait! ;)

The New Family Room - Day 9

Well, it's all but done! We need to install the window sills and paint the doors. And there are a dozen or so little decorating things I want to do. But it just can't be done today. I'm wiped out!
California, here we come!!!
But first...I DID have to do something about the stairway walls where they meet up with the new family room.
You can see it in this picture...

That wall color is the same as the living room. We painted it about 7 years ago. I knew we had some paint left. But I had my doubts about the condition of it. I wasn't surprised to find this when I opened it up.

Ewwwww!!!!!!

But an old pair of pantyhose and a couple tablespoons of water made it good as new.

I still love the color. And I really love the contrast it brings to the stairwell with the oak and the white trim. 

Speaking of the oak...I spent a good bit of time today getting the living room situated now that we moved most of the furniture out of there. I had hoped to find a couple of affordable (cheap!) side chairs to have in there but I didn't have any luck today. 

So I guess the wood floors get all the attention for now.

We've had an area rug in there for a while now. I forgot how pretty the floor is. :) We put those in our DIY selves about 7 years ago. Real 3/4 inch hard wood baby!

So...that's it for a week or so. I'd say that an exceptional amount of progress was made in just 9 days. You'd never know this started as a dark, half finished basement less that two weeks ago if I hadn't been boring you with  sharing the daily progress here.

Oh! I wasn't home when Jaxon woke up from his nap and discovered the new carpet yesterday. But Kenzie texted me to say that his response was to throw up his hand and say, "Wow! It's so beautiful in here!"

New family room - Day 8 (yesterday)

Carpet!!!

Followed by more painting till 12:30 am. ugh!

The New Family Room - Day 7 (yesterday)

Another day of things not going as planned.

The satellite guy came out to get the family room wired up for us. Seemed like such a simple request. Right?

Ha! Took him a couple of hours. On the plus side, the receiver suffered a sudden death while he was here (coincidence?) so we got a brand new receiver at no charge. woohoo!!

Unfortunately this put us way behind on painting though. 

I really wanted to have the whole room painted before the carpet arrived today. And I gave it my all. But I finally had to give up and go to bed at midnight last night. ugh! Not even close to finished either.

At least I got the baseboards and door casings painted. Those are the most difficult part of painting a carpeted room. I caught myself just before slipping into despair with a reminder that I've almost never had the opportunity to paint a room that didn't have it's flooring installed already. So it's not a big deal that I'll be painting this one after the carpet goes in. It'll be fine.

I'd add some progress pics here if Blogger would let me. But that doesn't seem to be happening. 

The carpet guy just got here so I'll have some better ones later. :)

The New Family Room - Day 6

Progress was made again today. Though not as much as we planned.
We had some electrical technical difficulties for the first part of the day that slowed us down a lot.
Here's where we were yesterday when the contractor finished his last touches.

Today we made several more trips to Lowe's. WHY must there be SO MANY trips during a big project like this?!?! I wish there was a psychic delivery service you could subscribe to when working on big projects. As soon as you discover that you need one more this or two more thats a friendly Lowe's or Home Depot employee would receive a telepathic message and have the item on it's way to you within minutes. How cool would that be?!?!

Anyway..we got the electrical problem straightened out, a bunch of cleaning done, lights installed, heat and cold air intake vents installed, smoke and fire detector installed, shelving on the ledge and 90% of the baseboards and door casings installed. Only 90% because...you guessed it! We ran a little short of door casing and it was too late to make a run to the store. So that will be finished up first thing tomorrow.

Here's how it looks tonight. I could take pics since we finally had lights installed but the pics aren't fantastic because it was 10 oclock at night. :P And let me just go ahead say it...the lights aren't fantastic either. But I'll be honest, I wasn't about to spend hundreds on light fixtures when we are trying to sell. So these will have to do.

 

I'm excited for tomorrow. We plan to finish up the door casings and baseboards, caulk and putty the joints. 

And then PAINT!!! YAY!!! The FUN part!!! Finally!!!!

Also, a technician is coming to put in a satellite cable so we can move the TV out of the living room and down into the family room. I've only been dreaming of that for 16 years. Never let it be said that I can't be patient.

See ya tomorrow! 

New family room - Day 5

It got too dark by the time we were finished to take a pic.
But progress was made!
I THOUGHT that the contractors were done yesterday but one of them showed up this morning to make even more improvements to the job that I thought they had already finished quite well. :) These guys ROCK!
So he finished up, took the check for the final payment and turned the project over to us to finish.
I spent a good deal of time with the shop vac trying to eliminate as much dust as possible. It's safe to say that there is now more dust upstairs than in the family room. :P
The dust is maddening!
I got the first coat of paint on the ceiling before Roger got home from work. It took every last drop of the gallon of Behr Primer and Paint in one for the first coat. We needed a second coat so we made another of what I'm sure will be a thousand trips to Home Depot. We grabbed the wall paint while we were there so we can get right on that tomorrow. I didn't want to invest in the Behr P+P until I knew I liked the way it performed.
Just finished the second coat a little while ago and I don't think we'll need a third. Considering it was brand new drywall that we were applying it to, I'd say that the Primer plus Paint is an excellent product. And thank goodness! My neck and shoulders are RUINED. ugh! If we had used separate products there would have been at least one more coat of paint. Possibly two.
So..there are visible changes. And there will be LOTS of them tomorrow.
I'll post pictures tomorrow. :)
Here's pic of the Behr product though. I'm no paint snob but this stuff seems to be pretty good to me!

The New Family Room - Day 4

We had more sanding.
More dust. *cough*sneeze*choke*
And then....THEY WERE DONE!!
The last "worker" (Jaxon's term for anyone working in our house) left at about 4 pm.
Roger and I ran off to buy baseboards, door casings and paint.
I'm going to try the Behr Paint and Primer in one that everyone in blogland has been talking about. I detest painting new sheetrock so I hope it's all it's made out to be.
Tonight there should be some progress pictures for today which is Day 5 of the family room adventure.
Stay tuned.....

New family room - Day 3

No picture. It wouldn't show much change yet.
Here's how the day went...
Dust
Sanding
More dust
Second coat of mud
Still more dust
Fans running all day and all night so they can come back to finish up tomorrow.
Oh the God forsaken dust!!!!!

It's a good thing this project is on the fast track because I've had just about enough of the dust now.

We chose the carpet tonight. It'll be installed Monday.
Which leaves us the weekend to install door casings and baseboards.
And primer and paint the ceilings and walls.
And install the light fixtures and switch plate covers and heater vent covers.
Sounds like a great weekend, huh?

New family room - Day 2

Well, they didn't show up at 7:30. But they did show up and they did get a ton of work done again today. They were here until 8pm when it got too dark to see what they were doing.
The HVAC guy gave us two actual heater vents in the room. Beats the heck out of the holes we hacked in the ducts to try to prevent Crystal and Heather from freezing to death in their sleep. LOL
The drywall guys showed up and went nuts. Within a few hours they had it all up.
Then another guy taped and did the first coat of mud.
There's a big fan running down there all night tonight to try and get it dry so they can sand and mud again tomorrow.
Look! They even finished off the windows! Nice!

I'm already thinking about paint and curtains. :)

Jaxon spent a good deal of time at the top of the stairs calling down to the workers.

"Hey! My name is Jaxon."

"What are you doing down there?"

"Hey! You got some of that on your pants."

"Did you get a new sharp knife?"

And the entire upstairs floors look a little like this....

The carpet installer will come and take measurements tomorrow. Yay!

Out with the bedrooms. In with the family room! Day 1

WOW!!! The work crew showed up at 8 o'clock sharp this morning. They stayed until 7 o'clock tonight. And there was only a 25 minute period of time that was free of hammering all day long. These guys worked HARD. So far, we are very impressed.
Let me show you where we started.
Come on down stairs from the living room and I'll show you around. ;)

As you can see, the "finished" ended right at the bottom of the stairs. LOL We always meant to do more. But we were busy with... ummm... life.
Just through that door on the right is the "blue bedroom" and through the door straight ahead is the "black bedroom". Around to the left is a hallway area with doors leading to the laundry room, two bedrooms, a bathroom and the garage.
Here's the blue bedroom. This was Crystal's bedroom. But not for long. Just after we built the room her cat killed her bird in this room and she wouldn't sleep in there again. LOL We can laugh about it now. At the time, it was quite tragic and upsetting.

See how we didn't bother finishing the ceilings or inside the closets? Or around the windows? ugh!

Here's the black bedroom. This was Heather's room. It was a cute "garden-y" themed purple and green room with a picket fence headboard at first. Then she took a photography class in high school and had all these incredible prints that we wanted to show off. So we painted the room black and white. Draped black and white checked fabric from the ceiling and installed a system on the diagonal wall where she could hang her prints to display them. It was awesome!

BTW, the diagonal wall was how we divided the space up evenly to make two bedrooms so that both could have a window.

And here's the hallway which was the most unfinished part of the space.

The floor in the hallway was covered with pieces of leftover carpet from one of the bedrooms which we lined up like a jigsaw puzzle and taped to the concrete floor with double sided tape.

So....those were our "temporary" living arrangements down there for, oh, ten years. Oy!

But the crew came in today and, in eleven short (for me) hours, they transformed the space to this!

They say they'll be back at 7:30 tomorrow morning. They say that they'll get the HVAC redirected, the drywall hung, taped and a first coat of mud on. I believe they will too! They are some serious workers. Very polite, respectful, clean and able to communicate clearly (English as their second language) as well. So far, I'm very impressed with this company. I hope the rest of the project goes as quickly.

So busy!!!

The past 10 days or so have been all about getting the house ready to sell.
It's already officially listed but there have been no lookers yet. I guess it takes a few days to get all the marketing wheels turning.
So there has been a lot of cleaning, purging, organizing going on.
We had a new garage door installed. Our old one has been broken since Jaxon was a tiny baby in an infant carrier. ugh! But we lived with it because we were focused on getting out of debt first. I got a GREAT deal because the warehouse was out of the insulated door that I had scheduled to have installed. So they gave me an upgrade at no extra charge. $1300 door for $800. woohooo!!! And we'll get the energy tax credit on our taxes next Spring too!
We had 4 TONS of wood chips trucked in to fluff up the xeriscaped  parts of the property. Roger moved all of it with our lame little yard cart and now the back yard looks all fluffed up. But Roger is wiped out. LOL

The fruit trees will bloom soon and it'll be so pretty back there.

We've also been debating about what to do with the basement. 

This house has an area that was intended to be a family room. But 10 years ago we had six children in here and we decided what we really needed was a couple more bedrooms.

So we put up some walls but no ceilings. And we went on with our lives raising kids.

Ever since the first 2 or 3 kids moved out we've wanted to go ahead and make a family room in that space but we just never really got around to it.

Now we feel like a family room separate from the front living room would be appealing to a buyer. This will still leave 5 bedrooms in this house. 

So, we've hired a contractor to come in next week and turn this...

in to this....

We think this will make the house more appealing to buyers. And, if we can't get what we want out of the house or if we just decide not to sell after all, we'll finally have the basement finished the way we want it.

The contractor says he'll start Monday and be done before we leave for vacation on the 31st. One week! One week to a nice family room after all these years. Ha! Let's hope it goes as fast as he says. :)

I'm BEAT from moving boxes of life stuff out of here all day so I'm off to watch a DVD now. 

The Time Travelers Wife.

I hope it's good.

And I wish I could time travel. I'd go ahead to the new house and get busy making fun new memories there. :)

P.S. If you live on the Wasatch Front and need recommendations for garage door repair or installation or a CHEAP way to get 4 tons of wood chips delivered to your house, just let me know. ;)
I'll let you know if I can recommend a contractor for finishing your basement in a week or two. ;)