Eleven

Because birthdays don't wait for major life changes like buying and selling houses, we celebrated Emily's 11th Birthday this week. She informed me that this birthday is significant because it marks her transition from "tween" to "preteen" status. Heaven help us!
I tried to suggest fun themes for her party like a flip flop party. You know, with a cake that looks like flip flops. And she and her friends could make those cute flip flops with strips of fabric on them as an activity/party favor.
No.
She wouldn't hear of it. For one thing, she would be inviting boys (gasp!) to her party and the flip flop thing just wasn't gonna fly. Besides, she informed me, she isn't FOUR, she's ELEVEN now!
So, she requested a Ninja Elmo cake.
I know. A what?!?!?
Her friends call her Elmo and I'm not sure where the Ninja part comes from.
I like making the birthday cakes when I can but I just couldn't wrap my brain around this one.
So we had our friend, neighbor and cake decorator extraordinaire make a Ninja Elmo cake.
Only Misty could make such a thing actually work!

Here's Elmo and Emily 

Always with the peace signs in the pictures. Very much like her oldest sister.

And so, she chose Sesame Street party supplies and invited her friends (even the boys, OY!) over and they did what "preteen" kids do. Played games, got loud, laughed a lot, had tons of fun.

She opened presents. I was taken by surprise at how skilled these boys were with the gift giving. There was clearly a female influence during the shopping phase. ;)

Then there was the cake and ice cream. Glad to see that part never changes ;)

And then outside to enjoy the beautiful weather and some new outdoor games.

It was a great birthday party. And particularly special since it will be the last of the hundreds our family has celebrated in this house.

Emily has great friends who are funny and sweet. Not surprising that she would attract a group of friends so much like herself. "Preteen" as she is, we love her so much.

Taking some time off.

Long time, no blog, huh?

Life has been crazy. And busy.

Too many irons in the fire.

Too many balls in the air.

My plate is full.

I'm losing my freaking mind.

You choose.

I'm gonna take a little blogging break. But I'll be back.

I leave you with a couple of pictures from our Spring Break trip to California. I wish I could go back.

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!