Ok, so I know that I haven’t blogged since the end of June and believe me hubby has asked me to catch up the blog so that he can show friends and family the progress on the house. I won’t go through and update every little thing, but believe me, things have been BUSY here. Despite being busy I have managed to keep track of our life and it is due primarily to two WebPages/programs that have been my primary sanity and I am very thankful for those developers who decided how to keep my brain in order. The first is www.cozi.com. Cozi is an online site that gathers together a family’s calendars, to do lists, shopping lists, etc and puts them into one place accessible on any computer, ipad, phone, etc. It also syncs with my Microsoft Outlook so I only have to put something in one place and it shows up everywhere. This has made life nice when I forgot my grocery list at home and was able to access it on my ipod touch. The other site is www.ohlife.com. Once you sign up it automatically sends you an email at 8pm asking you simply, “how was your day”. All you have to do is send an email reply and your life is documented. The best part in my book is that you can go back and read all your entries, take your journaling and blog or scrap your life. And those things you don’t want to share? Well OhLife is accessible only to you!!
July was FULL of birthdays and is our busiest birthday month of the year. We have:
Josh 7/6 – I have a hard time believing my baby is 20 now.
Youngest Sister 7/11, Mother in Law 7/15, Brother in law 7/25, Another sister 7/26
Twins 7/28 – 23. Thank God I can say while I love them both as if they were my very own, I don’t want to have 23 year old sons.
Plus all of the renovations.
To make things simple, here are the before and after photos
Living room: Before/After
After:
Dining room: Before/After
After:
Powder Room: Before
After
Library: Before and After
After:
Add in all of the parties, church activities, gatherings with friends and general business, our month was slammed. I don’t think I scrapped a single page…and if it didn’t have anything to do with a major event, I probably didn’t take a picture of it.
August was a little better (and since we are almost done, I have no problem discussing it in past tense). We moved on to a different renovation project and turned our attention to the upstairs loft area. Not surprisingly, our loft was unusable for the family since it was originally my over stuffed craft room. We moved things into my office but never completed the room. Now we are in the process of painting, stretching the carpets and working at making it a family-livable space.
One of my nephews celebrated his birthday and my sister was smart by not having 2 dozen children plus their parents in her house. We celebrated at Inflatable Zone and boy did they have fun, especially Ben. He is the favorite of his cousins and he didn’t have a chance to take a break with them chasing him all over the room.
Speaking of Ben he has been extraordinarily busy, and back to killing my food budget. Marching band practice started at the beginning of August and those poor kids were out in the Texas heat from 5 – 9 pm every week day. Some of those practices were held with the heat index of 104. Made me glad for air conditioning. His band march off and BBQ was on 8/20 and I was not impressed with the drum major. Ben would have gone farther into the competition if the DM hadn’t made the contest all about simon-says type mind games and not actual marching. Either way, the food was good, Ben had fun and he and Lyndsay (his g/f) got to spend a lot of time together.
Last night was Ben’s first game and they did really well. I was impressed that I actually got pictures.
Last thing I am gonna touch on is construction and termites. If you remember, this entire remodeling project was caused BECAUSE of termites and while we are still having issues with our contractor and getting things done right, we have termites again. The nasty little buggers are eating my front door. The Terminex guy had to take a picture because this was only the second time in 23 years he had ever seen that. So on top of our messed up renovations (the columns have a gouge in them that is going to have to be rebuilt, the fireplace has a number of places on it where it looks like they took a ball peen hammer to it, and the crown molding doesn’t match in a few places and looks horrible) we will have to replace our front door and possibly drywall in the dining room. I am just glad that we hadn’t done any remodeling in there yet.
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