Not Blogging Doesn’t Mean Life Stops

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.

Other Stuff

Since not having the computer, other really great stuff has happened besides the renovations and I want to share.

Most notably, Jared, Wayne’s youngest, graduated from high school and was formally accepted at University of Louisiana Monroe to chase his meteorology degree.  It was a great (but very long) ceremony.

Letting the graduate decide where to eat had us at Benihanna’s which was  yummy!

I promised cute kitten pictures and since he isn’t here any more this is all I have left…but Josh (my oldest) has claimed Mr. Shifu as his own and they are batch’ing it together.

Finally Wayne and I finally finished a project that was one of those “If I’d have only known it was this easy I would have done it years ago”.  When we got our furniture from Basset it broke within a month so we had to have it fixed.  They overstuffed the cushions and they were so uncomfortable but we figured it would take a lot of work to fix them.  Surprisingly it was easy.

Very overstuffed chair which is uncomfortable.  Also they under stuffed the back so it was hard to get out of.

1.  unzip the outside cover

 

2. take off the under cover

 

3. Peel off the top cushion which is inconsistently glued down so it is easy in some places and horrible in others.

4. Pull out lots of extra stuffing

 

5.  Use General Adhesive and glue top cushion back down.

  Step to seal and repeat OFTEN!  Another project down.

Did Ya’ll Miss Me???

I am finally back with a mostly functional computer and let me say that being without a reliable computer really isn’t fun.  As it stands I had to try to boot this one numerous times this morning because it doesn’t automatically find the hard drive and I get a boot disk error.  Hubby was in a meeting so I had to figure it out myself – which took 3x as long as it should have!

Man do I have pictures to show you…We are almost done with the renovations, the contractors only have to come in for touch ups and as Holmes on Holmes says, “the lipstick and mascara”.  Yes, the amount of HGTV watching that is going on in this household is scary.

When I last blogged about the renovations, I was waiting for the contractor to come back in and fix all of the issues with the columns and archway and the John was getting pretty annoyed with his subcontractor at having to redo things all the time.

 

They took down the columns and reinstalled them, capped them with the WRONG grade of wood (they used paintable instead of stainable), had to purchase a $90 piece of paper thin wood to cover the error, then stained the cap.  Of course part of the touch up is that the arches and columns have a very shiny finish and the fireplace is a mat finish.  And I have no idea how they are going to fix that but that is not my problem.

After that, the tile guys came in and put the tile on the fireplace.  I love how it turned out!

  All they had to do was remove the wood pieces, add the wood trim and it would be done.

Then we had a paint issue.  I chose my paint and really loved it but it looked almost identical to the wood…which would really negate the cool effect of the new fireplace you know?

Thankfully Carmen didn’t feel well that day and left around 9:30 so that I had time to take the tile, a stain sample and the sample of the bottom color back to Sherman Williams to choose a different sample.  I taped a 1970’s feel on my wall just to shock the hubby when he got home.  He didn’t think that teal, lime green, hot pink and purple was an appropriate choice.  Apparently, this one was better:

Now we are back to working on our own stuff and boy did the contractors spoil us.  Lots of things being accomplished with little work being done by me.  Spoiled I tell you.  But we managed to pull out carpet, level the floor and at least get one room full of flooring.  Wayne came home Monday night and we got the library done in just under 3 hours (and since Ben is at camp in CO, I actually had to bust tail, which I still feel today)

Putting the last piece in was a real challenge.

Baseboards are the last piece then touch up the paint and DONE!!!