Its Vacation Time!

THE LEE'S HAVE LEFT THE BUILDING! We are now at the point where our floors are going to be handscraped and refinished. That means we had to pack the whole house and move out all furniture, beds, decor...even curtains! We shoved eveything we could into the 3rd floor ( Clint, our builder scrambled to get the floor in ahead of time) and the 2nd floor playroom (the carpet came in damaged, so we will just lay it when the hardwoods are done and we have moved back in). So, we decided a vacation was in order! We loaded the car ( packed top to bottom) with everything from clothes to toys and scooters, baseballs and tennis raquets...and we are off to the cabin in Glorieta, New Mexico. The cabin is a very special place to Brian's family and we have not been able to visit in a while. We will be returning on the night of the 19th...we start school on the 20th! So, not only did we pack the house and pack for the trip, we ( I really should be saying I...) packed for school - uniforms, supplies, backpacks, lunchboxes, teacher gifts....all in the guest house for our return. Oh, we won't be able to spend the night there, but we can retrieve the loot for the following day.

I hope the floors will be ready for us to move back in by that weekend....Our builder has the whole week with an empty house and no kids to bug him, so I also look forward to seeing what he accomplishes as well.

All the texture on the walls is finished and the cabinets are being installed ( It took a little longer since a few of them were not made correctly and had to be rebuilt) Supposedly, we will have a kitchen by the end of August...appliances and all. We shall see...

If These Walls Could Talk

Drywall is going up - unfortunately we started the process on a weekend so the whole day we heard load banging of hammers and nails! We closed the doors to the family room and had Guitar Hero wars on the Wii...turned up really loud!

The trench for the gas line is dug...so hot water in the house should be on the way!

Annah Grace has a pair of stilts tat she has been practicing walking on...she htought the guys doing the sheetrock were so cool walking around the house on their stilts strapped to their feet! She wanted to try them on, but we thought 17 trips to the emergency room in her short 9 yers was plenty at this point!

Wake up sleepy head!

Saturday morning - 7am...the trucks started arriving. 3 huge concrete trucks with a team of ten guys to pour the driveway. They tore the driveway out yesterday and set the forms for inspection - we added about three feet to the sides of the driveway and about 4 -5 feet to the approach. Now, hopefully when we have visitors, they won't wreck their cars when entering the drive, or bust their oil pan when they leave!
It was our contractor, Clint's, birthday today - so we celebrated with donuts and sang happy birthday to him.
The guys also showed up to dig the trench for the gas line so we could have hot water back in the house. We have been showering in the backhouse which hasn't been terrible, but it does make for some creative planning for us all to get out of the house on time.
And then the drywall team showed up to install all the sheetrock. It was crazy around here - and very loud! Not to mention that when I tried to move Brians car out of the way of the concrete truck, I was so blocked in that I hit the truck behind me and it made a dent in Brians bumper. We were bound to not escape this process without some bumps and bruises. It did cross my mind to try to blame it on the college boys across the street - but I confessed.
The next team to show up was the concrete stamper/stainer crew. We did not think that we could fit the cost of staining the entire driveway into the budget because it is a lot of ground to cover - but my contractor has made friends with the concrete guy and the concrete guy is making friends with the staining guy and they were nice enough to pass the savings on to us. So, now we will get a stained and cobblestone stamped driveway! Yeah! The only worry I have is the color. I picked a brown color called walnut off the color card - but when he laid it, it is in powder form and it looks like terracotta red. My hope is that when he comes back on Monday to wash the powder away and put the sealer on, that will will darken the color a bit. He did say that he would go back over it with a really dark brown in some areas to help it as well. So, we will see.
So, by middle of next week, we should have A/C throughout the house, drywall installed, driveway replaced with a gate, and hot water back in the main house. The following week - they start to tape, bed, and texture the walls, and the flooring can be tied in at that point.
We got more done in one saturday than we could get done in a month! It's all about timing!

Catching up on Pictures!

Our old roof came down and the new one went up! For those of you that fretted with me a year ago over what color to paint my house (it had been painted mauve and country blue and because of the roof , shades of white and gray were the only colors that would work...believe me, we tried everything!) you know what this means...new trim colors! Anyone up for a trip on the color wheel?

This is the view of the "floor" third floor. It is going to be my studio space until the kiddos take over! The next pixture is of the huge truck trying depserately to remove a dumpster and replace another empty in our skinny driveway ( remember the last driver they sent knocked down our basketball goal!) We got some news today about that driveway...good news is that we can remove it all and replace it with a sloped entry and we can add 3 feet to its width. Bad news is...the estimate came in triple of what we had budgeted. oops!

What About That Party?

I have some catching up to do - so you will notice several blogs published with the same date! When you are trying to work from an offsite computer, it gets a little harder to keep up. Here is the update...
We had my sisters shower here a couple of weekends ago and it was great! I can't wait to post some pictures because it was so funny what we had to work with! We placed a big canvas drop cloth on the dumpster out front with Welcome spray painted on it. I dressed up the walkway with some iron stands I use for wedding and swedish ivys with little blue bows. The front porch had chunks of tiles missing right in front along with parts of the house address (missing!) so I got cheap striped rugs from Target and used carpet tape to tack them down into a runner right up to the front door. When you walk in, the areas to the right is boarded up with plywood ( that is the gutted kitchen behind the plywood) so we painted it with chalkboard paint and wrote scripture on it. The food had to go on the table in the family room, so to make more room for people, we moved a lot of the furniture from that room out onto the lawn. Then we strung a clothsline from the tree outside to the side of the new part of the house ( it was a disaster in more than half of the backyard area) and we hung cute polka dot curtains to block the disaster. I have always heard "define your space!"...so that is exactly what we did. I covered some extra tables with the same fabric and tucked chairs around them. Then I grabbed anything and evrything around the house the had birds or nests on it and used them for centerpieces. (the invites had a nest and bird on them and it said "come see who just flew in!")
Clint brought this power AC untit for outside - it actually felt pretty nice out there with his extra efforts. And with the help of my mom, my aunt and my intern - the party came off without a hitch. Everyone enjoyed seeing baby Will and everyone was so gracious to "overlook" the disaster. So, no more excuses ladies...you can have people over no matter what state your house is in! Just work with it!

This is where it gets uncomfortable!

ok. We knew it had to come sometime and here it is. We are hot. And uncomfortable. And to top it all off, with the power on and off, wiring here and there and everywhere, well, we have had a few hiccups. The other day, they got us enough power ot at least have lights upstairs ( we try to get up there for necessities and out as fast as we can because it is reaching 112 degrees up there!) So, it helps to have lights and not have to spend any more time searching for items. So, as we were applauding their efforts, we could smell something burning. Here it goes again, or should I say off again! Now, here is the kicker...when they got it all worked out (1 1930's home completely rewired!) we realized that that burning smell was the computer! The monitor came on but nothing else...it fried in the power surge. Geek guy confirmed the news and I was off to Frys Electronics in Arlington, because apparantly they are the only ones who carry an "external harddrive case with usb port...40 pins" Its all I can do to take the pictures on my camera and download them to the computer, so what you are thinking is correct...I have no backup! I was burning them to cd's until the cd burner went out about a year ago. Really, its no love lost on the computer. We had big plans for an upgrade in the near future. I think our computer was actually celebrating its 112th birthday this month in computer years. But...I have to have my pictures! So I spent $40 in gas to drive out to get the case, 2 hours on the cell phone with the "free" tech support (yes, folks, our home phone was through our computer internet...also fried)
to finally get instructions on how to import my pictures from the old harddrive to the laptop...SUCCESS! Yea! All pictures accounted for. However, now I can't get them to downlod to my blogs when I publish posts. I have written before now and tried to post pics, but it erases all my work. So, until the bugs are worked out - my lengthy verbage will have to do.
So, this is officially the worst week of our project. It should go up from here.

The picture was taken of the driveway (looking out the window of the third floor) after we had already filled 2 dumpsters!

The Messy Part!

It has been a very busy few weeks! We have been without power for 2 weeks and then when they turned the power back on, our compressor for the upstairs AC went out. So we are still waiting for AC...we have a little downstairs, so we are all sleeping on the pull out couches in the living room. The first few nights it was an adventure but now we are getting to the point where the kids are fighting over where they are going to sleep and then someone is up until 11:30 every night crying. It is definitely true that we all do better on a schedule!
The framers came to begin framing...this process took forever! It was fun to see the space take shape...first the walls, then the windows...then enclosing everything including the roof. Now they are working on all that needs to go in between the walls - electrical, plumbing, ductwork, and wires for media speakers. Next will be inside walls and trim. Clint is making the door for the back since we could not find what I wanted in our price range. He is going to turn it into a dutch door. I thought I was being so original, but the past few magazines I have gotten have them in every article! On the back door, the front proch french doors, and the front door, Clint is going to build them out of wood, stained dark, and then he will weld iron pieces is a criss cross pattern to the front of the glass portion of the door.
Take a look at a few of the pictures of what a mess we have been in the past few weeks! No worries, we have before and after shots!