Let There be Light!

We now have 6 can lights in the basement instead of the previous 4... and what a huge difference. Not really so obvious on the picture, but light level is much better. And since we seem to have an addiction to dimmers around here, we, of course, added dimmers on all the lights. It will make for quite an ambience.

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Painting - Done. Well, Almost.

Whew. It has been a VERY long weekend of painting - painting a 720 sq ft room... including doors, door casings, trim, etc... I'm glad it's done... well, it's all done except the stair case railing. We're still deciding if we're going to paint that right away or not. I think we will. But I have to say, aching back and all, it just looks great. The new colors really make the room feel so warm and cozy... and we haven't even put in the wood stove yet! So, here are the pics....

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Mid-Day Painting Update

The painting of the basement walls is going quite well today. I must give Valspar paint from Lowes' a big thumbs up. It appears as though the main walls will only need one coat of my Caramel Toffee paint (the picture makes it look a little oranger than it is). I think I might need another coat on some of the trimmed out areas, but that's easy enough to deal with. So after painting Grace's room with the cheap-o paint from Walmart (two coats required - and sometimes three!), you're definitely money ahead to buy the Valspar at Lowes' (Lowes' can send my endorsement check to 179...).

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Let the Basement Remodeling Begin...

So, I decided I'd had enough of the old, thrown-together-with-whatever we-could-dig-out-of-the-trash or-beg-off-family-and-friends basement. That's right, the 70's avacado green, orange, and harvest gold couch is OUTTA HERE (I've included some terribly embarrassing pictorial proof of the appearance of my basement before)! We had also had enough of the nasty carpet. A basement is just not a good place to have carpet. Now, granted, our basement is probably 95% dry (except in very extreme wet conditions & then only wet in specific small areas...), but there's still always the battle of the general presence of a musty aura.

So, the seating furniture has sold (it's a miracle). I will take the end tables & coffee table and refinish those next week. We have emptied the room of everything... and I mean EVERYthing. We pulled the carpet, the carpet pad, the baseboards, scraped carpet glue residue, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, (did I mention I've scrubbed the floor?) Yes, it's now down to bare cement floors. This weekend I will paint the walls (a fabulous rusty burnt orange) and trim work (cream) - (normally I'd wait until after the floor, but a timeline is pushing me :-). I'll post some after pictures of how that turns out next week. We'll add and move lighting next week as well. After that, the staining of the cement floor will begin... and that is some very cool stuff! Due to a fine kinfolk of mine named Clint Howle, I will have the added luxury of using one of the best products around on my cement floor... Dye-n-Seal from Ameripolish. This stuff will make my project a cinch... or at least relatively speaking. The whole concept is that you get yourself down to a clean cement floor, apply the stain via a spray on technique, do some post-stain cleaning, and then apply a sealant to protect and seal the B-E-A-UTIMUS cement floor you've just created. This will be very cool indeed. Clint's Ameripolish website has some fantastic pictures of jobs they've done around the area... some REALLY impressive stuff. I know I had no idea that some of the things they did were possible with concrete dies. These guys are talented. Now, since this is more of a DIY project, the intricacy of the project is much simplified... I'll be using one dye... Saddle Brown. And I won't be scoring the surface or anything fancy like that. But what a huge difference this is going to make to the look of our basement living area! I can't wait to see it all finished. I'll keep you posted!

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Can a Person Really Sleep Like That?

Yeah, my Infiniti's not dying after all! We found out that my squeaking & sqwaking in my wheel wasn't a joint... it was just some rotor rub. Easy fix. Whew!

But onto the business of the post title... so, we go in last night to check on the little angel before heading off to bed, and we see that our sweet little princess has turned into some kind of circus contortionist. She had managed to shove half her body up into the little window cubby on her cottage bed. Good grief! Can she really be sleeping? Like that? I mean, wow. She didn't even wake up while the flash was going off shooting the pictures. That girl can sleep now...

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August Heat

So, we started out August almost smothering ourselves... and that's when I decided it would be fun to go to Silver Dollar City. Almost 100 degrees... what on earth were we thinking? Well, we had a lot of fun anyway. Grace got to go with her friends Jemma and Maci from church... and I got to go with my friend Beth (Jemma & Maci's mom). It was a fun girls' day out. We rode the rides (at least the ones my midget could get on), we watched a Veggie Tales show, and we even spent some time splashing and soaking up the water. All in all, we had a fun day. I think I even lost a few pounds in sweat!

So now that we're in the heat of summer, my garden is beginning to take on the appearance of a bushy forest. The sweet potatoes are going nuts as well as the Spaghetti squash. Something is trying to take over my yellow stick squash & zucchini, but I think we may have saved them. The cucumbers are growing, the tomatoes are turning red, and the corn is over knee high now (not bad for a very late July start!). We'll also see our watermelons and pumpkins coming on soon too. Yummy!

Oh, and the chickens... still no eggs. We're guessing those will come in September, and Grace will sell them by the dozen to whomever wants to come get farm fresh, free range (mostly) eggs. In the meantime, we've got to get the nest boxes built before then or there's no tellin' where we'll find their eggs! The ladies are getting quite large. Many are too heavy to fly out now... wings clipped or not. The roosters are becoming obnoxious... crowing, crowing, crowing. I swear, they never shut up. We'll fatten them up and then, "Off with their heads!" I figure they'll make a nice chicken and noodles or some other fine chicken fare.

And on to the latest in the vehicles... so, my little car has started squealing and sqwaking at me when I turn... only on left turns though. I was hoping it was another rotor rub or a brake thing, but now I find out it may actually be a CV joint. That's not exactly what I was hoping for. That will cost a bit to fix, but it's cheaper than trading in an Infiniti w/ 110K on it! So, we'll fix it (Courtney and Grace tried to do it themselves...) and continue on paying off cars and debts. I'd love to get a new vehicle, but we'll wait until at least next year before we do it. I really hate car payments...

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