One Less Thing to Do...

The sliding door downstairs has had a broken door handle since we bought the property. Today, I fixed it. :)

Propane Tank--Check!

The propane tank has been set! The children loved watching him unload everything. He had a large crane on the back of his truck that maneuvered the trencher and tank off of his trailer. We had one problem come up--they cut a couple of lines (phone lines perhaps?). We will face this problem in May when the phone company comes out. Otherwise, everything went smoothly today. I even removed most of the basement carpet! Woot!

Keira and Liam watching him move the tank with the crane.

They wanted a closer look, so we went outside to watch.

Liam decided he didn't have to sit on mama's lap anymore. 

The two cut lines. We should be able to splice them together (thank goodness) but still a bummer. Just one more thing to add to our to do list...

One exhausted little boy!

Liam-My Big Helper

Liam got a kick out of putting the registers in the holes. He was really good at it too! He even pouted a little when I told him we were "all done". 

We have a Furnace!

The past few days have brought us to a screeching halt. This is what has been happening...

Electrical

Dad and Randy have started in on the electrical work. Doors and door frames are all primed and wall heaters are ready to be permanently removed. Things are moving right along.

Wood Floors

Our wood floors arrived today! Yippee!

Just a little bit more...

I have been dreading this linoleum floor all week. I knew I had to get it up, but put it off and put it off...until today.

Gutting the Bathroom

We need to move a toilet. So why not redo the entire bath while we are at it?

Scraping the Floor

The linoleum in the kitchen and sun room has been a pain to remove. Wish i could find out what brand of glue they used. It works REALLY well! Thanks mom for helping with it...:)

Building Stairs

The children have been able to stay busy..they build new stairs leading up to the front entry way!

Overcoming Cat-Pee

You've read about my battle with cat pee. Well here are a few detailed pictures. Please note: I always wore gloves. My iPhone is not "work glove friendly". :)

Scraping the crud off of the sub-flooring.

I used a putty knife/scraper that had a sharp point. This allowed me to get into the groves really well. 

I scraped in between the floor stud and sub flooring really well. 

After I dumped tons of hydrogen peroxide and white vinegar, this is what happened. The crud came to the top and I could scrape it away....Have a vacuum handy.

I primed as high as I thought a cat could possibly spray! 

I will later go back and cover all of the floor, but I wanted to make sure I got up and under the drywall and onto the floor studs and in the cracks really well at least one time. 

My Tyler...

....the comedian.

Tyler has been such a riot lately that I decided he deserves his very own post.

This morning I asked him to get dressed in the laundry room. Liam was still sleeping and I didn't want Tyler to wake him.
Let me set the scene, Mom and Dad have nice front loader machines. Front-loaders (for those who don't know) spin very very fast, so fast that they can vibrate the items that sit on top. One of the items on top of the washer is my glass jar filled with homemade laundry soap. It rattles something fierce.
I walk around the corner to check on Tyler's progress--he tends to be easily distracted. He is simply put, in a frenzy.  Shirtless and jumping up and down trying to pull his pants on as quickly as possible, he spots me and yells, "MOM! She's going to BLLLOOOWWWW!!!" and runs out of the room.

Dinner wasn't the hit I was hoping. I made BBQ pulled pork with a gluten-free, dairy-free, MSG-free BBQ sauce with roasted potatoes and carrots. The only problem? I didn't check the "spicy level" before dumping the sauce on the pork. We sat down to dinner and to our mouths' surprise had a fire-engine-red-spicy pork to choke down! Obviously, I didn't make the children eat the pulled-pork. They insisted on trying to eat it, but when dinner was done everyone's plates were still sporting nicely made BBQ pulled-pork sandwiches. I reached to clear Tyler's plate to find the below....I seriously can't make these things up!

Renovation Updates Day 4

Sorry I didn't hit Day 3--it was filled with boring things: clean up, wall paper, measuring, etc... Today was also filled with wall paper and cat-pee scraping. Nasty nasty work. For those of you who are cat owners--I'm sorry, but seriously?! These people lived in this house?! Remember those pictures from Day 1 and Day 2? Yeah, the ones of the floor? Holy cow. I scraped and scraped and scraped under all of the drywall, on the drywall, on the sub-flooring and up and under the framing posts today! Mind you, I'm not talking a "little-scrub-here-a-little-scrub-there". I'm talking "lube-up-the-elbow-and-let's-dig-into-the-1/2"-crusty-nasty-poo-and-pee-that-has-accumulated-over-the-last-22-years-scraping". I gagged and vacuumed and gasped for fresh air, then, I scraped wall paper (the inventor needs to be shot), then returned to the gagging.
It was a pretty uneventful day--minus cat-pee and wall paper. *If you haven't caught on, I will never own cats--or wallpaper--ever.
Well, because my hands were extremely filthy, I avoided touching my phone unless they were first washed, then sanitized (16 times--seemed like a good number). So I have 3 photos to show for it today. You're lucky....it's only wallpaper. ;)

You may think the first two photos are the exact same, but if you look close enough, you will see there is one little strip missing in the 2nd photo. That is what 45 minutes of soaking (15 min. intervals) and 5 minutes of scraping get ya. LOL