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

Helpful Little Hands--Day 2

While Randy and Hans continued to tear down the ceiling someone had to go around and remove all of the drywall screws. I was just letting them drop on the floor when the children decided it would be a "great idea" to help pick up the screws. They were excited to help and more than eager to collect them so we can reuse them down the road. I couldn't remove them fast enough!

Video compliments of Ms. Becky. 

Good Bye Ugly Cabinets

The kitchen has an incredible amount of potential, but is (er was) poorly laid out. Leave it to my amazing cabinet designer of a husband to come up with an incredible design for my new kitchen! 

Here he is knocking out the cabinets blocking my line of sight. 

Day 2

Day two was filled with lots of excitement. First thing first--hydrogen peroxide is my new best friend. I dumped 1/2 a bottle in the two worse places as soon as I walked in the door. I can't believe how much it neutralized the odor!
The children asked to help right off the bat, so we gave them a hammer and said "GO!" They had a blast! I finished pulling up the carpet tack strips with Keira's help. Randy tackled the kitchen. The W family came for a lunch visit and helped tear down the ceiling in the basement. The babies were so dang cute and wanted to help in anyway possible. We gave them "drywall screw duty" and "stack drywall duty". Then it was time to remove tile in the utility room and from under the wood burning stove.
These was so much going on today...I I edited a few photos and posted them. Perhaps more later...enjoy!

2nd worse spot in the house for cat pee, but if you look close (see next picture) it's a mix of cat-pee and water damage.

See the snow coming in? Front door needs to have some re-sealing done.

Worse place in the house for cat-pee. The bottom part of the wall has GOT to go too.

Removing the carpet tack strips. 

The children wanted to help, so we put them to work in the basement. 

Both of them are sticking out their tongues! Daddy does this AND Grandma Culver.  

This wall has electrical for the stove. 

Move that wall! It's blocking my line of sight. 

Keira wanted to help remove this wall too. She got her hammer stuck on her first hit. 

Gah! Love this handsome man of mine :)

Get it Randy get it!

Good friends and a lunch break, two necessities of life

Oh yes...my lovely GE double oven range! 

Where the wall was connected to the ceiling in the kitchen. 

Ripping up the fire place tile.

View of the kitchen without the wall and fire place tile almost up.

In the middle of ripping out the utility room floor and Liam decided that he needed some mama love.

Ceiling is down and almost ready for the furnace

I can't believe he stayed awake until 5 pm!

Getting ready to head out for the day...

The blizzard brought some more snow and more wind which means a much higher drift.

My poor exhausted babies...they had a blast.