Shelves

Slowly, ever so slowly completing all of my plans for the kitchen.
This weekend I put up some shelves. So now the stack of cookbooks we had piled on the play kitchen have a proper home. 

So few things left, but some of them are so tricky. I'm itching to get the vent in, then it will truly feel "finished" even thought there'll be more to do.

Lunchable?

Relia announced that she would no longer appreciate sandwiches in her lunches. Fine with me kid. They are a pain to make anyway. I saw somewhere, probably on pinterest, an idea for helping kids make their own lunches. Yes! my kid may not have any chores mastered so far, but there is a real reward to making her own lunch, right? We devoted 1/6 of our fridge to this endeavor, and so far it has been going well.

The top drawer contains fruits & veggies, second drawer is cheese & cracker type things, and bottom is drinks. We both like it, she gets to make choices about what she eats, and we don't have to rush to make lunch every evening or morning. Just prep a whole slew of packets of food on the weekend, and we're ready to go. It works so well, I'm prepping extra, so I will actually bring my lunch too. Now if only she could remember to bring home her lunch box every day, we'd be in really good shape.

What I did on my summer vacation:

Built a wall
Learned to camp with our kids
Got our garage door fixed
Cleaned out the garage
A little bit of landscaping
Attended a CGI Conference (and hung out with some very cool math teachers)
Visited Fort Snelling
Ate at Cossetta's
Went to the SPAM museum
Attended the Austin, MN 4th of July Parade
Went to 3 (3?!!) professional baseball games at Target Field.
Got to take in the view from the top of the Foshay Tower
Watched a heck of a lot of "Monk"
Booked a week long vacay for next summer
Learned to repair a tent pole
Spent so much time with my kids, that for three days Felix asked me, "why were you gone so long?" when I came home.

Camp?!

FP and I are not experienced campers. We've both been to camp, but have never really been camping. The DNR has this cool getting started program where they provide the guidance and stuff to get you started. We signed up to go in mid July.  I do feel pretty confident setting up a tent, and I know how to start a fire, but we are both a tad nervous about it the whole managing gear, cooking, and keeping the kids happy. In the end, we're hoping it leads to some cool adventures down the road.

They don't recommend bringing toddlers so my mom & dad agreed to watch Leo. But I keep thinking we could do it even with the baby. Is that just plain stupid? Any thoughts from those with more knowledge about such things?

Guess who has left the crib!

Thanks to Deborah and Keith's yard sale!


I just noticed that you can clearly see the quilts Nana made too.

Well,

It is summer (though you wouldn't know it for the weather) and I have a one year old, it must be time to work on the kitchen.

I started in March on repairing the damage done when I pulled off the old backsplash-ish tiles in 2011. Then in April I picked out a combination of tiles that I thought would look decent.  I got them up on the wall too. But it didn't quite look right, so this weekend I continued my white subway tile all the way around the room. Tonight I placed the very last tile! Now I just have to grout the tile, and figure out how to wire and duct the hood and I'll be able to cross off a ton of stuff on my ToDo list!

As I was doing all of this great tile work today,  I discovered that our pot rack had pulled away from the wall a bit. EEK! It had to come down, before it fell down. I move it to a spot in front of the window instead. Now I'm thinking some Ikea shelves where the rack used to be.



Friday, I came across a great deal on a floor model vent hood/extractor at IKEA. In my research of the vent, I came across this picture at Dusty house

It's my vent, with cupboards beside it! I'm not the only one with cupboards up to the corner by their stove (though those people put their own in on purpose)

At it again.

I'm planning to make another move on the kitchen. almost 2 years after I put in the countertops, I'm finally committed to getting the back splash done, and finally feeling like we have a real kitchen.

Here is my mock up:


Now the trick is to actually get the nerve to rip off the drywall and dive in to this.

Fixin' stuff

I know about 50 times more about how my dishwasher works than I did when I woke up this morning.

Last night I went downstairs to switch some laundry and found a large puddle on the floor and water gushing from the ceiling. Crap! The dishwasher was leaking. Not much to do, but turn it off and mop up the mess. Today I did some troubleshooting (what did we ever do before YouTube?) and managed to amass a long list of possible trouble areas. Three cycles of the dishwasher later, I'd bailed out the dishwasher each time we hit the rinse cycle and the stupid thing started to overflow again.

Fortunately, I had Felix there to help me use the flashlight to watch for leaks.



I'd managed to narrow it down to the float switch that turns off the water when it reaches the proper level. Made phone calls to Ry & Dad to ask for some ideas & support. Dad came over for dinner and hooked up the multimeter with pins stuck in the wires (genius!) and we confirmed that the switch was working. Darn. That was kind of the easy answer. We ran it again a few times and lo & behold the problem stopped. We think maybe the switch just got dirty over the, I'm now realizing, almost 10 years since I bought it.

After we wrapped up our work session, Dad got sucked in by our never ending photo slideshow on Apple TV and we came across this: 

That's me in the baby carrier, and I think I'm helping dad work on the dryer.
Apparently, we've always done this kind of thing.

Besides taking a gazillion pictures

I've been doing a little plumbing project

You may remember I found the awesome faucet deal. I then ordered a new sink. A week later it arrived. I took off the old sink (that thing is HEAVY), and measured to put in the new.



Immediately ran into a problem: the holes for the sink brackets don't line up with the studs. Not a huge surprise, but the old sink was sitting on 2x4s attached to the studs.


This means that I needed to open up the wall and put braces in between the studs. Bummer. So I suck it up, cut into the wall and discover:

There is reinforcement there, it was just lower than I expected. Grrrr.

Put the drywall pieces back, plaster the joints, and since I'll need to do it anyway, paint. At least I had saved the paint from when I did the bathroom way back in 2003.



It has been 9 years since I tried this plastic bag trick, and while the difference in the paint will stick in my craw for all eternity, I'm pretty sure no one else will ever really notice/care.

IN the mean time I have been trying to figure out why the supplier sent me a "pop up" drain with no mechanism to lift it. I was just getting ready to email them when I decided to go back and read the description from the website: "EASY one-of-a-kind push button action" Oooooh, Never heard of that before.


That crisis averted, I need to make sure it attaches to the rest of the drain pipe I'm sure you've guessed it, it's about 3/4 of an inch too short. Back to the hardware store to get the pieces I need. I have to cut both the drain piece and the extension I bought. I also got to have a friendly argument about the use of silicone vs. plumber's putty with the resident plumber. I went with plumber's putty. It is forgiving, silicone is not.

Get the tail piece and the extension cut (I love the angle grinder with all my heart), assemble the pieces, and voila! the tail piece is attached to the drain with about 2 millimeters of threading. And now that I have bumped it slightly, it leaks. GRRRR.

We have a working sink! The old one looked better, but this one has warm water (not hot OR cold) and it isn't a health hazard. The kids are loving it. Felix wants to wash his hands about a hundred times a day now. But I still haven't solved the tiny leak problem, so the big bucket stays under it to catch the drips until I can figure out what to do.


Maybe some silicone?

Into the squirrels' nest

Last November, we spent gobs of money to have professionals remove the squirrels that, for years, had been living in our third floor crawl space. We don't want them to come back, but have I've only been half-heartedly looking for someone to redo the siding, at least on the third floor.

I did put in a strobe light. My dad's, that is like one you'd find in a party store. So far so good, but the thing wasn't built for continuous use like the professionals recommend. Last week I finally ordered the "evictor", an industrial strength strobe, built specifically for pest control.

This morning after the rainstorm cooled everything down, I decided gather my tools and take advantage of the rainstorm cooling everything off. I wiggled my way into narrow space under FP's office.
On beyond the vent that is sticking up ......  and through this tunnel that is just about the size of me.


I had grand dreams of bringing garbage bags to clean up all the insulation the squirrels had used for their nest, but once I got in and got the light up, I had no interest in staying and trying to maneuver around to sweep stuff up. . Maybe I can find a vacuum with a giant hose.

Super Woman

I'm 29 weeks pregnant, and I just reran the cable to the 3rd floor so mywonderful hubby can watch the game while he is working, AND replaced the 3 lengths of insulated heating duct that the squirrels destroyed. Depending on our heating bill results, this might mean he can ditch the Snuggie^TM.

Yes, I'm a little bit proud of myself.

Other projects

As our family has grown, the volume of outerwear seems to have grown exponentially. You have to shimmy through the hallway to get past the pile of coats.

Shopping with my mom yesterday, without looking for it, I came across the perfect shelf for our coat nook (hallway, since people in the 1900s didn't believe in 1st floor closets). After some stupid mistakes in hanging it, I finally got it up last night, and it is exactly what we needed. Hooks for coats & stuff, 4 little cubbies for hats/mittens/misc, and a shelf on top.

What is looked like once upon a time (in "one small child" land), and what it looks like now. 



Love it already. Grown up stuff on top, kid stuff on the bottom.

This afternoon we took care of a whole bunch of stuff necessary for dropping our home phone line. It seems a little weird to not have that, but the only reason we still have it is to maintain our alarm system. We never use it. I wonder what will happen when the kids get older and start to use the phone on their own, but I know we'll figure something out.

For years

I have been planning this, but I could never pull the trigger.
What if I hated it after putting a gazillion holes in the plaster walls?
I have been stacking frames and photos on the piano for months trying to work up my courage.

But today I did it. I made a "gallery wall" in our foyer. And I only broke one glass pane.


I think knowing that our family is complete, and I'm almost done with the child bearing phase of our lives makes me feel like I can finally commit to this kind of thing.

I started out by laying out a sheet of Christmas wrapping paper (of which I am sick), and then began to arrange frames (over and over and over).



Once I was satisfied, I taped the paper to the wall.



Went to pick up the kids from daycare & stopped at the library (you may want to skip this step)

Then, started to put nails in the wall (gasp!)



and more nails


and ran out of the good nails. (Dammit)

Went to the hardware store with Relia (again, you may want to skip this step).
Put some more nails in the wall, and broke the glass in one frame (guess which one).



Removed the paper, and VIOLA!





Now I have to figure out what to put in the blank ones to make it not quite so Relia-centric.

UPDATE: I think I've got it planned:

Today's advent calendar gift was "Bake Christmas cookies with Mama and Nana." So we did.

The results were not what we'd hoped for. I like my sugar cookies thin, but these are gold leaf thin.
They don't look the way we expected. We tried changing a number of variables, but nothing seemed to work. They taste fine, and that is the important thing I suppose. My mom is going to try to bake some at her house to see if our oven is the problem.

It worked

We had the babysitter come over tonight. The plan was to get some Christmas shopping done, but we really just wound up having a really nice long dinner, wandering around the mall for a while and then going to another restaurant for dessert. Still, well worth it.
Of course there was always the possibility of coming home to something like this:

But in reality we came home to this:

It makes sense, they were both pretty tired. Even before we left, Felix was rubbing his ears and pulling his hair. Apparently they ate supper and went to bed without incident. Yessss! And that concludes my craziness over this whole babysitter thing.

I'm totally loving this whole advent calendar thing.

I'm so glad I put it together. The idea of "giving" an activity or some small token is so much more rewarding than seeing them overwhelmed by all the stuff in one day. Things that would have been forgotten in the hustle actually get played with. And things that would just be stuff to do, are now special "gifts"

I'm thinking this is a great way for me (the person who has a terrible time picking out gifts) to manage my part of the whole Christmas thing. Maybe we'll just ask Santa to do the stockings and one bigger gift?

Advent night 6

This one helped me have time to make supper. Both kids were enthralled. Not a bad dollar store investment. I didn't expect Relia could do it herself. Happily I was wrong.

Check

I found this "Countdown to Christmas" project on the Better Homes & Gardens website about two years ago and thought it would be fun to do.

 Last year I bought fabric for it. That's it. Just bought fabric.

This year I got motivated and last night I made 27 little bags with ties for an advent (extra, so I'd have plenty of room to lose a couple or screw up painting the numbers).

I'm pretty happy with how they came out. My two attempts at numbering did not turn out well, so that may have to be next year's project.

Then came the stuffing. My goodness, it is hard to come up with enough little things to put in. Maybe next year I'll have to save up all the McD's toys I usually toss. There are some toys, a few little candies, and several activity slips like "make Christmas cookies today" and "Go see Santa". I had to make a little calendar for myself to keep track of what happens on what day. BH&G suggested making a set for each child. Yeah, I don't see that happening.

I just scheduled the babysitter La la la la la la.

I'm nervous and excited.

Back at home. It was wonderful to have dinner and a night to ourselves. (Thanks again momma). Sounds like the kids were good, though Felix decided it was party time around 2am.

This afternoon, the kids and I went to get our Christmas tree. I think this may be the earliest I've ever picked up a tree (a quick blog check confirms this, but only because Thanksgiving is so early this year.).

We went back to a table top tree again because, well, it just makes sense with a curious toddler. Will I be able to hold out and not decorate it tonight? Probably not.

UPDATE: Definitely not:


With all lights on. I love the shadows it makes on the ceiling and the wall.
With just the  little white lights on