Clipboard Craft

My children are constantly drawing! It's a great thing except for the fact that my house is over running with papers. We bought them a cute orange magnetic board from IKEA and I had this vision of all their papers being put so nicely on the board. Great theory. In reality it only holds a couple of pages and then it's too cluttered. So I found this idea to use clipboards to attach their pictures on. I got the idea from Ashley Ann's blog and was on the hunt for clipboards. On vacation I found some at the Habitat for Humanity store in Hollister for 10 cents each!! I bought them all! Some of them had markings on them so we decorated them up (which I wanted to do anyway so they'd be cool without drawings on them) and hung them today. I'm pleased!

Before they got some TLC
After

Where have we been?

Sorry I haven't posted. We have finished painting our last rooms for a while. We still lack downstairs which I'm planning to do this winter, especially now that we have a pellet stove and it's become the boy's favorite room!

Here the kids are making Christmas cookies with Gramee


A picture of our stairs going up to our room. This is the saying I use quite frequently ;-) In case the shine is too great on this picture (I think I uploaded the wrong one and it takes a long time to re-upload) it says "Welcome to our World"

Here's a picture of our room...sorry that it's not clean, I was in a hurry. The windows have to be scraped and I have a light for Ben to install to replace this 1980's ceiling fan. I am thinking of painting the fan and getting a new light fixture to repurpose it in the boy's room..we'll see.

And here's the big dramatic before and after in our room. It's amazing what some paint will do! You can double click on any of these pictures to make them larger if you want.

We've also been to Silver Dollar City and The Santa Train over the last week. Grandma Russell took the boys to breakfast with Santa on Saturday then we had our 12 days of Christmas Party at Gramee's Sunday night. We've also had our church Christmas dinner this week which was awesome! We've been staying really busy with Christmas activities which is fun. We woke up Sunday morning to snow on the ground and Asher took one look out the door and said, "IT'S CHRISTMAS!!!!" It was too cute!

We're still believing for our Sparta house to sell and still unloading stuff from that house. It should be done soon. We'll be taking our annual winter trip with all the family soon. It won't be a far off trip due to family schedule conflicts but that's ok, we're getting away! Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

We're getting in the home stretch

You can tell we're getting to the end because we're running out of steam! We're shooting for moving in this weekend for various reasons. Janiece and I finished painting our bedroom ceiling and walls at midnight 2 nights ago. Ben had worked on the kitchen floor for quite a while and took the kiddos home for us. He also got the small leak fixed, our bedroom ceiling patched and something else done but I can't remember what. Jonna was also there helping us scrape up the adhesive in the hall. We've been working on this for 4 days but we finished it yesterday so we can paint the floors! Yesterday we rippped up the carpets in the master, painted the first 2 coats on the trim in the master, finished ripping up the adhesive in the hall, and worked on the kitchen floor. Whew! The kitchen is a disaster! We ripped up the tile because it was cracked and it appeared there was carpet under it. Instead we found 2 layers of linoleum and tar! It's being impossible to get up! And now the whole floor is destroyed. The hardwood is in most of the room but there is about a 3 foot section of plywood. However, yesterday on google we found out that someone said to use a wallpaper steamer and it works wonderfully. They're $28 to rent for 24 hours at Home Depot so instead Janiece looked on Craigslist and found a floor steamer (which she wanted and I was kind of wanting too) for $30!! So last night we loaded the kids up in the rain and ran to Springfield to get it. It works beautifully! It's still a lot of work but it's actually coming up! So excited and motivated now. The list for today stands as follows: Paint the trim in the master again, finish removing the tack strip and pieces of tiles in the master, paint the master floor and the hall floor, clean. Not too shabby! Then we'll work on the kitchen either tonight or maybe I'll wait and let Ben do it Saturday so Janiece and I can start moving us over!

Some Before and After Pictures

Ben and Adam working on the plumbing downstairs. Is everyone just thinking "that deer paneling is the best in the whole world!!" or what?
Mom decided she really liked the nail gun. She kept stealing it from Janiece which was hilarious! We were having a blast!
This is what we look like every day at the end of the day. The house is making us gray headed!!!! YIKES!!!
Mom and Adam fixing our toilet at about 11pm while Ben was working. Mom, Janiece and I thought we could hold the toilet up a little bit and get the hideous blue carpet out from under it so we could lay new flooring...we were WRONG! Either we are super strong women or the bolts to the toilet were super old....I prefer to think the first thought, but the toilet decided to rip out with the carpet. Needless to say, there was a lot of screaming as the toilet was flying at us (ok maybe it wasn't flying that fast but we have to add drama here). But the toilet is now in the tub and will hopefully be replaced tomorrow in it's rightful spot!

This week Janiece, Mom and I used the table saw, air compressor, nail gun and 2 paint sprayers all in one day! It was quite a day! You should've seen the guy at Lowe's when we were picking out our wood to make board and batten walls in the living room. Classic! So in one day we cut and installed board and batten in the living room, painted the ceiling, painted the walls 2 different colors, pulled up all the carpet and all the tack strips, took Jonna to Branson, then Mom delivered her and all her friends from Branson to their homes after midnight then had issues with the Suzuki and had to call Mom at 2:00AM to come pick us up! It was a LONG day and it was only 2 days ago so we're still a little tired. But the living room looks AMAZING. These pictures do not do it justice so I guess all of you will just have to come visit ;-)

We are SO tired of painting white. I've already went through at least 5 gallons which is odd because we never paint white...we like color! But look what a difference it makes in this hall!

We've Been Busy!

We've been at the house nearly every day until after 10pm. It's going SLOWLY for us...mainly because we're painting all the wood trim white. It's worth it but very time consuming. Here's a few pictures!


Two "during" pics of the boy's bath. I decided to embrace the blue and go with it. I like the blue walls much better than the pink walls with floral border (which by the way, next time you decide to put up wallpaper or a border please think twice. It'll date your room in a few years and it's such a pain to take down that you'll leave it for 30+ years until the next person moves in and thinks "yuck" and it'll take them 5 hours to take down a simple border... can people not paint murals instead? Just a thought!) I hope to finish this room tomorrow. All the wood work will need to be painted about 5 times and the carpet is coming up. I already have fabric for the window, I just have to make the curtain and I'd like a new faucet but that might be a while in coming. We'll see!

We have these huge drawers in the linen closet. The kids decided to play in them while we were painting the cabinet they fit in.

Good news is that Ben got us set up on propane today. No more freezing! Janiece and I have been painting in one room with a space heater while putting the kids in another room with a couple of heaters. It's been fine but a little chilly when the doors are open so we're thrilled with heat!

Ben also worked on getting us water today. It's been a challenge painting and bleaching with no water. Some of Grandma's friends have a well service so they came out. The kids got to ride up on the big truck which was SO cool! Who cares about pulling out the well? This is much more awesome! We all learn so much by just observing and asking questions. Today was a life lesson in how we get water. We all learned a lot!

The boy's room and the library got finished today except for painting the doors (which I'm hoping Ben will take them outside, spray them, and be done with it so we don't have to) and scraping the excess paint off the windows! We can check those off our list!!

Our library!

Day #2

The master. Have I mentioned that I hate paneling? Can't wait until it's invisible!
This is the wall we demoed (is that word?)
The boys room. Again, more paneling! WooHoo!


Well yesterday was Tuesday, Day 2. We got a lot accomplished! We don't go until about 2pm since we stay home and do school first. Last night we stayed until 11pm though! We're still without water since Ben can't seem to figure out the problem on the pump yet but we're making do. I have a lot of containers I fill up to go and then we take a trip back into Mom or Grandma's to refill since we've been bleaching a lot. Hopefully our friend John will come up tonight and him and Ben can get the pump running. It's also getting cold and we need to call the propane company to get a tank and heat but we also have someone else at church who has a neighbor who might be selling his tank since he just got natural gas. It's nice to have a great church!
The entire house is now bleached! WhoHOO! My lungs are not thanking me but my peace of mind is! It's took 2 days. Well, I guess not the entire house because downstairs is not done but the rest of it is. I'm focusing on the top floor first and then downstairs. We're also doing some major caulking and it's almost completely done which means we can start with the painting today! I have 16 gallons of expensive Lowe's and Home Depot paint and I'm still going to have to buy more. Everything was bought for $5 off the mis-tint rack which I'm thrilled about! So today we'll start painting. I'd like to have it ready to start ripping out the carpets soon and we have to paint first...that way we won't have to put down drop cloths. Here's the breakdown so far
Day#1- Bleach and Work on the Pump, Vacuum
Day#2- Bleach, Work on the pump, caulk, demo a wall
Day #3- To be determined!!

Our Miracle Home Story

We received a miracle involving our home! We were given a word from the Lord through our Pastor telling us we would receive everything we were asking for if we would obey God. This is an area we've been really trying hard on...just listening and obeying. About a week later we found a house that we wanted to look at. We had Dad, Mom, Adam, Janiece and Grandma go look at it with us just really out of curiosity. We had driven by before but it was out of our price range..now not even a year later it was marked down under 1/3 of the price they were asking. We looked at it on a Sunday, we were told that they were already accepting best offers and the agent wasn't sure why it was still on the market so we'd have to put in an offer right away and get our own financing because the bank wouldn't finance it. Within 20 minutes Ben had someone arrange a personal loan for us, we had the OK that it was a sturdy house from Dad and we had prayed and felt like it was good for us. We made an offer the next day, a Monday. We were told it could be 2 months before we hear anything. We prayed for information within in a day and on Tuesday we received the information that we had the house! God just provided it all miraculously for us! We have our current home on the market and believing it will sell super quick. We have a blog for it: http://aHomeToLove.blogspot.com Today we closed on our new house and we've begun fixing it up. It has sat empty for while so it needs some work. We found out part of the property (especially the barn) was built in 1883 which seems so neat to us! We can't wait to research it more. There are 3 acres, a barn, a shop, and a couple of other out buildings. So day 1: BLEACH! It's all in my lungs and nose but 1/2 of the house is done!! We hope to keep up with our progress here!

A HUGE sycamore tree in our yard! From the porch you can see the barn



Part of the paint we've bought!