Spring??

You've gotta love spring in the northwest.  Last week, Jared and I worked all day in the yard - perfectly comfortable in the long sleeves and pants that we had to wear while we dealt with the shrubs.  We even worked through a couple of rain showers and enjoyed the periods of sunshine when it peeked through the clouds.

But within a few days it felt like spring had turned into SUMMER!  I was completely unprepared for this and for the frequent requests from Gavin to play in the water.  He wanted to swim.  That was that.

With a super-long outdoor chore list, I decided to turn on the sprinkler for the kids to play in while I worked in the yard right next to them.  I looked at them and said, "Go play!" and they looked at me like I was insane.  REALLY??  Running through the sprinklers was the epitome of fun when I was growing up!  Then I remembered that Grandma got him these cool dip-stick squirter things at Costco, so I filled a mop bucket full of water and told them to go for it.  That lasted all of 10 minutes and then I noticed they were trying to GET IN the mop bucket.  Gavin was dead set on swimming!  That was when the light bulb went on: "I wonder if I have any bigger buckets..."  I took the kids inside and we found the perfect vessels for their water fun...

With the unpredictability of spring in the northwest, I think we will be happy with our wrapping paper tote swimming pools until summer is here to stay.  

Jaynee's First Haircut

Jaynee had her first hair cut this week.  Jared and I didn't get to witness it.

But Gavin did... 

After walking into the kitchen to show me a clump of hair, I caught a glimpse of a pair of scissors that, until that moment, had always been tucked away in my abyss of a purse.  I put two and two together and frantically ran into the living room to see the rest of the damage.  As I finger-combed through Jaynee's hair, more and more loose hair came out with each pass of my fingers.  My heart SUNK!  

While Gavin was serving an unprecedented TRIPLE time out, I realized that this was technically Jaynee's first haircut, so I removed her locks from the trash can and slipped them into an envelope for her baby book.

Luckily, Jaynee's somewhat crazy curl is pretty forgiving of this particular hack job.  Plus, there was enough left up top to do a strategic combover.  We have coped so well that I'll bet no one at church realized what lurked under the big blue bow she was wearing today!  :)

Shrubbish

Our crazy, overgrown shrubs won a couple of battles today...

 ...but we won the war.

That is all.

Just Needs a Fresh Coat of Paint

The title of this post is a phrase that I have both heard and used a lot!  When we moved into our home, we knew that we wouldn't have the budget to make any huge changes to the house as a whole, so we picked the room that needed a gut job the most (bathroom) and then proceeded to give the rest of the house a fresh coat of paint, which was all our budget could handle.

But in this house, the amount of work needed to get to the fresh coat of paint has been ridiculous!!  We're talking much more than your typical sanding and spackling.  With that said, here is how we arrived at our fresh coat of paint in the kitchen...

We started making changes to the kitchen the day we moved in.

Yeah, the drop ceiling came down within the first hour.

And we were left with this.  I can hear the buzzing of the florescent lighting just from looking at this picture, can't you?

We also unscrewed all of the add-ons left by the previous owner.

And I chiseled the bar lamp shades (right) off of the light globes.  It wasn't pretty, but it was an improvement!

I don't think I took a picture, but I discovered that the top layer of the wallpaper came right off, leaving the tan backing paper on the wall.  I decided that looked better than the faded strawberry wallpaper, so we lived with that for a while.  The kitchen sat the way it was from September until March, because we knew there were things we had to get done before we could ever paint.  The first being the lighting situation.  

In addition to the flourescent lighting and the oddly-draped bar lights, we had this little beauty blocking the way for us to close up the wall so that we could paint above the cupboards.  When Jared got his bonus in March, we decided to get the electricity taken care of professionally. 

But before we could hire the electrician, we had to deal with the tiles on the ceiling...

...and the final reminder of the drop ceiling.

I was so giddy by this point that I couldn't contain myself.  I almost posted this picture to facebook until I realized that it wouldn't impress ANYONE except myself! I mean, really, who would think that this could POSSIBLY be an improvement?! 

So the electrician came and went and the ceiling looked like this....

...and this...

...and this...

...and this....

(The whole time that I was ripping the tiles  off the ceiling, I couldn't understand why the previous owner had used them.  It was literally under the final tile that I found this hole to the ATTIC!)

We realized that there was just too much patching to be done, so we also sought professional help to get some drywall hung on the ceiling.

Out with Cover the old, in with the new!

By this point we had also peeled off the backing paper from the wall...

...revealing some awesome aqua paint.  That really got me itching to haul out the paintbrush!

 But it still wasn't time for that fresh coat of paint.  There was much mudding...

 

 ...and sanding...

 ...and gnashing of this germophobe's teeth.

 And finally, after our most successful round of texture-spraying to date, we were finally able to give the kitchen that fresh coat of paint...

 A couple more before and afters.  I don't have time to fiddle with any fancy photo layouts, although I wish I could, but I'm sure you can pick out the before and after.

 (I'm not spending money on a new backsplash until we remodel the kitchen, which won't be for a LONG time...but I thought it was amazing how much the paint brightened things up!)

And one more time, in case you forgot...

:)