the yard from somewhere diabolical

I finally stuck our poor raspberry and strawberry plants in the ground in the backyard. They've been living in a bucket and a plastic tote next to the garage for a few months now and were desparate to be planted. (although, I have to say that the strawberry plant was actually thriving quite well in it's tote...blossoming and everything).
As I was digging up the ground... "holy rusted metal, batman." old screwdrivers, metal pegboard hooks, brackets, hooks and huge nails.

there is even a circular saw blade

anyone else got this problem?

love our house...but the cell phone reception is terrible.





my mom was on the trail of a double jogger stroller (haha, ah, no...i will not be 'jogging,' i just prefer the large tire style wheels over plaz-tec). i wanted to make sure i got her call and could talk about the stroller. but of course, poor reception.





so.....after walking around the house watching my 'bars' disappear and reapear, i finally found the perfect location...


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what? it worked

mowing the lawn

you want to make sure and give your lawn plenty of time to grow in the spring before you give it it's first mowing. it helps establish the roots and promotes growth and . . . ok, i just made that up, i don't really know if all that is true.
...but if it is, i doubt they meant for the lawn to be this tall.

deep within

wayne's "office" remodel

It's amazing what a coat of paint will do.

Painted Wayne's fake wood paneled office walls a light gray.

and of course the mess in the middle of the office while we paint. (next time we buy a house [and have more money and time than we know what to do with] we are painting the whole shee-bang BEFORE we move in. moving around one's jun...i mean...stuff, is really annoying)

Painted the built-in cabinet in our 'parlor' room white to match the trimwork.

and Sydney flying through.

Elijah hanging out in the pack and play...I think this is actually while we gave Grandpa Fletcher a quick visit. Either way, have cheerios, will travel.

upstairs bathroom finally complete!

Finally.......we started this project back in February with my parents...and now it is finally done.
Let me tell you, we had the hardest time figuring out how to hang our shower curtain. We literally purchased and returned items for 3 or 4 different methods of putting up the complicated bugger.
It was always fun going to the local home repair stores and trying to explain what we were trying to do and why the various ideas they suggested just would not work.


We ended up getting an extendable closet rod...don't know how we missed that after literally going to Lowe's 20+ times. We needed something to extend the entire length of the bathroom because there is no wall at the foot of the tub, just open air until you hit the wall two feet later.


And, I finally got to do my awesome color-wash...thank you Paula for the idea. Of course, the color looks more intense in person...my camera tends to wash-out the colors. But it looks so sweet!


Kinda like a faux venetian plaster...........ooh...aah!

just torch it

So I want to take a torch to my kitchen.

It is the one room (ok, one of 3) that we (ok, I) cannot seem to keep or get clean! No matter how many times I think, today is the day!, it still ends up not quite as clean as I would want it.

Yes, this is part of our kitchen counter. Were you confused by the gloves, power sander and plant in the foreground?

I feel like I don't have anytime. Right now? I'm very busy! I'm blogging (obviously), eating an excessively late lunch, putting Sydney back down for her nap (for the second time), and checking the tv to see if there is anything on. (there is not, which by the way is an entire other post waiting to happen...the Retro TV Channel? seriously!?!)

Death of a Clothes Line Post Remover

So, Wayne nearly died trying to remove the clothes line post in our back yard.

It started out simple enough. We have a clothes line post in our back yard...we don't want the clothes line post in our backyard...so we need to take it out. Simple, right?



Wayne dug and dug and dug. The post would barely wobble. Down, Down, Down, deeper we went but the post was very secure...and long! While it was utterly exhausting, we were having a pretty good time. I took this video clip of Wayne after we had been digging for about 20 minutes.


Not 30 seconds later...wham, Wayne was flat on his back. We were both trying to lift that stinker out of the ground, when Wayne's knee popped out. Wayne has injured his knee before and missed some college because of a impromtu wrestling match (thank you Brice [just kidding]) in the college's gameroom (thank you Rich for egging them on [just kidding]). He literally keeled over and I thought, how am I supposed to get both him and the kids into the car and drive him to the hospital?



After the initial pain and shock...and several minutes lying in the dirt...we started laughing. Hence the above picture. Here lies Wayne Anderson...the post can be his tomb marker, cross shaped and everything.
Seriously though, he was laying there for several minutes, just kind of resting up his knee. Once I was sure he was better, I kept on digging and then I saw a mom and her son walk by on the sidewalk. I could just imagine what she was thinking. Hello, police? Yeah, I saw this woman digging a hole and some guy lying there dead next to it. ...I know, I can't believe she would try it in broad daylight and everything!
Wayne started to feel better, though sore, so he rolled over and just started digging with his hands...poor guy.


I'm not lying, that same lady walked by again with her son and I could imagine her thoughts again. Oh, thank heavens, that man is not dead. but wait...what she doing!?! That crazy woman is making that poor man dig his own grave now! (what can I say, I am a Fletcher, and all Fletcher's have over active imaginations and can pull the craziest stories out of everyday events).

Anyway, we finally got that bugger out. What an ordeal! That post was literally buried at least four feet down. That is our shovel in the picture below showing how deep the hole is!

call in the professionals

So, there was no way we could do this one ourselves. We called in the professionals (Portside Plumbing and Mechanical out of Sheboygan, in case anyone in the area is looking for a good plumber).
We were blessed with a nice tax return which we had counted on to make a bathroom remodel possible. It ended up being 'nice' enough to include a little bit of rearranging in the laundry room.
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Here we go...first off, Wayne pulled off some green floral wallpaper, and paneling that had gold stars on it. Below you can see what the bathroom walls looked like underneath...not too pretty. We had planned on just leaving the old walls, but when we saw this mess (and the huge holes that showed no insulation) we decided to have all the walls demo'd out and start fresh.
This is the closet area in the bathroom...it is going goodbye to make way for a new shower.


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There is the old mirror/medicine cabinet, and so forth...you can also see the cool 'gold stars' on the old paneling.


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Looking into the bathroom from the laundry room. This was just the first day and the guys already had the closet and walls demo'd out, the insulation in and the shower installed! Simply amazing!


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This is where the toilet and vanity used to be....so long old mess! (what an interesting disaster we discovered behind the walls. Layers and layers of old wall.)


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There is the new shower and ceiling with cutouts for the new lights.



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Up, up, up with the drywall! (outside, looking in)


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We also had new flooring put in...which meant that our appliances spent some time hanging out in the living room. Kinda nice having the milk and pop so convenient...but only eating microwave food is a drag.

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We chose a nice ceramic-tile-looking vinyl. Unfortunately for the flooring guys, the best way to install vinyl when you have radiators is to completely remove the radiators. So the radiators got to camp out in the living room too.

I felt so bad for the guys. I was upstairs with the kids, trying to stay out of the way, when they moved the large, long kitchen radiator. I heard one guy mention the weight amidst the rythmic, and slightly colorful, language (it was pretty funny actually..."one, two, three ferfenhiemer *grunt*...one, two, three snuzzeldorf*grunt*" [well, of course i can't write what they were saying! my mom reads this! just kidding. they were great guys and probably didn't realize i could here them; like i said, it was acutally kind of funny being on the listening end.])

What was I talking about...oh, yeah, one of the guys meantioned that he thought it weighed around 600 pounds!!! sacred heifer! [holy cow]

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The old asbestos tiles...buh-bye! Even just having the subfloor down was a great improvement!

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And there it is! The new floor!

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And the laundry room...the washer and dryer used to be on opposite walls. They like being friends and sitting next to each other. So happy together!

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ooh, aah! The bathroom now has a lightswitch IN the bathroom; it used to be outside in the laundry room. This great new switch features sterling white stitches and a glorious timer...not an old turn timer, but a new, high tech timer with buttons and lights...ooh, aah.

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The new toilet, mirror and sink! I know, I know, I gotta put the drawers and door back on still. We painted the old vanity an nice, rich black and it looks amazingly new! The old vanity was a little tired and worn out, but still solid. So for 10 bucks in paint, compared to 125, we have a new (looking) vanity.

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The walls are a light gray color so that I can change my mind and redecorate all the time! We plan on getting black and gray towels and hand towels and adding pops of color with the washcloths to match the shower curtain.
The shower surround is a Sterling 4 foot shower. This is a great shower if you don't have enough room for a full tub. A standard stall is 32 inches wide, this baby is 48! So much more room...

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And here is our cool shower curtain from World Market. I really wanted to find a black and white shower curtain, graphic, maybe floral, but i like this one too.

why do we keep doing this to ourselves? - kitchen remodel

Ok, so kitchen "remodel" is too grand a word for what we are actually planning to do. "Refinish", "Redecorate", or "Face-lift" is probably a better term.

Basically we are going to be taking down the old fake wood paneling and wallpaper, painting the walls a dark blue, and painting the cabinets white...eventually.

For now, we are simply trying to get the old fake wood paneling and wallpaper down, especially behind the radiator which is currently out while we are waiting for new vinyl flooring to be installed on Monday.

We started pulling down some wallpaper, then realised there was another layer, and potentially lots of cracks and defects in the wall. (it seems each project just snowballs like crazy...it should be soooo simple...pull off wallpaper, prime and paint; but it never is. why do we keep doing this to ourselves?)

Taking down the old wallpaper is proving to be very challenging.

The problem is that there seems to be two layers of wallpaper. And, in most places it is not simply one on top of another (which, while annoying, would actually be easier to take down), it is one top layer of wallpaper placed over the sticky paper backing of a previous wallpaper. So, we've got to pull off the picture part, soak through the first layer of sticky paper back, peel that off, soak through the second layer of sticky paper back, peel that off, then soak and literally scrape with a spatula the gunky residue left behind the final layer! As Sydney would say, "oh by gosh!"

I think it is going to take forever to get it all off!

You never know what the previous (or previous, previous) owner did to a house until you try and un/redo it.

I'm not bad-mouthing the previous owners...I know whoever buys this place from us someday will wonder, "what the he-eck were they doing?"

We all do things that others would wonder, "what were they thinking?" But, whatever we do, we are doing (hopefully) for the betterment of our family and home.

goodbye old wallpaper (i actually kind of like the blue paper...unfortunately [or maybe fortunately for Wayne who does not care for wallpaper] there was only a little bit left on the wall)

We can do it ourself - Remodeling

Well, there are a handful of projects that we wanted to do around the house and my dad was anxious to come on up and help. So, Wayne asked 3 days off and away to work we went. We made a full page list of all the projects we wanted to accomplish…or at least attempt to accomplish.
The big ones were:
1. Put up pebble board in the upstairs bathroom
2. Build a cabinet for the upstairs bathroom
3. Take down the dropped ceiling
4. Paint Sydney’s room
5. Paint Elijah’s room
I posted this one ‘last’ so that you will read it ‘first’ on the blog. The posts below detail each project.
We really had no idea how to do a lot of the projects we set out to do. However, we felt confident that we would be able to power through the various tasks. I mean, how hard could it be? I’ve watched HGTV…I’ve seen remodel work…we can figure it out.
Yeah…
Well…
You’ll see how it went in the following posts.

(sydney decided to 'help' - she found a screwdriver and started trying to 'fix' the baby gate)

Elijah did such a great job...he spent most of the time hanging out in his little excersaucer.

do it ourself - Elijah's Room

Elijah's room was a little more work.

One of his walls had wallpaper on it that simply had to come off.

One wall had a particularly bad crack in it. it was actually on an outside corner and on an angled wall...nice and complicated.

But nothing a little (OK a lot) of mud couldn't fix.

so...the pattern goes. mud, mud, kilz, paint, paint. :)

And in the end, you get a lovely...I mean, MANLY room. the walls are a great great.

the observant observer will notice that elijah's room used to be orange and sydney's room was changed to orange. why not just switch their rooms?

well,

#1 - sydney's carpet was just too cool and i could not come up with a masculine decor to match it.

#2 - i literally knew when we were looking at this house which kid was going where. the architecture of each room just fit the kids.

#3 - the oranges are totally different!

see, i even painted sydney's orange onto elijah's orange to show how different they are.

(sydney's orange is on the left)

i'm serious, sydney's orange is painted on elijah's wall!

the oranges were literally the same color...just a different finish!!! I picked out the perfect orange for sydney, was so sure it was so very very different...and it was the same.

oh well, elijah's room still rocks.