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Author: October

  • New Floor

    When we moved into our house in 2006, we had every intention of ripping up the carpet immediately and installing laminate. Well…that did not happen. Wade argued that we might as well wear the carpet out first. So we did. After 3 years, I was tired of it and we had many reasons to fix the flooring throughout the entire house.

    We ripped up the carpet and then had a BRILLIANT idea to paint while the floor was bare.

    We went with a brown color.

    At the last minute we also decided to do a double crown molding through the whole living area. We were not ready to take on that project quite yet, so we decided to paint the area where the molding would go and just leave it until we got around to it.

    I realized that I took very few pictures of the “during phase” of putting the floor down. Sydney was actually a big help, bringing us pieces and helping measure for the next. Here is the hall during:

    The laminate we bought was snap together…and really did snap together very easily. The whole thing just confirms how much I hate carpet! Now we only have it in the 3 bedrooms. 🙂

  • Wood Working

    For the last 2 months, we have had the saws set up in the garage as we worked on the floors.  (Meaning…we have to park in the driveway…yuck!)  Every weekend, the boys across the street make their way over.  The older one is 5 and loves to help.  Sometimes I will go outside and he is out there by himself…sweeping.  The younger one who is 3 is a little more mischievous.  I never know what he is up to.  Wade and I have to make sure that every time we leave the garage we unplug the tools other wise we find the younger boy in there trying to build things.

    Here is our table where we work.  One afternoon I went out to find this on the table:

    I guess the little one thought he needed to help us.

  • Guilty Dog

    We have almost finished painting.  *Almost*  The only thing left is the kitchen…which I am slowly working on.  Daisy…the strange dog that she is…

    Decided she needed to test the paint to see how it tasted.  No wonder why she spent the next 2 days throwing up!  (We noticed this 3 days after this was painted…)

  • Morning Glories Have Taken Over

    About 2.5 years ago, I decided I wanted a vining plant around the ugly electrical box in our back yard.

    I planted Morning Glories.

    They took over.

    I pulled them up.

    And every year they grow back and take over.

    They are interesting.  They open up in the morning, and close in the afternoon.  The humming birds like to hand out by them.  I am not sure they provide food for them…but they are a safe haven from the brutal sun.

  • The NEW Art Room

    Isn’t it funny how it took only 2 hours to empty a room but it took over 2 days to put it back?

    We have been painting and installing laminate flooring.  I am not sure why we decided to do it at the end of the summer/beginning of the school year…it is not like that is the BUSIEST time of the year (except for maybe Christmas)!!!

    I have been dreading the day.

    I swore that when we moved into the house, I would not move the art room until we moved out.  The shelves were NOT easy to put together…and well…I have an art room most people would be jealous of.  It is the one room in the house that I am overly anal about.  And as Wade says…I have a container fetish.

    First, a little history behind the room.

    The day we signed on our house and got the keys, I drove over and ripped up the carpet in the study and painted the floor.  I had asked that they not even lay carpet in the room, but since the builder owned the house until we signed on it, they refused.  So we have lived for the last 3 years with a rust colored, painted floor in the front room of our house.  Pretty tacky when you walk in the door.  Wade insisted on putting doors to the room so he could close it up so no one had to look at it.  In hind sight…that was a good call.

    Here are the before pictures.  I am not sure why I do not have a whole room picture.

    But the time has come.

    We started in the back of the house laying floor and worked our way up to the front room.  There is only about 300 feet of laminate left to lay.  We cannot do it without taking apart the art room. 🙁

    And apart the room came.  I had to put stuff in 5 different rooms to get it all out of the front room.

    Wade…he is such a trooper.  He hates the stuff…but he finally is ok with it.  He felt like our “playroom” never really had a purpose.  It was an ugly catch-all room that was just there.  A space that was totally under-utilized.  Not any more.  He had a good time adjusting the shelves with me to make it all work.

    And the final product…

    Wait for it…

    Ta-da!!!

    There are a few things that still need to be rearranged, but for the most part it is finished.  I am so glad.  I was dreading the day.  Now it will FOR SURE not be moved until we move out of the house.

    The girls have their own space.  We use a sheet of MDF cut in half for their desk.  They can color, paint, glue on it, etc…  Every once in a while, I sand it down so it looks a bit cleaner (and it gets the glue spots and paint globs off).  They also have a computer to share right next to me.  I am within arms reach of helping with anything we do.

    Stay tuned for the house remodel coming up in a few weeks!

  • Humming Birds

    In the spring, I took the girls to Home Depot and we picked out our stuff for the garden as well as some bird feeders.  We tried putting out a humming bird feeder a couple years ago, but it ended up getting moldy and we took it down.  Wade hung the new one right away.  It has been months…but the week that school started, Wade told me he saw a humming bird.  Then I saw one.  With in a week, our feeder was empty.  We now have 2 feeders, and a constant stream of birds to it.  They are getting braver and even eating while we are outside. 

    I would like to say that I took this shot, but I didn’t.  Wade sat outside and got this one.  I had my camera on just the right settings. 😉

  • The rat drama ends…part 4

    Hopefully this will be my last post of the year concerning rats in the garden.  By now I am VERY frustrated with the whole rat thing.  They are going through the poison like candy.  I go out Sunday morning to see what new damage has been done and what do I find in the garden…BIRDS!  After being amused for several minutes byt the one poor bird who could not find its way out (and continuously beating itself against the mesh) I went to get more zip ties.

    I carefully crawled into my set up and started adding more zip ties to the structure where the birds are coming in.  I am  right in the middle when I drop one and when I go to pick it up…there is a RAT 3 INCHES FROM MY FOOT!  I panic and jump out ripping some of the netting I had just fixed.  He did not move.  Ok.  It is dead.  I go in and get Wade to bring out his bb gun just to make sure.  He shoots it (about 3 inches from its face) and it does not move.

    Great.  Now he leaves me to get a bucket and pick it up.  When I come back…IT IS GONE!  We look everywhere and can not find it.  Wade, frustrated, goes in.  (Mind you this is now hurting his ego…this is the 3rd rat he has shot and not killed.)  I am determined to find it.  Sure enough, he is sitting up under some bricks, just chillin.

    Once again, I go in and get Wade.  This time he brings out his 22 with rat shot in it.  Once again, about 3 inches from it he shoots it.  Convinced it’s dead he goes back in.  I go to scoop it up and HE RUNS!  Ok…the poison must be mutating it…like Steven King’s Pet Cemetery.

    For the 3rd time, Wade comes out with his bb gun.  Long story longer, it takes 3 more hits before it falls over and dies.

    Update:  Wade mowed the grass on Monday afternoon and found 4 dead rats in the grass.  We have not refilled the bird feeder and we have not had any more rats or birds in the garden.  And the bunny visits outside of our fence now.

  • It’s RATS! Not Rabbits…part 3

    Just when I thought the problem was solved, went out Friday morning to find that 3 more tomato plants were wilting.  By now, I am very good at checking the bottoms FIRST to see if they have been gnawed on.  Sure enough, each one had a pile of nesting material under each one and about 3 inches missing from the base to the stem of the plant.  There is no way that a rabbit was getting into Ft. Knox that I had built!  I scanned the edges and found a small hole…that got me thinking that 2 weeks ago a rat had scurried out from behind our electrical box and under the fence.

    (Note: After Hurricane Ike we found out that our fence was not set in cement like most are.  They just put the posts in holes.  Due to the wind our fence is VERY wobbly and there are huge gaps in the posts that hold it up.  Our builder is responsible for the fence since the land around us has not been developed yet.  We are still waiting for them to fix it…hopefully soon.  Also: we are in an old rice/cotton field so yes…lots of pests around.)

    The rats would explain why the tomatoes are still being eaten (which I thought were birds).  They are climbing up the cages and having a feast.  After researching online I found that we are attracting them by having bird feeders!  Rats love bird food.  The bird food has been out for about a week, so they moved back into the garden.

    I am determined to solve my new problem!  We head to Home Depot for rat poison.  By the time we got home it was late and getting dark.  I used a tupperware container, glued on the lid, cut a hole in it, put the poison cake in it and put it inside the chicken wire where Daisy couldn’t get to it.  I also decided to put it on the side of the house where I had seen rat droppings.  By now…the sun is gone and it is dark.  When I moved the slide (from our swingset we disassembled) a rat casually walked over to a different area.  Freaked me out!

    Wade was out getting ice cream so when he got back, he got out his BB gun (that he got in 3rd grade) and a flashlight.  The rat was still sitting there.  His BB gun only turned the thing a flip until he scurried off.  In an attempt to find him, we moved the slide again…there sat a SNAKE!  I thought it was a rattle snake but it had no rattle.  It was a diamond back water snake (non-venomous).  Wade shoots it in the head with his BB gun from 3rd grade and that only pissed it off and he crawled off quickly.  BTW…those snakes only eat frogs, fish and small birds.  No rats.  Who would have thought?!?!?

     

    Saturday morning I get up to go roller blading and a rat scurries across the patio.  Daisy runs over, sniffs it then goes and does her business.  Comes back sniffs it again and then sits by the door.  The rat could care less that a dog is around and Daisy could care less to catch it!  grrrr….

    I go and get Wade…after 3 shots on his BB gun, he finally kills it.

    The story does not end there.  There are more rats.  Saw another one last night.  They are eating the poison…and seem to be liking it.  They keep coming back for more!  Meanwhile, Wade got a 22 last night since I have been nagging him that he is not going to get the opportunity to take 3 shots every time.

    This morning, this is what I found in the garden.

    He found a hole in the corner to get in, then couldn’t get out.  He was not happy especially when the whole family came out to get a look and there was lots of squealing…”Can we keep him???”  Daisy was no help…she was more interested in eating bird food since we don’t feed her.  Today I get to patch the wholes in the bird netting from the rabbit being freaked out and trying to jump THROUGH the net.

    (Obviously I don’t have Ft. Knox…)

  • Jello Watermelons

    I have several blogs that I follow…mainly photography blogs, but some are artsy crafty ones.  This idea is from one of my 87 (literally) blogs…I wish I could find the original to link it.  Oh well.

    Here is what we made, then I will show you how I did it.

    I thought this would be a fun summer activity to do with the girls.  I was wrong.  It took me almost 45 minutes just to scrap out the limes.  Limes don’t peel like oranges.  I cut the limes in half and then I used a knife to cut most of the insides out.  I flipped them inside out to scrape out the rest.

    *I should have left some lime on the rind…the oils in the rind made the jello sour.

    I put the lime halves in a muffin tin to keep them level.

    They have watermelon jello, but I wanted a nice bright red, so I used strawberry jello and poured it into the halves.  Make sure to use the “jiggler” recipe or the jello will slide out of the halves (which we discovered the next morning).

    I put them in the fridge for about 30 minutes to let them start to congeal.  Then I pulled them out and put in mini chocolate chips with a skewer for the seeds.

    After several hours, I took them out and sliced them in half again.  Wade could not stand to watch me with a knife, so he took over.

    The girls thought they were cool!  Spur of the moment, some friends invited us over for dinner so we got to share our creation.

  • Rabbits and Chicken Wire…part 2

    After searching online and discussion the options, Wade and I decided the best thing to keep the rabbits out was going to be chicken wire.  When Wade left for Home Depot Stacey commented, “Why do we need chicken wire?  We don’t have any chickens.”  I love how 4-year olds think!

     

    With it being the 4th of July, and needing to get out to my mom’s for a party, there was no way I was going to be able to put up the chicken wire today (at least not without having a heat stroke).  With the new structure I built, there was no way the rabbits were getting through the bird netting.

    Instead they dug under the whole thing.

    Seven more plants gone.

    I think I have lost somewhere around 15 tomato plants total this past week.  (I planted about 25.)

    Now the whole thing is surrounded by chicken wire, stapled to the wood.  The back part along the fence is surrounded by bricks so they will not be able to dig under the fence.

    If they can get in after this…I give up this year.