95% Complete

The painting is finished & the tape has been removed. Some furniture has been moved back in place, albeit temporarily. You see, the trim & transition pieces that were delivered with our flooring were the wrong ones so that will have to wait a few more days. So we can't put everything back in place because we don't want to move it THAT many times. LOL!  We haven't put the pictures back on the wall but that will be done in the next day or two.  We are *extremely* happy with our choices for the flooring and the wall color.  We will be changing out the outlet & switchplate covers next.  The ick of beige now that the beige wall color is gone.  Here are some pictures so you can see how it turned out.  I'll do another set once we get it 100% complete.

What a Difference...

2 days can make.  :-)   A friend, who happens to be a contractor, came over Friday and started working to find out the extent of the water damage.  He pulled off some of the siding & WOW, scary stuff.  It was wet & moldy from the gutters down to the floor plate...yuck yuck yuck!! 


 The guys were great (Jason Sloan & his oldest son, Jay) and got all the water damaged bits out of there and replaced.  Then put everything back together.  They worked so hard & so quickly.  Wonderful job!  The last bit of the job is the drywall inside...they replaced the bad parts & it takes a couple days to mud it & get it all prepped so we can paint it. 

On the same morning, my mom came over to help me start painting the living room.  So, the guys were working on the water damage outside & inside, mom & I are painting away in the living room, and Corey is working his hiney off downstairs at work.  Here is a picture of the hallway from the living room to the bathroom so you can see the new paint (used to be an icky beige).

Then this morning my brother comes over for our new floor installation.  About an hour into it, Corey got called to work (he's on call this week) and so I was trying to help my brother.  We made good progress and stopped for the day with just a little bit left to go.  We ran into a bit of trouble at the doorways by the bathroom and by our bedroom door (between the front door & the stairs).  So we will finish up the floors tomorrow & put on the trim.  We are SOOO happy with the floors, they look great!  Here are a few pictures. 

Living Room Renovation - Revisited

Due to water damage, trying to get someone out here to fix any & all problems so it doesn't continue, getting the wet place DRY...which can't happen if the outside isn't fixed and it doesn't stop all this darn raining.  The flooring is definitely on hold, which sucks, but that just is how it is right now.  We have decided while we are doing all of this waiting that we are going to paint the living room.  May as well since we have most stuff out of the room and it won't matter if we get paint on the floor.  LOL!  :-)   It took us 2 tries to get the color we liked but everything is set. The color we picked is called Sea Sprite, it's a very light blue. We are using the Behr Ultra (primer & paint) so we don't have to do so much painting.  I got the paint tonight and my mom is coming to help me start painting in the morning.  Hopefully, we can get the outside problem taken care of so we can move on with the inside.  That would be nice.  Fingers crossed everyone.

I won!

Remember the drawing for the Mother-Daughter Book Club book I told you about earlier?  Guess what?  I won! :-)  Check out Who Wins Cindy Hudson's Book by Book? and you can see for yourself.   I'm very excited to be the winner and can't wait to get the book.   I am very interested to read Cindy Hudson's book.

Thank you to Rebecca Laffar-Smith of Writer's Round-About !

Living Room Renovation

The time has come for us to start getting rid of the carpet in our house.  It is a light berber carpet and we hate it.  It stains horribly, snags & runs, and is impossible to keep clean or get clean.  We are replacing it with laminate. We will be doing one or two rooms at a time starting with the living room. Corey and I pulled up all the carpet & padding yesterday.  It wasn't hard but it was physically tiring.  We are both feeling it today.  Here are some pictures of our work in progress.

In my opinion it looks better already.  LOL!  Unfortunately we found 2 places that indicate some water damage.  One place is dry and looks like there is just surface damage.  The second place, and the biggie, is very wet and doesn't look good.  It isn't huge but still not a good thing.  We got some stuff to treat it (concrobium)  and have a fan blowing across it to help it dry.  We've already contacted our insurance company and are waiting to hear when the field claims adjuster can come out.  Until then, we wait.  I am very tempted to paint the living room while we wait! :-)

Summer 2010 CSA - week 1

Doesn't it all look delicious!!  This is a picture of the contents of our 1st produce box of the summer 2010 CSA season.  We got 2 containers of strawberries, a head of red leaf lettuce, a head of bok choy, a bag of swiss chard, a bunch of spring onions, a bunch of broccoli, and several stalks of an herb (not sure what it is).  We also got ground beef, chicken breasts, and sugar-cured ham.  We will also be getting eggs but they were missed this week so will just be added to next week's box.  I can't wait!! 

The strawberries are the most flavorful, sweet, delicious things.  Of course, I say this every year when we get strawberries.  LOL  Can you tell I love them?  We are planning on having salad at lunch to start enjoying our yummy vegetables. 

Our CSA, Avalon Acres Farms, experienced some serious flooding & flood damage during the recent weather events in middle TN.  They lost 1200 chickens to the flood and lots of expensive fencing. They are blessed with a wonderful crew and they all pulled together to repair the damage & get the farm back together.  The local Amish farmers supply a lot of the produce and while they had flooding...ALL of the crops were okay!!  What a blessing for everyone involved...farmers and members.  :-)   If you are in middle TN you definitely need to check them out and become a member of the CSA.  They are wonderful people that truly care about the earth, their animals, and all the people they work with & have as members.  They work their buns off to bring us great food for our families. 

Book Clubs & Book by Book contest

Are you currently a member of a book club?  Have you ever been?  Corey, Morgan and I are all members of at least one book club. All 4 of us have been a member of a book club at some point.   We love reading and discussing books with others.  Joining a book club can be great fun.  Corey and I are currently in an online book club with some Tampa friends and other friends of their's.  We were in a book club with some of them while living in Tampa.  The kids and I were in a homeschooling book club last year with a group of homeschoolers.  The kids ranged in age from 7-17 and it was great.  We would go on field trips that coordinated with the theme of the book we were reading, do projects, and have snacks & discussions.  Morgan and I have joined a local mother-daughter book club and are starting an online mother-daughter book club for friends that live all over the U.S.   Can you tell we love books & reading in our family?

This brings me to this book and contest.  The book is Book by Book, The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs by Cindy Hudson.  Rebecca Laffar-Smith of Writer's Round-About is having a contest to win a copy of Cindy Hudson's book.  You can read all about it here:  50 chances to WIN a copy of Book by Book by Cindy Hudson. I've entered because I think this book would be a wonderful resource for us as we journey through the years with book clubs.  Check out the blog & the contest.

Tornadoes

Spring in Middle TN seems to equal tornado season.  None of us grew up around tornadoes and none of us like them or even entertain any kind of comfort level with them.  Give me a hurricane ANY day of the week and I'll be fine.  This is our second weekend in a row that we are dealing with tornado watches and warnings (the more intense of the 2).  Last weekend the bad weather caused a theatre practice to be cancelled due to concerns of driving in the weather to drop off & pick up the kids as well as having the kids at practice if anything were to crop up.  Well, Morgan had 2.5 hours of extra dance practice this morning and then 2 hours of theatre practice this afternoon.  All during severe thunderstorms warning & tornado watch.  We are also under flash flood warnings until Monday.  We have areas that have had 10-13" of rain in a short amount of time.  We have side roads, major roads and interstates closed due to flooding.  There are parts of the interstate system that have floating buildings travelling down them as well as semi-trucks under water and cars completely under water & floating around.  It is insane.  And yet you will still find people trying to get out and drive.   Tonight we had a tornado warning for our county and a specific "get to your safe place now" warning for our area.  The storm system that caused this warning had rotation going on and was moving up the main road that is 1-2 blocks from our house.  A funnel cloud was spotted by a trained storm spotter in our area.  This storm system basically marched right over us.  Thankfully, nothing touched down.  So funnel cloud or no funnel cloud all was well. 

We are expecting more of this through the night and all day Sunday and into Monday morning.  Not fun! I'm trying to take it all in stride...being smart & safe without being overly cautious or freaked out.  Morgan is doing alright with it.  She doesn't like it but she went to the safe spot, took a book & a booklight and seemed okay.  Alex is wound up as tight as can be.  He doesn't like any of this. The continous coverage makes him worse but we HAVE to be aware of what is going on so we can all be safe.  We try to keep the coverage muted w/an adult watching for our area to come up on the screen and keeping him busy doing other stuff.  He did good throughout the day but tonight when we had to go to the safe spot (under the stairs through our bathroom closet) he was quite stressed out.  Poor little guy.  He got lots of hugs & reassurances. 

I love rain and thunderstorms but NOT like this.  We have neighbors that have yards under water, friends around the area that are completely flooded in their homes or neighborhoods.  Not a good May Day / Beltane weekend for sure.