Gattiland

It's Spring Break and I'm in spring cleaning-purge mode! After cookie season, the house is a wreck so I got a wild hair and just have been going crazy! I've cleaned out the pantry, the kitchen, closets, drawers, cabinets, everything that isn't nailed down has either been tossed or is going to Goodwill. The kids have been getting in on it too, Regan cleaned all the stuffed animals off her bed and has been straightening her room (miracle)!

But, I took a break and took Regan and friends to Gattiland for Mom's Eat Free. It wasn't too crazy. I brought my iPad and read while they played video games. They had a good time and then I got home and got back to purging! Working on #40bagsin40days!

Laundry Room Redo

I love Pinterest. I get all kinds of ideas for things I want to try. But mostly, it's just that...ideas. But when I saw this laundry room, I had to have it! My laundry room is my least favorite room of our house, and not just because of the dreaded chore that goes on in that room. It's tiny, it's dark, it's in a bad place, you can't switch out laundry unless you go in and shut the door behind you, making me, a non-claustrophobic person, slightly claustrophobic. Basically, I hate it. But I stumbled upon this laundry room on Pinterest, I figured that was something easy enough for me and my handyman-challenged husband to handle!

First, we got the washer and dryer out of the room and started massive clean up. I don't know how the floor can get so dirty underneath those things! David took the opportunity to drain the washer hose or something, whatever it was, I know it stank, bad!  Then we went to Home Depot and got all the wood cut. The pedestals for our washer and dryer are around $250-299 each, ouch! The wood for this project was about $110. Major savings!! We also bought a drip pan thing for under the washer, just in case.

Then David started assembling the pedestal while I painted the room. I went back and forth on the color, I recently painted my dining room wall a dark orange, kind of paprika color, and I like it, but I also had turquoise paint for the fireplace wall, and it's nice and bright and cheerful, so I went with that (maybe this will be my new happy place?)

While the pedestal building and painting took longer than we expected, having to work on it bits and pieces after work, we still managed to get it ready in good time. Of course, Regan comes home with a last minute picture day order form, and no clean picture clothes, so that was one snag in the process, but we got it worked out!

Then we put the pedestal in place and had fun trying to get the washer and dryer back on top and re-connected, but we managed. The only thing left is I want to trim the front so it looks a little nicer, and I'm looking for orange bins for the shelves. But, as it is, I *love* it! We even did a load of clothes as soon as we were done to make sure it didn't jiggle off the pedestal, and it worked great! I'm loving not having to get on my hands and knees to switch out laundry and we can now walk through to the garage without stepping over broken laundry hampers!

 

 

 

 

Now, back to Pinterest so I can find my next project!!

Long Overdue Update

I can't believe I haven't updated this blog since Christmas! I'm going to blame it on the fact that I'm still sharing a computer with David and Riley, so I don't get on here much these days. Also, we've been pretty busy I guess.

I'll try to hit the high notes! So, we had our wood floors put in while we were at Disney, came home and started painting, I repainted my red wall to a burnt orange color (I like it!), got a new couch, and then went to Ikea to accessorize and got a new table, a new entry table, wall hooks, etc. Slowly pulling the place back together:



And then...one day at home, I walk from the living room to the kitchen and find water coming out from under the staircase. I totally freaked out, but it turned out there was a hose that broke under the kitchen sink and it went behind the cabinet and down to the stairs and was coming out under the wood floors. Yes, the one month old wood floors. I was sick! I threw down towels, hoping we could get it all up in time, called a plumber who fixed it right away, then called a water drying company, they came out right away and ripped out baseboards, punched holes in the walls, and put in 6 giant fans to dry out the water, and 2 dehumidifiers.


So, right now we are insurance limbo. The adjuster came out, gave us a quote of around 6K, and the dryer people gave us a quote of around 13K, so I don't know what we're doing at this point. The floor is discontinued or we would just get a couple more boxes and replace what was damaged. But now we might think about putting tile down in the entry area, and leave wood in the living areas. Who knows at this point. I'm still upset when I think about it! All that hard work down the drain! Anyway, so for now, our house that we were finally enjoying fixing up and decorating, looks like a war zone, with holes everywhere, flooring ripped up, baseboards torn out. UGH!!

And then, cookie season hit. I'm the cookie mom for Regan's Girl Scout troop, and we sold just over 1000 last year so she wanted to sell more than that this year. Well, for a while, our house looked like this:


But last night we had our very last cookie booth:

And can you tell she was pretty excited! All total, and we're not quite done, I haven't added them all up yet, but we should be right around 1117 boxes sold! Woo hoo! She will get $300 in cookie dough (which she will use to pay for her summer camp) and a ton of prizes, including a day trip to Six Flags. So she's pretty excited.

A few other things that have been going on...my brother Donnie called out of the blue and stopped by last week with little Donnie. It was good to see him, even if it was just for a short visit.




Regan had 70's day at school, Riley had to go to the doctor (again) for x-rays, thankfully he was fine, he had jammed his finger pretty bad and torn some muscles in his leg. Just being a boy, nothing more.




And I guess that about wraps it up. It's been a busy couple of months with all of this going on and our regular stuff, school, church, Girl Scouts, and birthday parties every weekend! I will try to be better about keeping everyone updated also!!

House Update

So here are some before/after pics of the house with the wood floors! Some of them have spots since I used my flash. But you get the idea :)

Of course, the floors look so nice, we can't put any furniture back in until we paint, so we're working on that now! The last picture is the new paint color. New house by New Year's!

New Dishwasher

I'm so excited! The dishwasher we had was what they originally put in the house some 14 years ago. It was old, half broken, loud as all get out, and was missing a lot of its prongs. I put up with it because we've been taking Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University classes, and we decided we would only pay cash for things from now on. We were going to save money to buy a new dishwasher, but honestly, it wasn't really high on my priority list at the moment.

Then Matt, who has been staying with us for a while, said he wanted to buy us a dishwasher for letting him stay here. I was thinking sweet! I'm not picky, I didn't care, you could stuff two monkeys in a box with our dirty dishes and they would come out cleaner than they are currently. Then he told us this is the one he wanted to get us, the LG and I don't know the model number, but it has a handle on it, and the controls are at the very top. I know that the few times we've been appliance shopping and just glanced at dishwashers, this was the one I was always drooling over. They delivered it today, David got it installed, and I loaded that bad boy UP!

I was amazed at how much it could hold, which is a good thing since I cook a lot, it seems I always have a full load ready to go. I turned it on, and you had to be *very quiet* just so you could hear it running! No more pausing the TV during the rinse cycle! No more waiting to go to bed before you turn the dishwasher on, then forgetting to do it, and waking up to no clean bowls for cereal! It's so quiet, and the next morning, it was still hot, the dishes were super dry, and super clean! You know I'm an old married person when I can get so worked up over a new appliance. I didn't take a picture of ours because I don't have any stainless cleaner yet, and there are finger prints all over from getting it installed. But it sure is pretty, and I LOVE it!

Oooh, Shiny!

My new toy:


It's funny the things that excite you when you're an old married person. This is definitely the highlight of my year!

My Mother's Day Presents

It was Neighborhood Garage Sale day in our neighborhood, and I was planning on putting some stuff out to sell, but we were having a house full of company later, so I didn't think it would be a good day to make a huge mess in the garage. But when Riley went outside to play, and saw all the garage sales around, he bummed some money off me to go buy a tennis racket. Well, he came back a few minutes later, walking in the door with a friend saying, "Happy Mother's Day!" and carrying this:


It was a nice thought, but I don't really need a dog house. Especially not one that small, but I know my friend Tammy had been looking for one, so I asked if we could get it to her, and he said fine. Then he left to go get his tennis racket. But instead, he walks in the door again, saying "Happy Mother's Day!" and this time holding a bag full of bubble wrap that contained the following gems:


Sweet! Margarita glasses! He just thought they were really cool tea glasses. Then he went to buy his tennis racket, and instead, came back in the door with this over his back:


Funny enough, it is the exact same lamp my mom used to have in her living room, so that was funny. Other than that, it's pretty ugly, but we needed a lamp in the game room anyway, so it was a nice present. He did get his tennis racket and a baseball glove, so he had a great shopping day. He is such a sweet boy!

Decorations

Halloween08

Why are Halloween decoration so much cooler than Christmas decorations? Maybe cause we like skulls better than fat guys in red suits? Anyway, the kids and I have had fun putting stuff out this year, posing the bones and buying some more cool stuff for our collection. Regan decided to be a pirate (not just any pirate, but this specific pirate) and Riley is still undecided, although he alternates between something that requires a gun which mom and dad have vetoed, and something that requires a chainsaw, also vetoed (we're such downers). How I miss the days of Riley dressing up as Bob the Builder and Spiderman, now he wants to be Leatherface.

But, I did tell him that maybe dad could hide in the bushes with the chainsaw for when all those teenagers that are "too cool" to dress up, but not too cool for free candy come ring our doorbell at 10:00 at night, what a fun shock that would be to have dad start up the chainsaw then!! But, mom and dad probably wouldn't take kindly to us scaring their little snowflakes.

SCORE!

This is what grown men fight over! Riley was *shocked* to see it, he was telling me, "Mom, it's FLOORS!" I know son, but you don't understand, it's floors for 49 cents a square foot, so MOVE YOUR BUTT!! Ikea had a huge sale, and people were grabbing them off the pallets faster than they could bring them out and it wasn't pretty. But, we got what we needed and got out. Not that we were the ones fighting, I guess I should clarify, I don't need floors that bad, and David was very nice and gave up several boxes to greedy people that were jerking them out of his hands. In the grand scheme of things, they are just floors, but it was nice to get such a great deal. Now to put them in...

Maybe we'll host a brisket/floor laying party?? Any takers??

House Update

Here are some picture updates to what we've been doing around the house. Most of my "before" pictures are on another drive so I have to dig them out later. Here's a before of the kitchen:


And this isn't really an "after" more like a "during" since we haven't finished the cabinets on this side yet:


And the Game Room, we moved the living room furniture up there instead of the futon, since they kept pulling the futon mattress to the floor so they could use it as a gymnastics mat. Now it looks more like a living room and not a gym, and the kids are up there more often, playing the Wii and watching iCarly:


Here's the kids bathroom with the curtain up, the new towel bars installed and the fancy towels that I forbid the kids to even look at:


This is Kenzie's room, we painted it, we had the bed frame and headboard for a while, just never put it up, so we got that put together, rearranged the room, just haven't decorated much in there yet. But I do like the color, it's called Cafe au Lait!


Last but not least, new furniture in the family room. Entertainment center off Craig's List, just so we could have something that would hold ALL the TV, DVD, DVR, stereo, etc, etc!! And we moved the TV off of one wall onto the bigger wall, so we needed something bigger too. And I wanted to get rid of our ginormous sectional because it took up SO much room. It looks a lot better now, I think.

Dad to the Rescue!

So, you may remember THIS POST about my lovely master bathroom issues WAY back in December!! Well, my dad came to the rescue!! Poor guy, came down for vacation and we put him to work. But, you can see why...


All the darker center is rotten wood. I can't even tell you how many ways this bathroom was screwed up. The tile was horrible, the toilet was set all wrong, it was just a HUGE mess. But the good news...I have a working toilet again!! After 7 months of running down the hall to the kids bathroom in the middle of the night, I have my very own toilet back, I'm so excited! He broke out all the tile and cement board, cut out the bad wood, put in new wood, reset the toilet the right way, and we're good to go. Now we just have to re-tile it, but we are going to re-tile the entire bathroom, and David feels confident he can do that on his own, so now we just have to go tile shopping. What was going to cost us thousands in repairs has cost us next to nothing so far. My dad ROCKS!

Before and...During?

Well, now that summer is here, I've been toiling away on the house. The first week of summer we didn't do much but save gas by staying home and cleaning up and going to the pool. This week the kids are at Camp Dobulecreek again, so I've been using the time to get some much needed projects done around the house. Nothing is quite finished yet, but I'll show you the progress I've made so far.

First is a curtain I got for the dining room, nothing special, just that fact that we've lived here over 2 years and I finally got ONE curtain! (And Ricky likes it)

Then I took a bunch of kitchen cabinets off and started sanding and painting them. I'll post those pictures when I get closer to being done, which could be NEVER, I didn't realize how many cabinets I had, and they're all so big and it's just taking me forever to get them painted.

But I wanted to update the kids bathroom, less puppies, more grown up, and I like it so far. The blind in that bathroom was gross (like that when we moved in, not us!) so I found a cheap one to replace it at Walmart. And for future reference, no windows RIGHT next to little boy's toilets. I still need to paint the cabinet in there, I'm going for a darker brown, and hang new towel bars, but I like the paint color, it probably should have been a little more green, but it's close enough and I'm tired of painting.

Before:

After:

Now I am going to keep plugging away at those kitchen cabinets, and I have a light fixture in the dining room to paint, the projects just NEVER end!!

Bathroom Update with Pictures

I'm not done, but I thought I would post some pictures because I LOVE the way the cabinet turned out. I can't wait now to get going on all the other cabinets in this house, they were just so FUGLY to start with. I didn't have a before picture of the bathroom cabinet, but the kitchen cabinets are exactly the same so here's what it looked like before:And here's what it looks like now with new paint and knobs:
I still need another coat of paint, my holdup on that has been that I think this color might be a smidge too dark. I need to switch out the light fixture (my FIL said he would do that, thank God, I'm in no mood to be electrocuted) and make dinner for my plumber friend and see if he will switch out the faucet for me. There's a light at the end of the tunnel!! But then, the kitchen...

Bathroom Picture

How come nothing about remodeling can ever be EASY??? It's like one step forward, two steps back every time you turn around! For example...I wanted new fixtures, the toilet paper roll and hand towel holder is old and crappy looking. Sounds easy, right? Well, you would think so. There was a small hole in the wall where one of the toilet paper holder thingies was screwed in, so I needed one that was bigger than what we had to cover that hole, after buying 2 of them, I found one that will work. Only problem is, one of the screws that is holding that thing in place is stripped and I can't get it out. So now I have a dangling silver thingie. Then I made the curtain, and I don't know what I was thinking, but I made it too wide. So I hemmed it along the side again and guess what? STILL too wide. I found a hand towel holder thing I like, but it's not big enough to cover the huge screws that are in the wall to hold the last hand towel holder in place. I can't get one of the knob screws out to put the new knob on. And, to top it all off, I think I need something else over the curtain, like a valance or something, it looks too plain. And I think the color is too dark, and I still need a second coat. Wow, I am SO not looking forward to doing the kitchen, if these are the problems I have in just this tiny bathroom, imagine doing a whole kitchen? I'm scared!!

Bathroom Remodel Rant

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. I wanted to change just about everything in the guest bathroom, so I didn't do anything until I had all the stuff I wanted, new light fixture, new faucet, new knobs, new curtain, paint, switch plates, toilet paper holder, towel holder, etc. Maybe I should have just done a bit at a time. Anyway, I finally got it all, then started painting the bathroom this morning, and I just want to say thank you Home Depot Paint Worker. Mr. One-Quart-Should-Be-Plenty-for-a-Guest-Bath Man. I had about a two foot section left and I was smushing that paint roller down, trying to squeeze every last drop of paint out of the roller, using the tiny amount of paint left on the brush I used for the cutting in, so now it's kind of splotchy and I have to get ANOTHER quart. Oh well, it's on there good enough for me to put the cabinet doors back on and put the switch plates and light fixture and the other things up. I got some fabric from Ikea and made my own curtain (don't laugh) I can't sew to save my life, don't tell my grandma and aunts who worked in a sewing factory, that gene just did not come my way. But, I'm proud of my little makeshift $6.99 Ikea curtain. So, pictures will be posted soon, you know me, it just has to be perfect.

And cross your fingers that I don't electrocute myself when it comes time to switch out the light, I have no idea how to do that, and David is busy with another of our home upgrade projects, he put a big double gate in our fence on the side so we can park our new trailer in the back yard.

Bathroom Remodel - Step 1

Unfortunately it's not the master bathroom, BUT it is something on my resolution list, and something I've been wanting to get done for a long time now. In the powder bath, I took the cabinet doors off, sanded them down with my new Black and Decker Mouse, and applied the first coat of Black Ink paint. Kilz One Coat my a$$. But, it's looking good! It will probably take two coats, maybe three. Then I have to paint the walls, put in the new light fixture that we have, the new faucet that we have, and I am still on the hunt for the right curtain. I know in my head what I want, it's just finding it somewhere. Okay, that seems like so much more when I have it written down, but hey, first step is done, that's what counts! Baby steps.