I live in a small old house that was built in 1955. I read articles about people who love old houses and their "charm". How "unique" they are and "quaint". Let me tell you, as one who actually lives in an old house - it is not any of those words. This old house is old, it creaks, sometimes smells like the old woman who used to live here and it leaks water from everywhere. One of those leaky spots was our kitchen faucet.

Daniel put in a new faucet in our kitchen sink. These small changes probably don't mean that much to anyone but me, but I think they are substantial.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living the movie "It's a Wonderful Life". You know how George Bailey ends up buying that crappy old house they used to throw rocks at? And they spend their honeymoon night there and everything is leaking and they love it and each other anyway? Sometimes I feel like that. Like Daniel and I love each other in a home that is sort of falling apart.

Anyway, he fixed the faucet, but only after 2 days, and several leaks in two rooms later. Daniel successfully hooked up the faucet, then walked downstairs to the laundry room where he had turned off the water to turn it back on again - and then realized the knob he had turned off had been leaking all over our dryer the whole time because this knob was so rusted and decrepit. So he fixed that and truned the water on and the faucet worked .... but the hose to the dishwasher was leaking. It was then too late to work on the dishwasher, so we put a tub under the dishwasher hose to catch the drips and waited until morning to worry about it.

The next morning we awoke to a huge leaking mess in another place in the laundry room (the laundry room is right beneath the kitchen). Evidently, when I had dumped the pot of water catching the drip under the dishwasher hose, I had not replaced it correctly, so the leak had been dripping all over the underside of our kitchen sink, soaked through the floorboards and had been leaking all night on the laundry room beneath. Many towels and buckets later, we dried things up and Daniel had to go to Home Depot for more supplies to fix the dishwasher. He did it and everything finally worked .... two days and several leaks in two rooms later. Yeah. Old houses. Aren't they "quaint"?


Don't before pictures look so much worse when there's dirty dishes in the sink and everything is a mess? Yeah, that's what I meant to do. It's not that I was lazy and didn't want to do the dishes or anything like that ...


Can you see where it's leaking puddles?


Dishes done and everything .... oh yeah, and a new faucet too!

Wow, this has been a much bigger project than I anticipated (see entry below). The painting alone has been strenuous and drawn out, but the hardest part so far has been picking the right gray for one of the nursery walls. You would not believe how many grays there are! And all of them have different "undertones" and look different under different lighting, etc. Anyway, I finally did it. I feel like I should win something for finally getting the right gray. Seriously, it doesn't seem like a reward to simply put it on the wall, so I'm going to document my success here.

Here are a few before pictures of the office. It's actually a "during" picture, since I was already painting the walls white at this point, but whatevs:


You can really see the difference in this picture between the crappy, exterior paint I used in the office originally and the new interior white paint I'm doing now. The old paint looks gray next to the white, doesn't it? But not a good gray, just a dirty one.


The first white wall almost done


This is going to be the gray wall and the white crib will be up against this wall. This is the wall you first see when you walk into the room from the hallway. I really want it to be a focal point and really beautiful.


This is really what the grays looked like in the room. I know it looks a little yellow because I took the picture at night under the tungsen (sp?) lighting, but this is the most realistic way of seeing what I saw .... can you see how purplish the grays are on the left and the second to the right??! It was driving me crazy! The actual gray I will use is the one above and the farthest right one.


Here's the same wall of grays but under the flash. The flash makes these all look more like what they did look like one their swatches, but not like what it looked like to me in the room. ahhhhh, it's over though! Found it. I'm so glad. Now I just need to finish painting before the boys' sleepover this Friday ...

There's a whole network on TV dedicated to "do-it-yourself" projects. It is the DIY network. One night Daniel and I watched this show on there about people who decide to do major projects, like adding on to their house, or redoing their bathrooms and they video them and their struggles. It's hilarious. The do-it-yourselfers on this show look totally clueless. They start off with a plan to spend a certain amount of money and finish the project in a certain amount of time. Neither goal is met. They always spend more and it always takes at least 3 times as long as they predict.

Another thing that makes this show interesting are the captions that show up periodically throughout the show on the bottom of the screen. The captions tell the viewers what the do-it-yourselfers on the show SHOULD be doing. Sometimes you'll watch the guy on the show start on some plumbing work and a caption shows up saying you should always remember to turn off the water before starting a plumbing job. At which point, the guy on the show gets squirted in the face with a stream of water coming out of his wall. Like I said, hilarious and great TV. It is slightly less hilarious when you are the do-it-yourselfer.

I had some ideas of some home projects Daniel I should tackle before the baby comes, specifically in the office where we are doing the nursery. Everything went wrong. We weren't even planning on doing major projects and still - everything went wrong.

We wanted to put a light fixture in the closet in the office because it was a very deep closet with no light source nearby, natural or artificial. It was a closet tucked into a dark corner of the office. So, since Daniel had done some electrical work in our basement, installing about 20 recessed lights down there a few years ago, he thought this would be fairly easy. So, Daniel crawled up into the attic area and figured it out. He installed the light and it looks amazing and I was so thrilled to see it working and illuminating! However, after we saw it was working properly, Daniel had to go back into the attic to screw in the last few screws and while in haste in the attic, his foot slipped and went right through the ceiling and into our hall closet. Problem #1.

I was doing some painting in the office. Not a major project like replacing a bathroom, but it usually takes a while. I painted our office about a year ago and because I wanted to get the project going, I just used the white paint we already had on hand .... which evidently, was EXTERIOR white paint. I thought something was a little funny when I kept getting headaches from the strong smell of the paint. It also seemed a little thicker than I thought it should be ... but I didn't let any of those warning signs stop me. I had almost finished the office when I ran out of paint, so I took the can to home depot and asked for some more. They asked what I was painting and when I told them a room, they looked me up and down like I was looney and said it was a bad idea to use exterior paint for that project. It was embarrassing.

So as not to make the same mistake, I had Daniel go out and get white INTERIOR paint and grey paint for my project. I had even gotten a brand new paint roller a week before in preparation. I taped everything off and got started. The grey paint we picked was hideously wrong - too light and kind of purple. So I started on the white wall and thought I had done a pretty good job, until this morning. When I saw that the brand new roller I used had left tiny hairy pieces everywhere on the wall. I am going to need to sand the wall and start over with a different roller.

Then there was the blinds. I installed blinds on 4 other windows in our house right after we moved in and felt pretty confident that I could do it again. And I did a great job .... then I stood back. The blinds themselves were faulty and crooked and didn't close all the way. I took them down and tried to adjust them, but after a half hour of jimmy-rigging them to lay straight and close, I realized my only option was to take everything down and return them for new ones.

So, an entire Saturday and two achy backs later, Daniel and I have little to show for it. There IS a light in the closet though! But starting tomorrow, I head back to Home Depot to return blinds, buy more grey paint, a sander and get a new roller. Daniel will need to get some drywall and replace the ceiling that was kicked out, thank heavens it was in the closet and not somewhere more visible :) Man, I can't wait until we're rich enough to pay someone else to break their backs and do our projects for us. Until then, stay tuned for more horror stories from the nursery in progress.

Yep. We're on to baby boy number three. Everyone I talked to asked if I was excited about having another boy and I am. I think it would've been interesting to try out having a girl, but boys are fun. Boys like to play hard, wrestle, eat ... all the same things I like to do :)

I've been looking at baby rooms and I actually get to do some fun stuff for baby boy #3 that I have never been able to do .... like buy a crib. I know, I know, what did we use? We used the same crib Daniel did as a baby - for both boys. By the time Liam was finished with it we were holding up the side of it with a diaper box. So, I earned a crib.

We're going to put the baby in our office and not give up the office, so it will be the baby/office. So I tried to come up with a somewhat versatile color scheme. Danie's office furniture is black and the baby crib and dresser we'll be getting is white, so we're going to keep all the walls white except one, the one right behind the crib will be a beautiful dove grey.

Here's my little design board I've come up with so far:



I'll probably change my mind a lot and redesign it over and over ... after all, I still have 5 months to sit and stew about it ...

"Mommy, do you want me to tell you how much I love you?"

"Sure, buddy, that would be nice"

"OK ... I love you as much as Heavenly Father loves kids. That's a lot. I love you that much."

Liam is 3 and a half. He is driving me crazy. Sometimes I want to attack him with kisses and sometimes I want to lock him in a room.

It's always hard to get back to life after a 3 day weekend. I don't enjoy anyone as much as Daniel. We don't have to do anything extraordinary, in fact, it is sometimes just the funnest to snag him in the morning when he has inevitably gotten up before me, even on a holiday, and coax him back into our cozy bed to snuggle for a while longer.

Well, today I woke up after that glorious 3 days with him and he was telling me that it had been raining like crazy all night and our basement was leaking water, so to watch out for that. He kissed me goodbye and I could tell it was not going to be a good day. I woke up later to a rainy, cold, grey day ahead of me. Yuck. The day wasn't awful, but it wasn't good. But Liam worked hard enough and made it awful by 4:00 pm. Thanks.

So now I'm sitting here blogging a bit after just scarfing down, not one, but two bowls of fruit loops from my beautiful new Anthropologie bowls. This is supposed to make me happy. And while the fruit loops are actually giving me an immediate stomach ache, the bowl is working its magic by being light blue and happy. Ahhhh. However, I can still hear Liam crying and wailing and tossing things around in his room. He's been banned from Legos for 24 hours. Why did I do this? I know that it's just going to be more of a punishment for me to enforce this than anything, but consequences need to happen and Legos are the only thing that Liam seems to care about.

Liam.

This kid. He is so stubborn. About everything. He's argumentative and particular and picks fights about EV-ERY-THING. He HAS to put his boots on by himself, so I let him, but he makes one weak attempt and they don't immediately glide onto his foot, so he bangs his feet on the floor and throws himself hard against the carpet exclaiming, "It not w-uh-king (working)!!" I bend down to help, but he violently alligator rolls away. He thrashes a bit and keeps complaining. This might seem a little bit of an overreaction. Surely I must be explaining a specific instance that happens once a week, right? ... nope. This is an everyday, several times a day occurrence, just change the name of the task at hand - eating breakfast, putting on his jacket, washing his hands, drying his hands, putting on his pants, eating lunch, picking up a toy, putting away his blanket, eating dinner, getting in the car, getting out of the car, putting on his jacket ... you get the picture.

Liam has his glimmering moments in there too. Sometimes he will come up and tell me he loves me, totally unprompted. Or giggle and smile and yell how he "W-UHVS (loves)" the meal we're about to eat. Yesterday he came into my room after dinner and said, "Fank (thank) you mommy, for making a yummy dinn-uh (dinner). I w-uhv (love) you", then he skips off into the bathroom to wash his face and hands. Or even earlier today he was walking with me hand in hand in Michaels and he looked up at me and said, "Mommy, you my fwend (friend)". sigh. I wish it were always that way. But sometimes it's not. At least Daniel is coming home in an hour and it's quiet now in Liam's room. I hope he fell asleep. He needed a nap today. He keeps waking up before 7 am and it's not good for him. He becomes a crank monster and then refuses to nap. Pray that he's sleeping.

Gotta go make dinn-uh.

I have to admit. I'm not really the "New Year's Resolutions" type person. But Daniel is. He said every year growing up, they would set goals for different portions of their lives: physical goals, spiritual goals, personal goals, etc. And so I checked out Pinterest to see if there was any cute way to display our family goals ... once I found a cute idea, I was sold on "goals" for the new year :)

I am good at short term things and small projects, so we'll see how this goes. But here are our family goals out on my chalkboard in my kitchen for all to see ... I guess I shouldn't be caught in my kitchen drinking a rootbeer with my new goals in sight!