Baking and the Usual Busyness

I got up yesterday and scrolled through pinterest and a recipe for Raspberry White Chocolate Scones. I had all the ingredients and thought why not. I hadn’t made scones in ages. I went out and picked the raspberries and ate a few because how can you not? The scones weren’t as pretty as the picture and the kids were hesitant but by the end of the day they were all gone. Success.

Laundry was my big chore of the day. Well, that and dishes. The kids had taken so many dishes downstairs and left them that when gathered up and including the dishes upstairs I washed load after load all day long and still had some leftover to wash. Maybe I’ll use disposable the rest of the summer. Just kidding, I hate buying things just to throw away. I did spend the entire day doing dishes and laundry. The rest of the house was in shambles as well. It was so overwhelming that I kind of just sat between loads and tried to get up the gumption to do anything.

Last weekend I was working like a fiend nonstop and it was great to see progress. For some reason I was having trouble figuring out how to get the momentum back. So I decided to put housework on the back burner, besides the laundry and dishes that were in the washers and I pulled the paint out. The trim from the remodel still needed to be painted. I’d always put it off and now was the day to get it done. I painted two door frames and looked back and it was flat. The sheen had dried matte and not shiny like it was supposed to be. Dang it. I had not labeled my paint container and I’d primed the door frames. At least I noticed before I did the remaining 9 of them. I found the right paint and did all 11 of them. It was tricky because it was so hot in the house (78°) that the paint was drying fast. But I got them all done and it looks so much better. I have the baseboards to do but those are easy enough. I was going to save the painting for when school was in but realized that if I did that then Evangeline would have no one but me to keep her occupied. I’m doing it now so she can play with the other kids and away from all the wet paint.

After dinner Benjamin was complaining that he was hungry because he hadn’t eaten all day. There was food but he chose not to partake because he didn’t like the food. His own fault. So after dinner was done he made root beer cookies. He has been asking for them all summer. I finally got the root beer extract a couple weeks ago and he made cookies last night. And he did an amazing job. He learned his lesson from the last time he tried to make them and they didn’t turn out at all. This time he did it and was a happy camper the rest of the night.

We finally got rain last night. I’m glad because now I don’t have to water the yard or garden until the weekend. I’m glad we didn’t get torrential rain and flooding like some places have been getting. Alex and I talked about what was in our basement and what would we do if it flooded. I need to move a bunch of stuff upstairs. Well, just the irreplaceable stuff. The way our basement windows are it would have to rain a lot and the water would have to get six inches on the ground level. We are also uphill so I think we’d be okay. But thinking scenarios and actual experience is a whole different ballgame.

I better get going. I still have more laundry and dishes and such to clean up. Also the toilet in the basement made a huge mess last night that I have to clean up better. Wish me luck because there are tons more things planned for today as well. I’m thinking school being in will slow things down a bit, at least during the day. I could be very wrong though.

Installation and Issues

I know you are all dying to see some progress pictures. They are coming.

So Thursday our fridge was delivered. They called before coming and I told them that the fridge wouldn’t fit unless they took off the fridge doors. When they got to my house they saw the front door and said it should fit. Yes, through the front door, but no, not through the entry door to the kitchen. Ohhhh. They saw what I meant and took the doors off the fridge.

Right as they were leaving the electricians finally showed up. It was almost noon. They got right to work and 6 hours later they had it all done. But we tested the disposal and it didn’t work. The other guy who had already left had installed it but hooked it up different from what it was supposed to be. Quick fix. It all looked good and we thought it was.

We went to plug in the fridge into the outlet that we had made for it and it didn’t work. We plugged it into another one and it did. We checked all the outlets and four of them didn’t work. Great. We figured we’d call in the morning to have them fix it.

Later that night, actually morning, we woke up to our alarm clock blinking and flickering. I checked my phone for the time and it was dead when it had been half full at bedtime and had been charging. It was 4 a.m. we turned on the bathroom light and it was strobing, and if we turned on one light the other stuff in the room would turn off. What the heck. If the electrical hadn’t been worked on we would have thought the house was haunted. We unplugged everything and went back to sleep.

In the morning we tried to figure it out. We thought maybe it was our high school bathroom fluorescent light fixture in the bathroom causing problems. It turned out not to be, as we found out when we unplugged it, and we installed a new, more modern fixture. About time we got rid of that ugly thing.

We checked all the outlets again but things had gotten worse. The outlets still didn’t work. The master bedroom and bathroom electricity was acting normal and then it would fritz, blink, flicker, turn on and off. Then the kitchen would do stuff too. The power would work, then it wouldn’t and with stuff we thought was fine. The dishwasher wouldn’t stay on, the light in the fridge would flicker. It is a concerning mess that wasn’t happening until the electricians came so I’m am for sure expecting them to fix it and I will not let them charge me for it.

But other than that it has been wonderful. We installed the ovens. I will not do that again. It was so heavy and so hard to do. But it is in and we’ve used them a couple times. We made pizza and used all the ovens at once. Dinner was done all at once instead of dragging it out for over an hour waiting for one pizza at a time. I know it sounds ridiculous and spoiled but it was still, so nice to cut the baking time down by so much. We made valentine’s cookies and the three batches were done in 10 minutes instead of half an hour. Time saver!

She was so helpful.

They weighed so much. We used a car jack to lift it up and slide it it.

Alex put the cooktop in place but we can’t use it until we hook up the gas which we won’t do until the counters are in.

I finally got a new fridge. It has an ice maker! I’ve never had one before. I’m excited about that.

We still have a ways to go but it is so close now. And I love it. I love the colors, the space, the storage. It doesn’t even look like the same place- thank goodness because the before was very worn out.

The kitchen and front room are looking great. Now to get the rest of the house to match.

Deliveries, Scheduling, Budgets and Kids Stuff

I heard a faint knock on the door yesterday. It was the second one that day. The first one was shoes that my sister ordered for my son’s birthday present. The other giant box was for me. The kitchen sink came! They didn’t have the one I wanted at the store so online order it was. I should open it to make sure it will work but how would I know because the kitchen is still bare bones.

I had two different visits from the worker bees. Well, the quote bees that schedule the worker bees. I got the gas line install scheduled for next week. The electricians are going to come either Thanksgiving week or the week after. Yay! The cost is more than I want to pay but it includes the lighting and electrical connections in the living room and hallway as well as the kitchen, dining and laundry room. Go big or go home. I’m hoping the number they quoted me will be less because they did a quote as if it was new construction. We have the wires all up there and they only have to pull a few new ones. And if we put all the lights and connect all the outlets ourselves after we drywall then it knocks off 20% of the price. I’m willing to work to save 20%.

I sat down and figured the money for the renovations and *gulp* it is scary. Does anyone really like to spend that much money all at once? I keep telling myself that it is like we bought a slightly more expensive house, that is all. And in the end our equity will just go up because a finished and updated house will sell for more and faster than a broken mismatched one, if we ever decide to sell. I don’t see myself as a house flipper anytime in the future, but you never know.

I thought about it and to save money where I can I am going to not add lights to the living room or hallway. It cam be done another time and isn’t necessary anyways.

I had fun with the kids today. Evangeline and Noah and I watched the tree trimmers swinging from the branches of the neighbor’s tree. I guess they were thinning out the dead, crowded branches.

I made some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies for an afterschool snack. They are my favorite, not the kids, apparently. Some of them ate some. Lauren and Michael both came up to me and asked if we could take some to neighbors. How thoughtful of them! We took some to two neighbors and there wasn’t enough for the third one but I’ll make bread for the other one another day soon.

After a dinner of spaghettios for the kids (they begged for a few days) Alex and I had sausage and sauerkraut, we helped the kids with their homework and then the kids all piled on Alex and me. They chose to watch Disney’s Robin Hood. I worked on some stuff on my phone as I had seen the movie hundreds of times.

We read scriptures and said prayer and the older kids started asking questions. They wanted to know about the election and what was at stake and what each side stood for. It also brought up questions of what is the difference between fascism, socialism, Marxism, communism, capitalism, etc. Big questions for 15, 13, and 11 year olds. I went to youtube and found some PragerU videos and it explained it all pretty well and in a condensed way so we weren’t up all night.

Well, I had to stay up because right before bed a child let’s me know they need their dress clothes for a choir thing the next day. The clothes are dirty. So I stayed up to wash two loads and woke up early to dry a load. I do make my kids do their own laundry sometimes because they need to know how to do it but with my laundry room in chaos it’s just easier for me to do it. The past few days I have not been able to vent the dryer outside because when we moved it to where it will go the vent hose wasn’t long enough. Alex said he would vent it to the outside for me later today. So I’m grateful that normal is coming soon.

Gardens and Family

The weekend was so busy!

Friday and Saturday was spent on errand running and yardwork. Usually I am the first one on the block to have my flower garden in. Not this year. I was the last. I don’t think I’ll do that again. The nursery near my house was completely out of flowers. We came home and loaded the kids into the van just to get them out of the house and to make the yearly pilgrimage to our usual nursery for plants. Most of the kids enjoy it. They all get to pick out several flowers for the gardens and they have fun doing it. My flower gardens are never the same color year after year. I also have what I have dubbed my “odd” garden. When the kids pick or random flowers I have no idea what to do with then so I plant them all in this one garden so they can look at their choices. It’s always colorful.

Gardens always look so sparse when the flowers are just babies. (And I did spray those weeds and yes, there is still a lot of work to do. So much work!)

In my front garden- sorry, no pictures yet- I had two daylily plants that have been getting bigger every year. I finally divided them. I dug them out and Alex and I chopped them into three or four each and spread them farther apart in the garden. Yay! Now I’ve got more foliage going on. I’ve just got to wait for the tulips to finish dying back for the year. They are taking forever and look very haggard.

Luckily, the one flowers, Alyssum, that I grow every year reseeded themselves because both nurseries were completely sold out of them.

Enough garden talk.

Sunday, Father’s Day, was pretty laid back. We took our time getting ready for church (actually I hadn’t washed Alex’s white shirt so we waited while it washed) and then finally at noon we had church. Michael gave a talk about the importance of having a father in the home leading and supporting the family. While he was talking a circus broke out. Gideon’s nose started bleeding and it was a bit of a mess. I think Michael kept talking through it all. Haha.

Later Alex made his own dinner. He had a specific meal in mind and made it. I was good and he didn’t make too big of a mess. Marinated chicken cooked on the grill and roasted vegetables and rice. I made oatmeal cookie sandwiches with marshmallow frosting. Bit of a mess because the frosting was sticky but it tasted good.

That morning I had received an email from the family history site I am a member of that said they’d found a hint for a relative. It was the 1900 United States Census. I love looking at the census records. This time was kind of the jackpot in one way but a really upsetting puzzle in another. In this particular census it had my great-great grandparents and their kids. (My dad’s dad’s mom’s parents.) The big shocker was there were two kids on there I didn’t know existed. I’ve been working on this family tree for over 20 years. Technology and indexing (connecting records to people’s name so they are searchable) is making more information available every day. If you haven’t ever indexed you should, it is fun to do.

Anyways, there were two more kids! An eleven year old boy and a one month old girl. The problem came in when that was all the information I could find. Alex and I spent a couple hours looking everywhere. Cemetery records, obituaries, and trying to find the 1890 census that the one kid would have been one year old in. Fruitless pursuit because it turns out that the 1890 census records were badly burned in a fire. The 1910 census we looked at was a sad record. The father had died and the two kids I had found, well their names aren’t listed as living with their widowed mother. The son could possibly be living elsewhere as he would have been 21, but we couldn’t find any mention of him anywhere but that one 1900 census. The baby girl would have been 10 but she was gone also. My great-great grandparents had 11 kids that we know of but only 8 made it to adulthood. It was exciting but incredibly frustrating and sad at the same time.

Before we turned in for the night Alex drew up the plans for the new window we are putting in. I need a drawing of the plans in order to get a permit. When the window guy was here I said I wanted the window to be the same size as the window in my daughters’ room. I had never measured it. Um, I should have. The window doesn’t look that big in the bedroom. It is 60 inches long! Alex drew the outline on the wall where we are putting the window and it takes up most of the wall! Its huge! I mean I am okay with it and that’s good because it is already ordered. I wanted the window for light because that room is dark and I am thinking that big window will definitely do the trick.