Finally Some Pictures

I finally got around to putting pictures on the computer, so now you all can see some if the improvements we've been making! We'll start with the carpet, which is berber.
You may be noticing our "bound" runner going from the kitchen eating area to the study (and basement), a very high-traffic path. This was a remnant from the installation, and we knew we didn't want to waste it. We also knew we didn't want to pay $2.00 a foot to have it professionally bound, so we did the next best thing: we used duct tape. Yes, this rug is semi-professionally bound with 3 layers of your highest quality off-white duct tape on each side! It certainly does the job. That was Elizabeth L's brilliant cost-saving suggestion, so if we had any kind of "Suggestion of the Month" award, she would definitely win!

And here we have the "powder room" on the main floor, with the new tile, toilet, vanity, mirror and light fixture. And the paint! We can't forget that! Actually, you really can't, because if you had seen this bathroom before, you would know that it was painted a light blue with some sort of sponging technique that sort of looked cloud-like. This very light tan paint color really makes it look totally different. We got the vanity and mirror as a set from Home Depot. I think they look really nice, although Bob had tons of troubles with the sink. He even had to return the first sink basin because the bottom part was crooked, so it would never seal right.

We really got fancy with the toilet, getting one that offers a "low-water" flush for "liquid waste", as well as a higher flow flush for those pesky solids. So far it is also doing its job, which is as good a report as one could for a toilet, LOL.

This is our basement storage room, which is under our kitchen and laundry room. It's the only unfinished part of the house. The past few months we had gotten really bad about just shoving boxes, bags of clothes, etc. in there willy-nilly. While the kids and I were in Ohio, Nathan had cleared a small space in the middle of it and set up our weight bench, but the rest of it was a real obstacle course. It took quite a while Saturday, but I can say things are back to being organized in there! This is where I let the boys play Lincoln Logs and army men. These 2 things go together, and they have a tendency to take over any room. At least in the storage room they can leave their elaborate battle set-ups and forts up and keep playing with them, except that lately there has bveen no room. As soo as I took this picture on Saturday, the boys immediately set up operations for WWIII in there, and the whole front space is filled again. The good thing is that they can disappear for hours playing in there, and it is so nice and quiet on the main floor!

I had wanted to take a picture of the whole family room, so you could see the odd spectacle of bare walls, but almost as soon as I had taken the picture of the carpet runner, Anna and Grace set up shop in the family room. I didn't feel like cleaning it up again, and I didn't particularly want to share all the clutter with everyone either, LOL. But I did take this small picture of Anna's "minivan". She and Grace are on this little phase where they move all the little chairs, strollers, baby high chair, etc. into a room, put them all together in lines, and then load their baby dolls up in them. That's because it's their minivan! Many years ago my brother Dan gave Nathan and Luke this "Tonka Joe" computer game, which had this totally cool dashboard/steering wheel thing that went over your keyboard for the game controls. Well, the girls aren't so interested in Tonka Joe, not that it would even run on our computers anymore, LOL, but they sure love the steering wheel part! And thiss minvan gets around too. They lug those chairs all over the place--dining room, play room, entry way, and of course the family room. Sometimes they have so much seating, it is more like a school bus.

I must confess the other reason why it's taken me so long to post these pictures. I have really wanted to start doing all my blogging on the laptops, but I have not been able to figure out the best way to do my pictures on them. On my main frame, I can upload the pictures from my camera using the Canon software that came with it (although I can't find any discs or anything to put it on the other computers). Then I use this HP software to crop, rotate, resize, etc. so I can blog the pictures. We have some HP software on the laptops, but I can't figure out to how edit with it. Totally not self-explanatory or obvious. So today I spent a good deal of time downloading Picasa on one laptop, since I know people use that. I put the memory card from my camera into the computer too, so all 1218 pictures from it are also on the computer. But they don't seem to be in any nice date-organized folders, and when I put them on Picasa, I could not figure out what on earth to do with them AT. ALL. I couldn't resize them, and I couldn't even figure out how to select more than one of them to blog, even though it said you could upload 4 at a time to Blogger. All I could do was rotate the pictures. Grrr. So I was very frustrated, and I went back to my very old, very slow, desktop computer, where at least I have a workable routine. There you have it--I'm not a technology lover. I guess sometimes old is better. I am, however, open to suggestions, tutorials, etc.