Switching Rooms

Our big accomplishment last weekend was changing rooms around.  Anna, Grace, and Faith switched rooms with Caleb and Jonathan.  The 3 girls had been sleeping in the smallest bedroom, on a set of twin bunkbeds with a pull-out trundle.  Faith slept on the trundle, and with it always out, the room was even smaller!  So now they are sleeping on a bunkbed with a twin on top and a full on the bottom (perpendicular to the twin).  Except Anna doesn't want to take her turn on the top bunk, and Grace doesn't want to sleep up there all the time (and I declared Faith, who does want to sleep up there, too young, LOL).  So the past few nights either Anna or Grace has slept on a little pallet on the floor.  Sigh.  Crazy girls!  I think eventually the sleeping situation will work itself out, and the rest of the room is so much nicer for the girls!  We bought these cubes from Target, and the girls have their barbies, Polly Pocket stuff, books, etc. on there.  Before they really didn't have a good place for those things, and it was a source of real frustration for me (I don't think it bothered them one bit though).  There is also more room for them to actually play with said dolls on the floor in front of the bed than in the old room with the trundle out.

Here is the girls' old room/Caleb and Jonathan's new room.  They don't have to have the trundle out, so they are thrilled with all the space!  We still need to hang up their pictures from art class, as well as Jonathan's set of hooks, a present many moons ago from Aunt Amy!  We also turned the bed bunks.  They used to be along the wall with the window, blocking the window.  The room is so much nicer with more light coming in!  Looking at the window reminds me that I need to get some new curtains for this room, LOL. 

My original brainstorm for the move was that Micah could sleep on the trundle with the older 2 boys.  I have since changed my mind on that.  Micah is not at an exceptionally obediant phase right now, and he loves, loves, loves to climb up on that top bunk.  If I put him down in there for a nap or at night, I am sure he would be up there in half a second, and I do not have time right now to camp outside the door, waiting to catch him trying, and discipline him!  Drew is sleeping pretty well, so I am hoping to just go ahead and put them in the same room--Drew in a pack-n-play, and Micah still in his crib, at least until Micah is older.  But that won't be until Drew is sleeping through the night pretty reliably, so he'll still be in our room for a little while longer. 

In the meantime, it was a wonderful excuse to go through clothes, throw away a ton of trash in both rooms, and generally clean house upstairs!  I think it was about my only big accomplishment this break, LOL, even though there are tons of other areas of our house that need the same treatment!

. . . And After

Well, before any "after" shots, here is one "in the middle" picture. We moved all the toys into the entryway first, leaving the big pieces of furniture--a bookshelf, an armoire that was a home to stuffed animals, and a black desk--in the living room. Wow--that's a bunch of toys! Now you can see why we don't have big birthday parties for the kids!

With all the cleaning and moving, several missing things came to light, such as puzzle pieces, and several Little People. We were also able to find the matches for all 9 pairs of cowboy boots that own. I kept 4 pairs upstairs and put the rest in the basement!

So here is our new schoolroom. I still have all my books in the study, in those 3 big double bookcases, but the boys can do their work here. And we put the laptops on the black desk, where you can see Luke, so now we won't be tripping over the cords! I put all my science stuff, plus other misc. school stuff, in the big armoire back in the left corner. Close the doors, and the clutter is gone1 What a concept! We do need to get another lamp for the front of the room. The one torch light was fine for a playroom, but we need a bit more light for schoolwork! I am VERY happy with this room. It is going to be so nice this year!

And here you can see some of the new playroom. It's right off the kitchen, so it's even easier to toss the toys which somehow migrate into the kitchen back into their home territory. And the room has French doors, plus a door going into the kitchen, so I can close them all when the girls are too loud! Well, I probably won't, unless we're having Rivendell over or something, but it's a nice option! Everything fit into the new room except our keyboard, which is currently still in the entryway, right outside the bathroom. Convenient! That will not be its permanent home, however. I've moving it down to the basement. The girls are enjoying the new playroom just fine. We do need to get something to shorten the chandelier chain though--I bonked my head on it a few times already!

Before . . .

When we were in Ohio, I had a reorganizing brainstorm one night. The day before we left to drive to Ohio, we had a Rivendell meeting ar Siri's house. Siri lives in a beautiful old house, and we met in her dining room/schoolroom, which is a huge room at the front of the house. She has a big table in there, along with lots of cupboards, school desks, filing cabinets, etc, as well as plenty of room to move around the table. I left thinking how nice it would be to have so much room. Our dining room is where the boys are doing more and more of their school, and that is often where the laptops end up. But we don't have anything against the wall, so there are always cords stretching to the wall, which are huge tripping hazards! I also store all my science lab supplies in the dining room, and we have this really comfortable pink chair that our neighbors gave us when it didn't sell at a garage sale. So things are pretty crowded in there!

Here are Luke and our neighbor, playing the computer, with school clutter surrounding them. You can see the pink chair in the corner.

This is a better view of the lovely wire shelves, pulled straight from our garage just because I needed SOME kind of shelves right away, where my science lab supplies are. The big box on top is the microscope. And there on the floor is my new (to me) copy of TOG year 2! As a side note, the almond joys on the table are NOT mine. Anyone who knows me knows I absolutely detest coconut with an undying loathing. Just wanted to make that clear.


We do, however, have lots of space in our playroom--which is technically our formal living room, except there is obviously nothing formal about it, LOL. When we moved in (7 years ago?!?!), we knew we didn't want or need another room with a couch, especially one which we never used. So we made the room a playroom, and it has worked out great. We have always had lots of kids playing in it! You can see I didn't trouble myself to really straighten anything up before taking these pictures. I'm all about keeping it real, LOL. But it is a bigger, wider room than the dining room, which got me thinking . . .

So my big brainstorm was to switch the two rooms around, and make the dining room the playroom, and the living room the schoolroom. Wednesday we had friends over in the morning, but starting that afternoon, moving the rooms was our big project for the rest of the week.

Bob's Big Home Improvement Project

This is another way that Bob has spent the last week--the one filled with over-90-degree temperatures. At the top of a very high ladder, working on the trim on our house! He had noticed that there was some definite rot going on way up there, so he took the old piece of wood off (cutting it into several sections to get it down), and then he put up new wood. That he carried up just in 2 sections--we were all a little worried about that, but the Lord was protecting him, thankfully!

Nathan, Luke and I were ladder-moving assistants. One person would stand on the bottom rung so we could swing the ladder away from the house without it slipping out on us. Then we would GINGERLY carry it a few feet (praying madly that it wouldn't go out of control and fall, hitting our neighbors' house--yes, the ones that don't like the trampoline!), set it down, hop back on the bottom rung, and carefully lean it back against the house. Whew! Definitely not a one-man job, moving that monster!

The ladder was actually a huge gift from God. We were out walking one evening several weeks ago when we noticed this ladder laying down along the curb outside a house on a different cul-de-sac. This family had just had a bunch of landscaping work done, so we were wondering if maybe the landscaping crew had just left the ladder or something. At the end of the walk, Bob rang the guy's doorbell and just flat-out asked if the ladder was out for the trash (which was going to be collected the next day). The guy said yes, so Bob and the boys took it on back to our house! It's a 40 foot ladder, which would be quite expensive, so we were so incredibly thankful! Most people in our area just hire people to take care of all their outside house stuff, and the man was definitely older, so he probably just decided he was never going up a ladder like that again, so why let it take up space?! Whatever, we are appreciative! Bob has also cleaned out gutters and installed gutter screens over them, which he couldn't do with our old ladder, since we have a two-story with a walk-out basement. Those back gutters are REALLY high! I think we will all breathe a big sigh of relief when we don't need to move the ladder around anymore, though. It's a scary job, an accident waiting to happen!

Major Tree Trimming

We have a huge tree in front of our house--a "willow oak" I now know, since I finally got around to identifying it. (When Amy was out visiting several years ago, she said she thought it was some kind of oak, but it wasn't in my handy-dandy Michigan Trees book from botany class in college, so I never confirmed that. Bob wonders when Amy's friends will stop doubting her, LOL!) Anyhow, this tree just keeps growing and growing, and we have not spent much time cutting it back or shaping it or anything really. We were taking a walk last week, and we noticed how most other people with this kind of tree have the lowest branches a lot higher than ours, and consequently, their trees don't look like they are taking over their front yards, as our did. So we got busy yesterday.
Many, many large branches were cut off. We were ruthless! And the difference is so amazing. The whole front yard just opened up! You can see our house from the street! I wish I had a "before" picture, but I really didn't think about it. Bob was up on the ladder using this new electric reciprocating saw he got not too long ago. It worked really well! Here is Nathan demostrating how to use this fine saw to cut branches into appropriately sized lengths for future fire pit use.

Luke also had several turns with the new saw. Plenty of cutting to go around!

Caleb was an awesome helper in toting all these new logs back to our wood pile in the back yard.

It truly was an all-day project. After dinner, we went back out there and bundled up all the branches that didn't get cut up for firewood so the trash guys will take them.

So here is a picture of the tree in its entirety. Note how you can see the front lights on the house--Bob just replaced them, so they are really nice, but you couldn't even see them before, unless you were walking on the front walk up to our door! I don't know how tall the tree is, but we have a 2 story colonial house with 9 foot ceilings on the main floor, so it's pretty tall! We've never actually had big trees in our yard before in any other house we've lived in. and now we don't feel like the branches are about to poke our eyes out if we walk across the yard!

Proof in Pictures

This morning Bob took most of the kids swimming at our local rec center. Luke and I stayed home, and we tackled the garage. We made some serious progress (sorry, no "before" pictures, LOL), and we wanted to be sure to record that progress because I am sure before a day or two goes by, the garage will somehow fall out of order, and everything will be strewn about all over the floor. But for right now--look at all that floor!
In fact, if it weren't for the lovely red pole in the middle of the garage, and the fact that we have 2 doors, we could actually park a van in here! But since we can't park in the middle, we instead have a set of shelves and all Bob's tool stuff there. It's like the tool corral at Home Depot.

Speaking of the 2 garage doors, Bob came up with a brilliant use of that space awhile back. He made a plywood box with rubber on the bottom to fit in the space between the 2 garage doors. This is where the boys put all their hockey sticks (theoretically of course. In practice, they dump them on the floor wherever they happen to land, until Luke and I clean the garage . . .) Then he screwed a green kitchen trashcan (our old one before we got our lovely stainless one) to the box, and this is where their Rip Stiks go. Then in front of that is a 5 gallon Lowes bucket with a circle drilled out of the top, which is lined with a piece of a pool noodle. That is where the lacrosse sticks go, as well as the big plastic hockey sticks for Anna and Grace. Isn't that nice?

Not all of our storage is high-tech, however. We have boxes full of bike helmets, wrist and knee pads, and roller blades. And since no one can immediately find their pair, the whole box inevitably gets dumped out. Grrr. So we need a better system, but 6-7 pairs of roller blades do not take up a trivial amount of space! Clearly we need, at the very least, a bigger box!

Here is one last bonus picture. Faith is eating yogurt and demonstrating her ability to make a huge mess. You should see the garage once she's had a shot at it! She does have a lovely strawberry on her forehead. This is a result of a faceplant she did on the street during one of our nightly walks. She wanted to be out of the stroller and walking with everyone else, but she went a little fast and tripped. She still didn't want to be in the stroller though, LOL. Anna and Grace are always glad to take her place for awhile.

Good Neighbors

We have a book called The Berenstain Bears and the Eager Beavers. In this classic tale, the Berenstains get some new neighbors--a family of beavers. The Bear family is a real casual, fun-loving family who would rather play games than take care of things around the house. The Beavers, however, are hardworking and industrious,and they never "waste" time playing games. So they immediately embark on all these ambitious projects around their house to make it look nicer. I won't spoil the ending, but let's just say that eventually Junior Beaver turns out to be a natural at paddle ball.

Well, I am sure you can imagine what kind of family we are more like. We have a lot of kids, all of whom love being outside. And of course we have lots of outside toys for all those kids, the newest one being the very large trampoline. And we don't have any sort of "professional" landscaping.

Our next door neighbors are a very nice family of fellow believers. They have 2 daughters who are spaced a respectable 4 years apart so one of them is finishing her second year of college, and one is finishing her second year of high school. They are all quiet and very, very hardworking. The mom, "Rose", is very talented with flowers and landscaping, and their yard is a place of beauty and curb appeal.

Their yard got hit pretty hard with all the snow we had this part winter, so they lost some trees in the back. One tree in particular fell onto the deck of the house behind them. It was a large evergreen tree, so when they took it down, it really left a big hole in the yard, and now the house behind them is quite visible from their kitchen and family room. Also, their yard has had some issues with drainage over the years, with water rushing down through the back from up the street. So several weeks ago they started working on their back yard. And they worked like real troopers--out there all day, digging ditches for a drainage pipe with pickaxes, renting equipment, etc. They put in a sprinkler system and and a big pipe for drainage, and they tore up all their grass. They ended up resodding, and on the Saturday before we left for VA Beach, Rose planted a bunch of shrubs and flowers in the back corner of the yard, where it adjoins with ours.

That same Saturday Bob had been working out in our yard. Our yard always looks like it has 7 kids running through it, and this year we have tried hard to reseed parts of it to make it thicker. Bob also bought a few very small trees and planted them. He bought a pine tree for the front yard, over on the side where our yards adjoin, and was planning on planting it, but "David" told him he didn't want him to plant it. So Bob took it back and told the lady at Lowes, "My neighbor didn't approve." LOL!

Anyhow, David mentioned to Bob that we aren't supposed to keep our trash cans on the side of the house. This is true--it actually says that in our HOA covenants, stupid things. We're supposed to keep them "out of public view", but a lot of people in our neighborhood just keep them wherever is convenient--on the side, in the front in between the 2 garage doors, etc.--so we didn't really think much about it. I mean they are those rolling trash containers that everyone has. Who cares?! Well, evidently our neighbors do, and we hadn't realized exactly how deeply they care. So Bob decided to move our trash cans into the back yard, and not just in the back yard. He would move them all the way into the back yard, into the far corner, so that they were as far away from the front yard as possible, which is what he figured they wanted. So he did.

I was innocently cleaning out the big van in preparation for our trip when Rose came storming out of her house to me. She told me she had NEVER been as furious as she was now, and she didn't know WHAT Bob thought he was doing, but she had spent ALL DAY working to make a FOCAL POINT in her back yard, and now he MOVED. THOSE. TRASH. CANS. RIGHT where she could see them out her back windows!!!!! She went on for awhile more, but the gist of it all was that she tried really hard to make her house and yard a place of peace and serenity, and she couldn't do that with us around. Ack! I sat there and was very humble and contrite and calm, and assured her I would move the cans immediately. She was mollified and went back inside. I was shaking and felt so bad because it was very obvious that these things had been building up for quite awhile, and we had no idea.

We got back from the beach Thursday afternoon, and a few hours after we were home, Rose came over with a letter. In it she explained how they feel we fall short in the yard-upkeep area, and how they dislike our trampoline, which we never even got approval for from our architectural review board before we bought. Also, our kids are distracting for her while they are on it, and they want us to move it farther from their house. Also, she feels that although we say we want a good relationship with them, our actions fall short because we deliberately do things to antagonize them, like move the trash cans right to where they can see them even better.

So even though Bob and I were very tired and I had a huge headache, we stayed up composing a letter back to them. Obviously the first and most important thing is that Rose feels that we were doing things on purpose, when in fact we were cluelessly just bumbling along, thinking we were doing what they wanted, not realizing what their actual real beef was. She was putting motives on our actions that simply were not there at all! We addressed their other issues as well. We said that moving the trampoline would be difficult because we have such a small backyard, and it would involve cutting off several larger branches. We said we were willing to move it, but we wanted them to come over and help us figure out where, because we didn't want to move it and have them not be satisfied with it, since it appears the issue really is the existence of the trampoline. Also, it never even occurred to us to seek approval from the ARB, since it's not some big building thing, and other houses in the neighborhood have trampolines right out in the open.

I went over Friday afternoon with the letter, and Rose and I had a great conversation. I reiterated how we were absolutely not doing anything too deliberately provoke them, and we were so sorry that was how it had appeared. We talked about the trampoline, and she said they were getting used to it. I told her that the kids wouldn't be on it as often as they had been. For one thing, it was still new. For another thing, we had been doing the test review, and I was sending all the other kids outside while I was working with each individual child. The weather was so beautiful, and it worked out really well. I told her we homeschool year-around, and the kids really aren't outside before the afternoon. She said she couldn't ask us to not be on it in the morning, so she was a lot more reasonable about everything. I think having communication was really helpful, and we both felt better about the whole situation.

But I still have struggles. For one thing, I know we will disappoint them again. We simply can't keep our yard to their standards, and our kids love to play outside! The boys picked up a second hockey goal from the trash pile of a house up the street, so now we have 2 "rescued" goals on the side of the house where the trash cans used to sit. Is that any better to look at?! I'm sure not, although there are no covenants about that I don't think. But that doesn't mean Rose won't simmer with resentment over them for a few years.

The strange dichotomy for our area is that everyone has really large houses. Everyone. Our house is over 4000 sq. feet, with 6 bedrooms. It's wonderful for our big family! I don't know what everyone else does with all the space, LOL. But our yard is small--only 1/4 acre, and our house footprint is fairly large--and so it our garage. It's a 2 car garage, with a big post in the middle of it, and no extra room on any of the 3 sides. In Ohio we had a one story, 4 bedroom house with an ENORMOUS garage--3 cars, with all sorts of extra room! It was bigger than many apartments! So now we have 8 bikes, a wagon, several different strollers, hockey quipment, roller blades, soccer stuff, baseball stuff, Bob's tools, extra toilet paper and paper towels, a freezer, a refrigerater . . . in a small garage. We don't have room for our trash cans! (The garage is where Rose thinks we should keep our trash cans, since that is where they keep theirs.)

So now I just worry that our kids are being too loud, that we have too much stuff, even though it's all played with, that we are just a source of stress for other people. It's hard to just relax outside anymore. And it's hard to understand the different priorities. Obviously they value their yard and peace more than children. But they are Christians! Even if they decided not to have as many as we do, it would seem like they would still see the value of children! And our kids really aren't wild and loud, tearing up stuff and causing huge scenes. They just play outside like kids USED to play, before everything was scheduled and there was no informal play and childhood obesity was a huge problem. Except we don't have that problem here. Hmmmm.

I'm also struggling with exactly what is expected of us, as far as being good neighbors. How much of it is our responsibility to ensure people around us don't take offence at us and our big family, and how much of it is just us living normally and their needing to relax. It's a hard balance, especially with us being Christians and wanting to be a good testimony to Christ. We really don't want to cause confrontations and problems, but we also just want to live in the house the WE purchased, and enjoy our own yard! Three acres in the country has never before looked so tempting . . .

Finally . . . Kitchen Pictures!

I finally got around to taking pictures of the new countertops in the kitchen, so here they are! I love not having the tile backsplash! I really hated that. Looking at plain wall is sooo much nicer and easier to clean!
Here is a close-up of the granite. It's brownish with black flecks.

We took more off the island. Through that doorway is the laundry room and the garage. This walkway is by far the most traficked area of the house! So why would the builder put an island there with a huge overhanging ledge for stools? How could you possibly have a BREAKFAST BAR in this narrow walkway?! After a year or 2, Bob sawed off about 6 inches of the monster. That made it better, but I still could not carry a laundry basket through without having to either dip it down or raise it up to get it past the island. So we made the granite island an additional 4 inches smaller. We took a total of 10 inches off the island! Isn't that crazy?! The family before us had 5 kids--how did they manage? They had a huge fridge too! Well, it's tons better now.

And finally here is my beloved new undermount sink. The garbage disposal is still on the left side, so now it is under the big part of the sink, not the little part. I love it! I never understood why the disposal was under the small side. When I would dump things into it, water would splash out, and I was forever picking nasty stuff out of the grate at the bottom of the big part. No more! We had them drill a hole for my dish soap dispenser. I do like having that.

So good riddance to that nasty old tile and grout. I don't miss it a bit! I still can't believe it's gone, to be honest--throughout the day I still look over and am amazed at what I am seeing in the kitchen! When I made biscuits a few nights ago, it was SO wonderful to be able to roll them out RIGHT ON the counter! I haven't made bread yet, but I can't wait for that either!