Crazy Busy

Well, it’s been a little while since we’ve written. That’s because it’s been crazy busy around here. Michael started his Mohs surgery rotation. It is a very busy schedule and I can tell he’s tired, but I think he’s enjoying it. This last weekend he took the boys to the annual Fathers and Sons church campout. Although they got there late on Friday night after Michael got home from work, the boys had fun and slept well for Michael. They had fun around the campfire and then played in the river the next day before returning home. While they were gone, I had plans to get a lot done. I was invited over to my friend, Julie’s house after Michael and the boys left Friday night and we had fun just talking for a few hours. When I got home, I started the demo work on the upstairs bathroom. I removed the toilet and pulled off all the tiles that ran along the base of the walls, then I started working on pulling up the tiles and boards on the floor. It was being rather difficult, so I took a break from the floors and moved to the walls. It took me a few hours, but with the little crow bar and the drywall saw I was able to remove all the tiles and drywall on the walls up to the ceiling surrounding the tub. That was a lot of work, and I was glad when I finished with that (especially since I could then remove the mask I was wearing in case there was lead dust that was quite uncomfortable). I got to bed around 2am, but I had been planning all week to get up early Saturday morning to go to the Rochester farmer’s market downtown, so I set the alarm for 5am.


After hitting the snooze button for an hour, I got up and headed downtown. I was glad to find that there were indeed lots of nice plants for very inexpensive prices, and I stocked up on plants for our garden. I got some spinach, 2 kinds of lettuce, cucumber, zucchini, eggplant, broccoli, 3 kinds of basil, a variety of different kinds and colors of tomatoes, and a lot of strawberry plants (and there were 4 different kinds of strawberries, so they should be ripe at different times of the season, hopefully). I also found a really pretty lilac bush that’s about 3 or 4 feet tall and has a few dark purple flowers. I took the double stroller to carry all of the plants in, which turned out to be a smart idea because it would have been impossible to carry all that in bags through the crowded market aisles – but I did get a lot of comments from people asking if I’d traded my kids for all the plants. It was really cool to go to the market. I enjoyed it a lot, and would like to go more often, but it was pretty crowded (and I overheard some of the vendors saying it wasn’t the most crowded time of the season yet), and would be pretty difficult to go with all the kids if you wanted to do more than just browse and pick up a few vegetables or something. So it was nice to get that chance to go by myself. When I got home I pulled out an ugly little pine bush that was growing in our front yard (which took me longer than I expected), and I planted the lilac. Then I got working back on the bathroom, cleaning up the tile and stuff I’d torn down the night before. Michael got home pretty worn out, and we got the kids down for naps. We decided to plant the plants in the garden while the boys were napping (and while it was still daylight out). It took a while, but we got it all planted and watered and were pleased with how it turned out. We still have lots of space to put in more plants in the garden, but it was good to get those in – and we already have a few little green tomatoes and strawberries starting to come in, how exciting! I’m just really crossing my fingers that we are able to do everything right and that the garden really will produce a lot of veggies and berries, that way all the hard work will be worth it.

After dinner and getting the boys to bed, Michael and I got back to work on the bathroom. We cleaned it all up (vacuuming up all the dust so we wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of lead anymore). Then we removed the vanity and started back in on the floor. After getting the little area of flooring by the door out, the materials under the tile changed and it was this really hard wood that we were having a lot of trouble removing. With a lot of effort we were able to pry up a little square of the flooring by standing on our little crowbar. But then we stopped that technique when we tried doing the same thing with the next portion of flooring and we punched a hole through the subfloor (the lower flooring that we were not trying to remove). The board under the tile was just a lot harder than the subfloor. After trying everything we could think of and calling both of our dads for suggestions, we finally cleaned up and gave up on a pretty good-sized section of the floor for the night, even though the people who were coming to work on the bathroom were arriving on Monday morning at 7:30am and we were not going to work on it on a Sunday so we were out of time.

So, at church the next day we asked our friend, Spencer, to borrow his circular saw, and he brought it over that night along with another kind of saw. He suggested using the other saw first, saying that it was meant to cut through metal and everything else and it could be bent and wouldn’t break so it would do a good job of cutting through the nails in between the layers of flooring. He was afraid that the circular saw blade could break if it hit a nail and then injure us, but he left us both saws to use. We set our alarm for midnight and got up to start working again after Sunday was over. We started with the other saw and broke the blade on it within about 5 minutes. So then we used the crow bar to pry up the top layer of particle board bit by bit, so we could see where the nails were to avoid them. Then after making two passes with the circular saw, the entire floor came up – we were glad for that, since we expected it might have taken quite a bit more cutting. After cleaning up, Michael headed to bed (so he’d be able to stay awake through his day of surgery on Monday), and I stayed up a while longer because I wanted to get a little paint up around the edges where the tiles and baseboards were going to go, just so it’d be easier than painting around all those little edges later on. I went to bed at 4am, but at least we got it done in time.

I got up at 7am Monday morning so I’d be ready when the guys came to work on the bathroom, and things have moved along pretty well with the whole job since then. The first day they fixed the plumbing (they moved the showerhead and the shower handle up higher, and changed it from three handles to one for the shower and tub), they got the alcove framed out in the shower wall, and got the backer board down on the floors and walls around the tub. Then yesterday they got the tile on part of the floor done and about 2/3 of the walls. Yesterday was a rather rough day, since two of the boys woke up throwing up in the morning (which is a little difficult when you only have one toilet in the house), but luckily both the boys were acting fine by lunchtime, and everyone continues to seem healthy today. Last night I took Eli to a meeting for new kindergarteners and their parents, which he really enjoyed – he didn’t want to leave the school when we were done. When we got home, we put the boys to bed and then Michael and I decided last minute to stain the vanity a dark color. I ran to the store to get some supplies while Michael sanded, and we got it all sanded and the first coat of stain on last night. Then I went to put on the second coat this morning, and realized by the time that I finished that, that it was not working well. I don’t know if it’s just the grain of the wood or if we didn’t do it right (although we followed the instructions), or if it would have been better to use something else (my dad said that he uses a sealant first so the wood will take the stain more evenly, and then he prefers to use a gel stain in layers to have better control over the darkness, but I learned all those good suggestions this morning, after I’d already done the second coat on the vanity). It turned out with lots of spots on the wood that didn’t take the stain for one reason or another, and several places where little bubbles were coming up after I stained it. Also, after letting it dry all day today, it’s still much more red than the dark brown that I wanted (although I do realize that more coats of stain would make it darker). Needless to say, though, it didn’t look nice. [Ok, I learned my lesson – don’t take on new, spur-of-the-moment, time sensitive projects in the middle of the night.] And being faced with sanding it again, re-staining, and then possibly having unsatisfactory results again (and running out of time, if we want the bathroom remodeling guys to install the vanity and sink when they are done with the tiling tomorrow), I went and found a new vanity. It looks nice, and is a nice dark wood color, which will go well in the bathroom. So, at least I’m done stressing over that.

This afternoon I painted the base board white, and they will install that tomorrow too. They said that they expect to be done tomorrow, and the person they have subcontracted to re-glaze the tub white will do that on Friday so the job will be entirely done this week (which is ahead of schedule). The bathroom is really looking amazing, so we’re super excited to have that finished. Well, I’d better run – we have to pick up one more little piece of wood for the bathroom job (yes, two trips to Home Depot in one day with all the kids – oh well). Then the dog needs a good walk.

We absolutely love this dog, by the way. He’s so good – with the help of a new kind of collar he has learned not to pull and is doing well with remembering to walk next to me instead of in front of me almost all the time now. I taught him the other day to sit whenever he fetches the ball (because he was so excited when he’d bring us the ball that he would jump on it as we tried to pick it up and sometimes accidentally scratch our hands, and I was surprised how quickly he picked it up – now he brings back the ball, drops it, and almost always sits down right away without even being told. And he’s house trained – although I’m pretty sure that he was before we got him, but he’s done well at our house with that. And we’ve trained him to only go in one spot in the back of the yard behind some trees and bushes, and he does really well with that now too. He has also learned that Michael likes to sit on the ground and rub his tummy, but I prefer to sit on the couch and have him sit next to me on the floor and I’ll pet his back – he has calmed down and acts gentler with me than when we first got him. And he has also calmed down in general – not quite as hyper as he seemed when we first brought him home. And it has been great for us to get more exercise too – going on at least one walk a day, and playing ball a few times a day has got to be good for us too. We also had two different friends from the neighborhood over this week with their dogs – a black lab and a golden retriever, and although they played kind of roughly at first, they calmed down and did well together, and Brax was very worn out – great exercise. So, even though it’s a little more work to have a dog, it really has been great. I’m taking him to the vet tomorrow to have him weighed – he was underweight when we got him, and the vet said it’d take about 2 weeks of feeding him extra for him to fill out, and he still looks just as thin to us after 3 ½ weeks, so hopefully everything will turn out well with that.

Anyways, I’d better run. I talked to Michael for a minute earlier today and we are going to take the night off tonight. :) After the kids go to bed, we’re going to relax – no bathroom, no garden, no sanding or staining, and no other projects. I’m going to make some treats, and we’re going to sit down and do nothing productive at all. And we’ll just ignore the fact that the kitchen sink is full of dishes, the clean laundry hasn’t been put away yet, and we’re running low on groceries (until tomorrow when I’m planning on a trip to the grocery store). That will be nice. I’d better get things done so we really can just relax for a couple hours.