Entry Way Progress

Back in May, I wrote a bit about how I was trying to finish the entry way project that's been going on in our tiny entry way for YEARS. 

At the beginning of June, Shannon had texted Jeremy about coming over to do some work in there that was the next step. We were at my parents' but [unbeknownst to me] Jeremy told Shannon to go ahead and let himself in to the house if he wanted to. So Shannon and Dawn spent their day at our house working!  Dawn sent me this photo later of Shannon's things spread out on our front porch.

When we got home, Jeremy and Sylvia went in first and he got her to take a video of me coming in and being completely surprised.

I had a little bit of staining and sealing to do on the shelf and trim pieces that Shannon put in, but it was a quick and easy part of the project.

After looking at dozens of solar lanterns, I finally found a really good deal on some white plastic ones at Menard's. (It was an interesting adventure for me to drive into the lumber yard with the contractors and pick up my little lanterns, haha!) But I love what they add to the space.

Especially at night!

I put some tap lights under the shelf to add some more light 

when we actually need to see something in the space.

I love this space now, and I love it even more because of these dear friends! It was all Dawn's design and vision and Shannon's handiwork that made it come to life! We love sharing life with these friends!

AIR CONDITIONING!!!

Ohhhhhh we are enjoying our central air conditioning!!! 

I do not at all take for granted the fact that it was very hot and humid outside today...

...but I cooked dinner ON THE STOVE and IN THE OVEN!!!

I’m pretty sure this is the first time in 19 years that I’ve made meatloaf and mashed potatoes in JULY!!!!!

And while I was at it making meatloaf and mashed potatoes, I steamed some carrots and some broccoli, and browned 4 extra pounds of ground beef and turkey with onions and garlic to freeze in 1-pound packages (added taco seasoning to 2 of them) for quick meals later on.  

I'm not trying to brag about getting central air, but I really am SO GRATEFUL for the ways it makes things so much nicer and more bearable.  I love to cook, but in the summer I have hated it for years.  I am so excited to cook in the summer now!

I am also sleeping better because we didn't have to move all our things downstairs and use the guest room for months to have some cooler air.

I am also cleaning (better, anyway) and doing more projects because I feel I can move around freely in our house and not get all sweaty and gross and grouchy about it!  It is just SO nice to have central air and I'm so thankful!

It's been beautiful this first "official" week of summer.  

We are learning to enjoy central air--not too hard to do!

Caeden in his music producing spot

He is really liking the midi controller he got at Sweetwater last week!

Friday afternoon, Jeremy took Sylvia to Indiana.  He spent most of Saturday helping around his' parents' place. I tried to clean up and organize our back porch and also worked on staining and sealing the new wood pieces Shannon put in the entry way. It is looking so cool!

Erin took the girls shopping in Fort Wayne. Sylvia tried on formals that were on clearance at Von Maur just for fun and ended up finding and buying her senior prom dress for a really great price! They had so much fun, too!

Tonight Caeden and I watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  He loved it.

Central Air!!!

On July 5, we will have officially lived here for 19 years. 

This week, something very exciting and momentous has happened...

We got central air conditioning installed in the house!!!

I'm sure it will feel strange for quite a while, but we are SO glad and thankful to be able to do this!!!

More projects around the shelter-in-place-house

We are slowly working on a few other projects around the house while we are sheltering in place.

This weekend/week Jeremy has installed a new water softener.  In the kitchen, he installed a new faucet with a sprayer in the head, and also a drinking water filter with its own faucet. He also ran a new hose from the drinking water to the ice maker which required moving everything out of the lower cabinets, moving the stove, and the fridge. He is a regular plumber this week!  And he made about 7 trips to various home improvement stores, even though he tried to order everything on line and just pick it up. (I will say that Lowe's remains not great with online orders, geesh.)

Sylvia helped with installing the faucets in the kitchen.

I've been working on trying to reorganize our den.  It has become a dumping ground over the past couple years, and I really want it to be organized and usable. Plus, I love my red shelves and I want to be able to see them because they make me happy!  

This is an in-progress photo. Since Annah finished school this month, she moved her school things out. We bought a new iMac and cleaned the desk when we set it up. I moved the tall white hutch into the bathroom and switched the rusty white cabinet into the den. It is full of yarn. I condensed my finished crochet projects into 2 red bins and took a bin of party supplies upstairs to go in the hallway closet when I get around to reorganizing that. I condensed yarn into fabric bins on the red shelves. The biggest part of the mess in the den now is actually items that are waiting to be donated to Goodwill or Mission Mart, but no one is accepting donations in the middle of a pandemic.  I will keep plugging away at this room forever, I'm sure...At least we can walk through it now.

Annah decorated the front and spine of a cardboard binder for me to use for crochet patterns.

Sylvia doodled the back.  I love that it has both of their very different artistic styles on it! 

About a month ago, we got Caeden some audio recording equipment and software. He has been using basic Garage Band on the iMac or his iPod/iPhone to make beats and produce music, and we wanted to invest in him a bit more since he seems to have a talent for it.  When we discovered our old iMac was too old (We've had it almost 10 years!) for downloading updates anymore and we got the new one, we also bought a little Sauder desk and moved the old iMac into the music room for Caeden to use. Sometimes he lets us listen to his songs in progress.

The music room is also in progress...The shelves I bought for music books a few years ago are leaning, and Shannon is going to reinforce them for me when he comes back to help with the entry way project. So...we are trying to get some things done around here, slowly.

Entry Way Project

We've lived in this house for almost 19 years, and the entire time I've been wanting to do something about the entry way. It is tiny and has no electricity or lights in it. 

More than 12 years ago, Jeremy and my brother and Dad hung new drywall around the window Jeremy replaced. I'm pretty sure it was years later before it was mudded and taped and sanded.

Two years ago, my friend Dawn started helping me get a vision and plan for decorating and organizing the space.  She drew this sketch, and we talked about wallpaper, ways to light it, storage options for shoes, using things I already have...

I finally painted the room for the first time since we've lived here.

Over a year ago, I bought peel and stick wallpaper and supplies to apply it, and 6 Trones from IKEA. 

And, Dawn and Shannon came over to measure the space for wooden things Shannon would build and help with.  I brought up trim pieces from the basement and figured out which ones will go back up.  I am THE slowest person at decorating.

I am so scared of wallpapering.  I've been putting off and putting off applying this peel and stick stuff for over a year, because I am scared to death to hang wallpaper without my mom! I decided last night that it was going to get done today.  Sylvia agreed to help me.  She had a Zoom farewell meeting at 10:30, and after that we started.

We tried applying the paper horizontally to make the small room look bigger, but our old house is so crooked, and I am so NOT knowledgable about applying wallpaper, that after more than an hour of fighting with it and not having a second ladder to get Sylvia up to the height I was at the top of the room...I decided it was not getting hung horizontally!

We put up the piece we'd cut to hang horizontally in a corner, and I calculated.  There was no way I had enough paper to make the repeat come out even this way.  I texted Dawn and called my Mommy (who is a major wallpaper expert!!) and they both agreed that it was totally fine not to match up the repeat. 

 Two hours in, we had one partial strip of wallpaper up.

I was getting so frustrated!!!  I was scaring my poor Sylvia!

I thought I had bought enough paper to do the whole room, since it is so tiny and has 3 big doors and a window in it. Alas...I had not! And this particular pattern is not available anywhere anymore, since it's been over a year since I ordered it.

 I was able to piece together enough to cover the spaces that will be exposed on 2 walls.  The current look is still very much "in progress," but hey, it's been that way for almost 19 years!

I have to say, I am not a fan of the peel and stick wallpaper after today.  The bubbles do not come out as promised, and I think it kind of stretches a bit if you pull it off and re-stick it too many times.  Thankfully, this brand, Repeel, you can do that! 

Today's lesson--well, not really a new lesson; I already knew--I am a terrible DIY-er!

Right about noon today, Caeden seemed to have the sudden inspiration to grab my phone and take pictures of each of us who were around.  (Jeremy was outside, grilling.)

I was actually playing around on Annah's piano, trying to find a song to record, since another one of my students recorded himself playing.  (See my music blog.)

Clean your glasses, boy!

Annah was chilling in the living room, on her phone, as usual...probably watching TikToks.

Sylvia was doing homework. She recently decided to camp out on the guest room bed all day every day to do her homework, even though I had neatly laid out some of my crocheted items.  She has always claimed to like cleaning and organizing, but she has been found out during this stay-at-home order...She is just as big a slob as any of the rest of us! Ha!

Septic situation

For the past 12 days we have been unable to use our toilet at home.  

 We have had difficulties the last several winters, and figured the septic line was clogged, and that it had something to do with all the rain we had a week ago.  We had a new cleanout valve installed a few years ago, and when this has happened the past several winters we have had the tank pumped and either rented a sewer auger or dropped a lot of money to pay plumbers to come clear the clog in the line.  So this time, when we discovered we had a problem that was more than a toilet clog, Jeremy just bought an auger. He spent hours each night last week, trying to clear the clog with the auger and having no luck.  We had the tank pumped, but that didn't help.  Finally, we called plumbers and they brought their "big guy" auger out, ran it through the line 5 times, and couldn't find a clog. I cried while I wrote them a check for their work that still didn't solve our problem.  At that point, we had spent $1000 and a week without a toilet--with no sign of fixing the problem.  

The plumbers figured that the was a break or collapse in the old clay tile between the cleanout valve by the house and the tank in the middle of the yard, and they sent us a quote for digging up and replacing the clay tile with pvc pipe = $2500.  I sat in a chair in the living room and cried.  I don't know if it would've been as big a deal if we weren't still trying to catch up from all the expenses from the flood last May 1, but it just feels like we will never get ahead financially with this old house!  

I went outside this morning and saw that "Julie" had been here, 

marking where it was and wasn't ok to dig.

We have had good experiences with A-1 Haney plumbing through the past year, and they sent 2 guys out today.  They dug up the old, old, old clay tile and broke it into pieces.  Kurt spent all day down in that trench.  I mean, you would have to pay me at least $2500 to do a job that dealt with breaking up an old, completely clogged septic line!  

They put in the new pvc, and gave it more of a pitch going away from the house.  

We had our toilet flushing by afternoon, praise God!  It has been difficult not having a working toilet in the house (or even one in the village that is accessible).  We have made trips to Colfax multiple times each day to go at the school or the gas station.  We are very, very thankful to have this problem corrected.

Cold and Heat

It's getting cold.  We had snow on Halloween!  I heard an "old wives' tale" that the date of the first snow is the number of snows predicted for the winter...I hope we don't have 31 snows!  I've never heard that particular tale before, so I think someone just made it up and started spreading it when we got our first snow on the 31st.  Haha.

Our furnace drowned along with the water heater in the flood last May. We had a new water heater installed mid-May.  In August, we had to replace the dishwasher. In October, we had the house re-plumbed so we could run the water appliances better.  Since it was spring when we had the flood, and getting warmer, we decided we needed to wait on replacing the furnace since we had all these other expenses to cover--not to mention the cost of sending a kid to college!  So, here it is snowing and getting really cold in October, and we not only don't have a furnace, but we now have no way to pay for it...

We did get a little space heater, but even cranked all the way to 86 degrees, it doesn't do a lot when it's really cold out.

25 degrees on November 1!

It was so cold it felt like Christmas, so Sylvia and I put up the tree and Christmas decorations on November 9!

I saw a cute new cowl pattern and whipped this up to keep warm too.

On November 11, Hermes arrived (along with more snow!) to install our new furnace.  However, the weather continued to worsen throughout the morning, and they weren't able to get the furnace delivered!  They took apart our old furnace and did as much preparation for installation as they could, but left early in the afternoon to allow time to travel slowly back to their shop.  

Sylvia and Caeden were asked to take a nice picture for me to send to Annah, and they went for the awkward family photo version...

It was very cold in our house the past couple weeks.  We are thankful for electric blankets!  Jeremy even got out his fleece pajama pants and robe!

It was 50 degrees in our house, because the windchills were below zero outside...

Our friends the Ramirez fam loaned us a couple more space heaters.  It was 54 inside when the Hermes guys arrived today to finish the job.  

We now have a nice Trane furnace installed sideways and suspended 4 feet above ground.  So, if/when we have another basement flood, it should be safe.  They finished around noon today, and walked me through the thermostat and controls.  

By 1:30 it was back up to 68 degrees in the house, and I could teach piano lessons.

We are all thankful for heat.  It has been a very difficult 6 months for our family, financially, and emotionally.  While we are in a yucky spot right now, and that causes a lot of stress and worry for us, we are thankful that we were able to have access to the credit needed to have the furnace installed.  It's not something we could go without any longer.  We thank God for his provision for our family, and continue to trust Him.