Look What I Made! . . .

When I started MOPS this year and all the steering members were getting up for their 3 minute run-down speeches spelling out plans for this season, the Creative Activities coordinators got up to tell us we were going to do some absolutely fabulous crafts this year. Right. On my first run of MOPS at a different church I remember thinking 'Crafts? You want me to make crafts? Are you crazy? Can't we just talk?' I thought, if I have to volunteer in the kids rooms for a meeting then I want to do it on a craft day, not a speaker day! I am soooo not 'crafty'. It didn't take long for me to realize that I had it all wrong. There are definitely speakers that it is totally okay to miss, but craft days are more fun. It wasn't that I was particularly good at the crafts (some days I barely had a workable end product, barely covering the basics), but you get to visit more with your group on craft days which I loved.

As much as I enjoyed the craft days, I didn't really get the purpose of them. Was there a reason for filling the moments? Mostly my group just wanted the chance to sip coffee and visit so why the attempts to fill our mornings? Did we absolutely need to have a purpose for that hour? So this craft coordinator got up this year and said 'Maybe you are wondering why we do a creative activity . . .' Yes! I am wondering! Tell me, tell me, tell me! She said a few things I don't remember, but the thing that stuck with me was that the main purpose was that we had an act of completion. Say again? As preschool parents, she said, it is so rare that we actually get to see a project through from beginning to end. Such a hard thing to do to actually complete something that is for us, not the kids. That's what the craft is for, being able to sit down and complete a task from start to finish at one sitting and have a fulfilling feeling of accomplishment. If only for a moment, you can look at something and say 'I did that. I made that.' Even if you never look at the silly thing you made ever again. Not too different than our preschoolers coming out of their classrooms and saying 'Mommy look what I made!' and then forgetting the picture they drew by the time you pull into the driveway.

This week I am looking out over the biggest project I ever attempted or completed and sighing with satisfaction. My 2 rooms are done! Woohoo! Four months of sweat and toil have resulted in 2 beautiful rooms that are complete! My kids are moved into their new bedroom, their two old rooms are currently a reorganized play room and office until I am ready to work on some more walls (after Christmas) and I am sitting in a nice cozy room again to blog to you with a scentsy candle burning and my legs curled up in my big soft office chair instead of leaning over the kitchen table at a laptop with a too small keyboard. Life is good today!

When we first started this project it was supposed to be simple: build a wall, put up a door and fix some cracks in the walls so I could paint. But nothing in my house or my life is ever really that simple. There were problems right away like the opening for the door didn't really have a jamb on one side so we were going to have to make one, solution: take out the entryway closet and make a jamb; matching textures on my walls, solution: retexture all the walls; matching up base moulding with new walls and doorway, solution: rip out all mouldings and replace with new. When we started demo it was clear right away that there was little worth saving and way more work to do than we ever thought.

My dad showed up once or twice a week for months to work on this massive undertaking and I am so grateful to him for sticking with me. I said the other day to him 'I think this is the biggest project I've ever done, what about you?' Him too. I think he's pretty proud of the results as well. We ran into problem after problem as we literally took most of 2 rooms down to studs and built them back up again, but we plowed through and got it done. And I learned a lot along the way:

1 - Having the right tool makes the job go a lot smoother! My dad invested some of his discretionary income in a couple of really cool power tools to do this project. Things he wanted anyway, but building walls was a good excuse. The Sawzall is amazing and will cut just about anything you want at almost any angle, metal or wood. The palm nailer for his compresser made nailing studs in tight corners a very doable feat. And I picked up some very cool and necessary things along the way as well. I rented this amazing nail gun that uses .22 shells to shoot nails into concrete one day. It was worth the extra trips to Home Depot and the extra expense to invest in a stud finder, electrical current readers and appropriately sized tape knives. My best investment though was $9.99 at Sherwin Williams for one of those cool color books with their entire color palette in one place. No more running to the store for color cards only to find out when you get home that you need one 2 shades lighter or with more blue in the greys or grey in the blues. Dad already had a compresser with 2 nail guns, a tile saw and a miter saw that he would bring over as needed. His small crowbar inherited from my grandpa's basement was used more than any other tool. We used both Scott's cordless drills, my dad's cordless drill and my grandfather's old electric drill to get the job done. After renting a power texture machine, my dad invested in his own for the next time around because he also wants to do a bunch of work at his house and texture where there is currently wallpaper. Things go smoother and faster when you have the right tool to do the job, even if you are renting it.

2 - Electrical doesn't have to be scary! I am a wimp when it comes to electrical wires and recently spent $200 to have an electrician come out and replace a metal box behind my dryer and tape over an exposed wire because I had no clue how to handle it myself. Never again. I learned how to replace outlets and switches and to feel comfortable stripping, cutting and clamping wires. I have a much better feel of how electric works and what to do when there is a problem. I don't have to live with the dingy off-white outlets in my house anymore - I can change them to whatever I want them to be and I don't have to call someone to help me. I can change out a light fixture without waiting for my hubby to come home and climb on the ladder to do it for me. I am WOMAN, hear me roar!

3 - Sometimes it's about who you know. When we took out the entryway closet we discovered that the air vent for the front room came down and curved through the closet with the vent box just plastered over. It was in the way and unsightly. It was also July in Texas and my air guy (an old family friend) was absolutely NOT going to go into my attic to move the vent until at least October. But I wasn't going to leave my entry way in studs for 3 months either. Scott's cousin's hubby came out one Sunday afternoon and moved the whole thing for us in about an hour without having to climb into the attic at all. I think he just stuck his head up through the hole in the ceiling a few times. He also decided to go ahead and move some of the electrical wiring for us that my dad and I were going to work on that week. I was so grateful since it was only a small delay and we could keep working. It was the only time we brought someone in the whole time, the rest of the work was done by dad and I and occasionally Scott.

4 - Flexibility is key. I can't tell you how many little roadblocks and problems we ran into along the way. Every step we made we ran into some kind of issue. There were so many things to work through and so many times we had to improvise. But we did. It sometimes meant delays or rethinking the project, but in the end it all worked out. We paused many times along the way to wait for deliveries of supplies, or to wait for the next payday because I had already exhausted that month's remodel budget, or wait for my neice to be born (since we were all on call to hit the road). Lots of delays, but we kept coming back and working on the next thing, the next stage. It was also well worth it to take our time. I tend to like to plow through and get things done quickly, but it was really good to take this thing one little step at a time and to sometimes only work once a week or every other week. It kept us from feeling too overwhelmed or overtired. It kept us fresh and clear headed.

5 - Nothing is perfect. I know where all the mistakes are. I know where every imperfection is. Some of them are obvious, like now that the walls and trim in the entryway aren't all dingy white you can actually tell that our house isn't straight. If you look closely it is very clear that the spacing isn't even between the front door and the windows. But that's the house and we did the best we could with it without replacing glass and door completely. It turns out that even if you are very careful to not have any bubbles or raises in your drywall tape, the moisture from texture and paint can seep through dried mud and sometimes put a bubble in after the fact (very frustrated with this, but will prime before texture in the next room to avoid. will also fix my bubbles at some point, but was more concerned with being done than fixing that small problem for the moment). For some reason when you lay wood floors yourself, no matter how tight you make the pieces while you are working, they will sometimes separate from each other after you have done 6 more rows and can't go back to fix them (very small gaps at a couple of points, but it was the first floor - prepared for the next room). I can't tell you how many times Scott came home and said 'Why . . .' and my answer was 'Our house is not level, plumb or square'. Cuz it's just not and a professional finishing carpenter can make it look like it is, but I'm not a professional. We did the actual construction level, but that doesn't mean it would look right with the house as settled as it was. We sometimes did things off-level so they looked better aesthetically, but those times were rare since it was more important for our elements to actually be level - like headers and doors. Sometimes working on a house that is 50 years old is just a problem all on it's own. There are little quirks all the way through, but overall it looks great which is the important part. We did the best we could with what we had and when you look at the rooms you don't see the mistakes. I just know they are there. Oh well.

6 - The toil is worth it. My dad would come over and we would work our tushes off on the big stuff and then he would go home. I was here to work out the details while he played with his dog and rested for the next big challenge. And there was a lot of detail work, especially towards the end. Dad helped me lay the big huge tiles in my entry way, but it was up to me to do the grout and then to clean up the grout. I had some issues with that since my grout spacing was bigger than I was used to and my tiles don't have clean hard edges. I spent almost an entire day scrubbing the lines and cleaning them up so it didn't look like a 7 year old did the grout job. My fingers were red and raw before I finished and that 54 square feet felt like a square mile. My body may slowly recover from installing the bamboo all in one day, but my fingers will never be the same. Fitting all the pieces together was tedious and painful, but going back and cleaning the glue out of cracks that we missed the first time was brutal. I think that I might have actually removed a fingerprint or two in the process and it will take a month for my fingernails to look decent again. I really don't want to look at a paintbrush again for a while. Between touch up paint and the elaborate 3 color design motif I put in the boys room and trim work, I am so tired of touching up paint I want to scream. But it looks gorgeous. Every part of it is beautiful and worth the aches and pains and headaches.

My kids will never really appreciate all the crazy hard work that went into their new bedroom. They won't ever really get how much pain their grandpa and their mom put their bodies through to get the job done. But they do know that we did it for them. They watched us work and asked questions and complained about the noisy tools. They really enjoyed having Grandpa here all the time. And so did I. Can I just tell you how amazing my dad is? He's crazy awesome! And I have so loved doing this project with him. When I was young I always loved working with him on something in the garage and helping him work on house projects. As I've aged I have occasionally helped him with projects at his house or asked him to help us with something here. Little did I know that I was going to get to do something so huge with him as an adult. My sister and dad built a planter stand a few years ago with the (at that time) new miter saw and I remember being jealous of their joint project but so proud of their work. The planter is now in my house, in my new entryway. Not sure how I got lucky enough to inherit it, but I love that it is here until Asheley someday asks for it back. I think Asheley was a little jealous of me this summer too while I got to work with our daddy on a project. It was just my turn, I guess.

So now, the work is done. Well, most of it. Technically, I still need to caulk all the moulding so you can't tell where the old walls bow and I haven't caulked the gap under the front door to match the tile grout. And then there's those stupid bubbles in my drywall to deal with. But, mostly we're done. Scott and I spent Saturday taking beds apart, moving them and putting them back together. We put felt circles under all the furniture so it doesn't scratch my fabulous Bamboo floor. I reorganized the back bedroom and turned it into an office. Yesterday I reorganized all the toys and turned the other bedroom into a temporary play room. We've crammed so much extra furniture into the 2 kids rooms, the kitchen and the living room the past few months that having things sorted out and organized makes my little house feel downright spacious right now. Scott said he was bragging about me at work the other day when we finished the bamboo floors because he couldn't believe we got so much done in one day. I tell him all the time that I am not the kind of woman who is going to sit around and learn to quilt or darn socks (does anyone still do that?) but I am the kind of woman who will rebuild a room in the house on my own without hiring someone. He's kind of getting used to me and my crazy ideas.

And there is still work to do. I have plans to build some furniture for the kids room and I need to decorate with new bedding and curtains. I find myself hesitant to hang pictures and decorations on walls because I really don't want to put holes in those walls that I worked so hard on, but eventually I will. I'm kind of thinking that those removable hanger things sound good for my Christmas decorations in the entryway although now that those particular walls are purple, I'm not sure how everything is going to look in there.

There have been people that thought I was crazy for putting all the boys together in one room, but the room is huge. There are 2 beds, 3 dressers and a tv-game set up in there and still tons of space to play cars on the new wood floor. It's not forever, but it works for now. Scooter is super happy to not be alone in a room anymore and it's working out well so far. There are now 2 extra rooms to cram furniture into when I start on the rest of the house. And the rest of the house won't be so crazy. Most of the rooms just need a face lift - patching drywall cracks, retexturing and painting then new floors and base boards. No major construction, at least until we get to the bathrooms. I am seriously considering replacing all the doors in the house as I go and I know I want to tile over the brick on my fireplace before I finally replace the mantle that fell down 2 years ago. Eventually it won't be just the 2 front rooms that look fabulous, it will be everything.

For now, I am super happy and satisfied with the accomplishment. I wish I could post the pictures here, but I still haven't gone out to purchase my SD/USB converter for my camera. If you found me on Facebook, you can go to my profile and view the mobile upload pictures I posted there the other day. The small imperfections in our work are nothing compared to the mess we started out with - huge gaping cracks in dingy dirty walls, old stinky carpet and vinyl layered over linoleum, a cramped entryway and a room without a purpose. I am so pleased with the completion of a project - a huge one. I get to look at it and say 'Look what I made!'.

Thanks and God Bless!