"In cleaning out your basement, you will find great and necessary things!", said No One Famous.
We've been on a warpath to attack some of the projects on our Master List during the last few months. Me and my husband-who-never-sits-down.
Plans around here are always tied into, well, everything else, and we can't get one thing actually finished without starting or ripping out something else that is somehow necessary to completing the first thing. I'll give you an example - the basement (which is really more of just a lower room, halfway under the ground in our split-level home) has been slated to become a family room for years now.
But first, we have to address the water problem. The one where water comes in the bottom door and the crawlspace in copious amounts when it rains a lot, or the snow melts a lot. And that means digging a trench and laying a pipe and having stone, and etc, etc, etc. So, in the middle of Frozen January, when you all of a sudden want to get hot-to-trot on your new Family Room, well, it just ain't happenin'.
Then, we also know that the crawlspace will be less likely to take on water if the back addition gets walls and a roof. Can we borrow some TIME from you?
There's also the minor issue of how the basement is filled with CRAP. Okay, maybe not CRAP. Stuff. Stuff that is mostly needed on some project, either at our house, in our garage, for our newly planned outdoor living space, or for the farmhouse project, all of which will likely save us lots of money. So, not stuff to get rid of.
Yeah, we've been moving (slowly) on that. The trench is mostly done, with a little help from a small man with a red shovel.
We've been cleaning and clearing that ole' basement. We bought an enclosed trailer to store stuff in for now, which will eventually serve its purpose in the business. We managed to find, in the process, a whole bunch of useful things that we forgot we had. There were some leftover or extra (i.e. FREE) cabinets from some of our vendors that I absorbed into the homeschool room and my new laundry area.
So we took out Indy's old Pirate Ship themed bed, love it tho we did...
...and of course, the walls were ruined, so we spackled and painted...
...and then put those cabinets to good use.
The best gift a man can get for his wife is STORAGE!
We found the brackets to fix the fence panel that got whacked down by a tree limb a few weeks back. We found the tub of Easter eggs and buckets in the basement, too - ha, right?! Just in time! And what the heck was it doing down there, anyway? We (finally) moved the big filing cabinet up to the office where it belongs. It's like a whole different house in here!
Beyond that, our winter can be summed up like this:
It snowed.
It warmed up.
Snow melted.
It rained.
It snowed.
It warmed up.
Snow melted.
It rained.
REPEAT.
We ping-ponged between snow and mud. My washing machine groaned and moaned at the increased laundry from all that Splish, Splash, Splooshin'. I got smart and added screws for hooks in the exposed ceiling joists in the half-cleaned out basement above the fireplace to dry the snow gear that continually got soaked from the wet, slushy, muddy, sort-of, almost snow.
The children delighted in the mud and I delighted in them. For the few and far between snowstorms that actually produced anything worth writing home about, we decided that Snow Blowers were SO 2014, and Roger helped cleared part of the road, too.
But Spring is FINALLY here. I can tell because my head is chock full of snot every damn morning. This is normal for me, unfortunately for like 3/4 of the year, and I don't bother going to a doctor about it because they'd probably either recommend meds (which I don't want), or a head transplant, since this one causes me so much trouble.
My spring bulbs out front have burst through. Our early crop seeds have turned into little shoots sitting on our windowsill. We are outside (without MUD) more and more. Baseball practice is in full swing, after many weeks of drowned out or snowed out practices. We are thankful our league starts at age 5, because Riley wanted to play this year, but she has to wait. Next year we can run around on 3 different teams...
Riley plants more seeds for the kids' flower garden this year.
The farmhouse has a back wall and a REAL DOOR. This is huge. :)
Homeschool is going well, we are in our groove more than ever. RJ is starting to nearly, almost, maybe normalize, or perhaps I have just learned better ways to manage him (it sometimes takes A LOT), so we get out more to homeschool meetups and events. We are doing some cool side stuff with school, like making Stop Motion videos, and the kids are writing and illustrating their own books. We sort of float back and forth from sit-down learning, book-learning, and hands-on learning and it works really well for us. Indy has been doing charcoal art projects from
here, and she's actually pretty good at it. Musical instruments continue, with the big two taking lessons and performing with the local district kids, and Riley practicing making noise on her trumpet.
Don't mind the spackle in the foyer and downed curtains... this was probably one of the last days that our living room was bright orange. I can't tell if RJ is singing or crying...
RJ demands often to be included with school, and we've been learning about Steam Trains and Steam Engines so in-depth it makes my brain hurt. I never really thought trains were that great. Ever. And I still don't think they're that great. But RJ does. And so, I know more than I ever cared to know about trains, tracks, train parts, and train terminology in general. But it is really fantastic to see him so excited by something he loves.
Since we are still living without that family room, sometimes triple-table train set-ups end up in the Master Bedroom. Thank You, Craigslist, for connecting me with all those people who darn-near GIVE AWAY really cool train stuff. More spackle in the background and a ladder waiting for us to get in the painting mood again.
So that's about it. Business is good, Rog has been out doing estimates like crazy and the phone rings often. Customers are concerned about getting on our schedule, as they've heard about us and know that we are busy. This is an excellent sign of Roger's workmanship quality, since we don't actively market the business. We rely almost solely on word-of-mouth referrals, and it also seems to help that people see him literally all over the town working on local jobs. I don't know for sure exactly what it is about him, but people get REAL excited when they see him... "Hey! Roger! Yeah, I see your truck all the time! You were working on my neighbor's house!" Local vendors love the crap out of him and even share their company lunch with him. The one guy working at the T-Shirt place nearly falls out of his chair when he sees me coming in. Me. Not even Roger. He just knows I'm married to Roger. So excited, I tell you. And Rog deserves it, because he really does put his heart into every job he does. No half-assing, no short-cuts, no trying to rip people off because he thinks they can afford it, and no taking on anything he can't handle. He's genuine, with an excellent work ethic and a knowledge base that is rarely matched, and I'm sure those are reasons why everyone from the town to the customers to our vendors loves the crap out of my Roger. But for small Roger, well, we'll need to work on his motivation and work ethic a little bit, because as of right now, he still sleeps through lunch...
