dungeon play

I have several different random photos of the kids playing that I've grouped together here. 

When Noah was a toddler, we started out with just a few Thomas train tracks and he would have daddy build him a new track every single day. We've found tons more tracks from garage sales over the years and have a large collection. When Samuel became old enough to be interested, he'd ask Noah to build him tracks. But now Samuel is becoming quite the train track builder as you can see from the photo below. Ezra is getting better about not destroying the whole thing. Though he does love to do that just to bug Samuel.

And FYI, that rug is not a random dead guy on our carpet like several facebook friends thought. It's an awesome rug of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. 

We limit video games to a few hours on the weekend. Evie and I don't like them at all so you can guess who does...

The one game I do like is the Michael Jackson dancing Wii game Terry got me for my birthday. No, I will not post the video of me dancing. 

More tracks! 

Terry wrapped Noah up as a burrito and threw the other boys on top as toppings :) 

building shelves

Two weeks ago Terry was bored on his day off (he's a busy body). Since we'd always talked about adding some built-in shelving to the furnace room, he did a little shopping and got started. As way of reminder,  our house started out with an unfinished basement that we finished the summer of 2013. Wow, it's crazy that it used to look like this. Now we have students down there weekly!

The basement didn't originally have a room surrounding the furnace. Terry added that. This picture contains the old furnace, but you can see how there's space to the left and right of the furnace for storage. We used to have a large plastic Menards shelf on the foundation wall along with two cheap wooden shelves tucked up against it. You can see the plastic shelf next to the old furnace... It was pretty bulky.

The first thing Terry did was take out the old plastic shelf and move the wooden book shelves next to the door.

What lovely drywall right? Yeah, Terry did that too :) These two bare walls are where he constructed the new built-ins.

First he cut support boards and screwed them into the wall...

Then he started on the frame. Ezra was a big help = Eva puts the camera down to scurry over there and remove Ezra from the premises...

Then he screwed the actual shelves down. What was great about this project is that it was almost entirely paid for by Menards rebates :)

Once we had everything in there I made him stand in the picture for a size comparison. He was so pleased.

Look at those great shelves! It actually makes our pile of games look smaller than they ever have previously. We've also got the keyboard in there for when the kids need to practice during quiet nap time. Or Terry has been known to work in there when necessary since it's quiet (the furnace drowns out the kids' din) and hidden  (the kids nearly forget he's home).

Nice right?! It adds a lot more free space in here. 

Take no notice of our extra food stocks... HA! It's a work in progress okay? 

Noah is going to start keeping his large Star Wars Lego ships up there. Plenty of room for more storage.

We joke that the kids could sleep on those shelves. 

students over, thankfulness

Halfway through August we had a former youth group student, Amanda, over to share her first year experience at Stanford. We of course invited all over who were interested in hearing what it's like to be a Christian in college. 

Having students over in our house impresses on me (over and over) how thankful I am to have the house we that we do. God has truly blessed us with this house (this blessing began before we even arrived in Rapid!). It meets all our needs in abundance. 

We have a beautiful back yard with plenty of room for plenty of people.

There were lots of eyes peeled out for Ezra's safety amidst the big boy shenanigans. 

How cute is our little frisbee player? I love those pudgy cheeks. 

It really doesn't cease to amaze me that our dungeon used to look like this. Not the most hospitable place for people to hang out - kind of cold, dark, hard and messy.

And now it looks like this. Plenty of room for plenty of students. God has met our needs :)

dungeon - part 12, window well

By way of reminder, here's how our window project started: 

Back in March, when we had been working on the dungeon for about a month, we were told that for our project to be to code, there had to be a window. Back the truck up! Terry started digging under our front porch right away. Here's the initial pit.

About a month later, we got the window installed. That was great and all (seriously was), but since we had decided not to do an ugly metal window well, we were stuck with a view of red dirt and foundation pieces for the time being. 

We wanted to let in more light into our dungeon. It needed it! And besides, there's no way our kids could climb out of a deep window well if there was an emergency. So Terry's idea was to make steps.  These were his initial tiers he started a few weeks ago.

And this is it now! BAM! My husband did great. Perhaps now our dungeon project really is done :)

Notice his beastly Blazer in the reflection? Yeah, he did that on purpose.

The view is much improved.

dungeon: part 11, moving in

The same day we got carpet in the dungeon, Terry put the finished trim up along the floor. We couldn't wait to get this thing done. That night my brother Nathan and Ana came over to help us move the couch and TV stuff down so we could have our very first movie night. We watched Iron Man 3, which was awesome, ate a lot of popcorn and had a great time. It was so fun! Even better since Stephanie was there. 

Terry kept saying that he didn't think the couch was going to fit. I kept insisting that it would. Guess who was right? ;)

The day that Stephanie had to leave I put her to work by having her help me move all the kids toys down there. It's hard to believe that most of it was in a closet! I can tell you that it's such a relieve to have moved all the stuff downstairs. It was so incredibly cramped with the huge couch, toys and school room all in one area. There's still some things to be added, but for now, we're done.

The day after carpet was installed, Terry put up the remaining trim for the window and doors. It looks so great.

And the hand rail matches the rest in the house. Except it's prettier.

That night we had our very first family pizza movie night. Ahhhhh. It's done. I am happy. We all are!

dungeon: part 10, carpet!!!

At long last. At very long last. We had reached the point of finishing our dungeon. We started this project back in January and hoped to have it finished by Ezra's birth. Well, that didn't happen. But four months late isn't too bad for doing it ourselves (with four kids, having had a baby during that time!). My husband is awesome. He's learned a ton.

So a week after Stephanie arrived, a week after my birthday, the carpet arrived.

I tried so hard to be a discreet paparazzi. But I was SO excited!

Here's what the dungeon looked like before hand. Everything was done except for carpet!

And after!

Before:

After! Boom baby!

Before:

After. YAY!

dungeon: part 9, ceiling, beam

 Back over the Labor Day weekend, Terry and my brother knocked out the last really big dungeon project: the ceiling! I guess right before that we took care of the support beams too.

Here's what it looked like back in May for the inspection.

And here's the beams and ceiling afterwards! Terry also insulated between every single floor joists before he started on the panels.

Looking towards the stairs.

And again. 

I can't believe how much brighter it made the room. The white really took away the dungeon feel. Plus, the white beams. Originally I had planned on doing dark brown trim like in the rest of the house but changed my mind in favor of something cleaner and brighter. We like it. It was a ton more work than just plain white paint would have been - we stained it white (three coats!) and then put polyurethane over it. The good news is we got all the floor trim done at the same time.

dungeon: part 8, tape, mud, texture, paint

 I'll be up to date on the dungeon progress after this post. It's so fulfilling to see how much we've (Terry's) accomplished. He worked incredibly hard the week leading up to his disconnect youth trip to WY the first week of August. Really, it was a grueling week for him mudding in the evenings but he wanted me to be able to paint while he was gone. I was glad to have something to keep me busy. 

Here is the first layer of mud over the tape and screws. We thought the second and third coats would go quicker since he wouldn't have to tape as well. Boy were we wrong. 

Here is the second coat of mud going on. 

And here is the third! Talk about fanning it out wide, right?! Terry is quite the perfectionist. Even though this was his first time mudding, you wouldn't have known. He did a fantastic job. The drywall was so smooth that we could have skipped the texturing and just slapped the paint on. 

I thought it would be cool to show before and afters of the walls of mud and paint. What a difference eh? It's a real room!!! 

Mud opposite side of the room where the TV and couch will go.

Let there be paint! I wanted a blue gray and I think it turned out well. Sherwin Williams Gray Screen.

Mud on the north wall. Nice right?! 

Boom baby.

Mud going up the stairs. The hallway was very strenuous, difficult work for Terry. It looks great.

Bam.

Here's a close up cell photo of the knockdown texture before it dried. Terry had never textured either but he knocked it out of the park. Of course.

Check that hallway out. Brilliant.