finishing the school room

It has been nearly four weeks since we tore out the school room fireplace on July 18th (mostly for efficiency reasons that I bemoaned in my last post). This is what it looked like mid-demolishion. Not a pretty sight. And it was ugly to clean up. Oofdah.

After I handled all of the smaller rubble, I decided to handle the ceiling popcorn. That was just a few days later on July 22nd where I left off from my last post. Terry was at work and I figured in order to get this project done and done and not have to wait until the weekend, I'd do as much as I could. That, plus, I'd become proficient enough in removing popcorn since doing precisely that in our bathrooms (which I haven't blogged about apparently. darn darn darny darn!). I just detest the popcorn in our house. Some popcorn, like at my parents house, is live-able because it's pretty sparce. But ours has to be like four times as thick as theirs. I'm serious. It's out of control stupid. What was that contractor thinking? Okay. Soap box ended. So here is the nasty stuff (and my pretty, spick and span fireplace pad).

It was messy work. I completed half of the scraping before lunch and had Noah take my photo amidst the wreckage to show how I felt.

But check out how much incredibly better that looks! 

I finished that afternoon and it looked great. 

The following day, Wednesday the 23rd, I primed the school room doors and siding. It was mega hot and humid outside while the kids played with sidewalk chalk and I rolled away. 

The kids love to paint. I have to force myself to slow down and let them have a little fun. I just want to get it over with. 

But they each got several turns and were actually pretty helpful. They'll be happy to see themselves painting on the blog. :) 

After lunch that day I tackled the school room brown siding. I had been previously calling it wainscoting when I painted the stuff in the boys room. But it is technically called car siding. It's pine and comes with two boards together with a groove down the center and then a tongue and groove on the sides. They must have stained it that dark color originally to match the rest of the trim. And I didn't hate the trim color, I just wanted something brighter for the school room. I like white a lot now. Wish our whole house was white. But now at least half of it is. Before:

And after. I primed the grooves first with a brush and then went over it again with a roller. Then I rolled two coats of semigloss. But this is just the primer. You can see why it needed so much paint! 

The following weekend we took a break for some reason. Might have been busy. So during the final week of July I scraped the popcorn off the downstairs bath/laundry room and Terry filled that fireplace pipe hole. Actually, he cut styrofoam insulation to fit and put it in the tube opening. Then he pushed the rolled insulation in the outer layers of the pipe, followed by screwing a board over the opening. Then he put this insulation up, drywall, tape and mud. Take that inefficiency!!! He also added an electrical outlet right there since that wall only had one before (of course it didn't need one when it was a fireplace!). 

So last weekend, the first in August, we were extremely busy in the school room. Probably a little crazy. What can I say? We just wanted the thing DONE. 

Friday August first started with Terry adding a fourth coat of mud to the wall to even it out more. He also added some mud to the ceiling from where he had gouged it with his sledgehammer and falling brick during demolition. He's doing the ceiling here.

While he prepped the wall for texture, I painted the de-popcorned ceiling. Look at how much better that white looks! 

It took Terry like five minutes to texture. Setting up took more time. He even hand textured the ceiling gouges so they would blend in.  

I went and bought paint and decided it was too yellow. Had to go back and get the next darker shade. Glad I did. Here is the original.

Still during that same Friday Terry finished insulating the foundation with that styrofoam stuff. Then he started on the car siding!

They finished right before family pizza movie night. That's why Noah was like, "Let's nail this down dad!" here. We were so ready for a break.  

The next day, Saturday the 5th, I primed and painted the car siding. Sunday afternoon we painted the walls with a shade darker paint. 

Just to give you a better idea of the change and how much brighter and happy it is down there, here is before: 

 And after :)

Here is the other half of the room before: 

And after :) 

I cut in while Terry rolled. He got the first coat down pretty quick and was still feeling good. He wanted to go ahead and finish the second coat that night. At first I was all for that until I came upstairs and saw the orange paint from there. I did not like it at all! 

Even though those stairway walls are connected to the school room, their hall color needs to flow upstairs. And it did not at all. I felt terrible about it! I felt like such a failure. Perhaps it had to do with how tired I was but I took it pretty hard. All that Sherwin Williams paint was expensive and here we had wasted it! I didn't know what to do. I took these photos and sent them to a couple friends for advice. They helped me to decide what to do. See how the hall orange and the kitchen burnt orange clash?

We decided to keep the orange in the school room (because I like it there!) and paint the stairway hall back to gray. Looks SO much better. It was just all wrong. 

While Terry was rolling orange that day, I was out in the garage painting the trim. I got those all done that day and a few days later we brought them inside to await installation. But that is for the final post!

blanket faced Samuel

Two weeks ago I had to wake Samuel from his nap. It was dinner time and he just had to get up. I went in and found him fast asleep like this - with a blanket right over his face! I was immediately worried he couldn't breathe but after checking, he was fine. So I grabbed the camera. 

He was so sound asleep he didn't hear me or notice the flash going off while I took photos. When I finally got him awake, he didn't seem to mind the blanket right over his face.

He did not want to get up and promptly rolled over and pulled the covers over himself. 

Poor Samuel. Sometimes it's tough being a Samuel. 

Ezra in a basket

While I was working in the school room, I came upstairs to find Ezra happily playing away in the toy basket. Silly little guy. 

He reminded me of a time when Samuel was also in that same basket. Except Samuel was freaking out. I guess he was only nine months old and not as adept at getting in and out of things. But still. This is totally Samuel - he flips out a lot. Ezra is, so far, more chilled. I hope he stays like this. And I hope Samuel learns not to scream so much. Ha!

Ezra walking

Ezra has been my baby slowest to walk. Noah walked at nine or ten months, though he never crawled. He just cried to be picked up whenever he fell. Evie was around 13 months and Samuel learned not too soon before they turned one year. Ezra though was 15 months. He just figured it out last week. 

This photo of Evie helping Ezra walk was taken on July 18th. 

So just about a week and a half later, Ezra started going for it all on his own. I have two terrible cell phone videos from that day, July 29th, but one won't work and for some reason the sound is gone. We were at Storybook Island so he could even handle uneven ground! And I'll tell you what, it sure is a lot easier taking him places outside if I don't have to worry about him crawling in who knows what. 

So... Go Ezra!

fireplace demolition

I have been excited to write this post. I haven't posted hardly any pictures on facebook because I was afraid people would nit pick our decision to tear out our fireplace. But it's done and can't be undone! The only regrets I have now are that we can't store our guns back there (HA!) and I am going to miss the ambiance of a wood fire. But those things weren't enough to prevent us doing what we did.

Our reasons are thus:

1. The fireplace was terribly inefficient. Seriously guys. It was bad. It sucked air out of the house to feed the fire, air that the furnace had been working so hard to warm, air that we had paid to warm, air sucked out of the house and gone. And for what? To warm the air only directly next to the fire. As you can see from this photo, you had to be directly next to the fire to get any heat from it. Radiant heat. The rest of the house became colder and this room only slightly warmer. A fireplace guy told us you had to burn for 10-11 hours just to break even. 

2. The school room was always so cold! Firstly, because of the air sucking. Secondly, because the area behind the fireplace was very poorly insulated. The bricks were just a facade - the entire space behind the brick was empty! The space was mostly finished (drywall, texturing and even ceiling popcorn), but the hole that the fireplace pipe went up didn't have adequate insulation around it. You could feel the cold air coming out of the cupboard doors next to the fireplace. Brrrr!

3. Since we added a wall down the middle of that space for the boys new room, their bedroom stays warm! So the fireplace room is cold and the boys room on the other side of that wall is warm. Hmmm. Good bye fireplace.

4. The facade was really huge. It came out four feet into the room and went 12 feet of space lengthwise. We thought we could use the extra 48 square footage in space.

5. I thought the bricks were ugly.

So we were thinking that to increase the efficiency of our house and furnace it would help just to block off the whole thing. No more air sucking or air leaking. And after Terry tore out the old wet bar  that's now the boys closet in their new room (using only a hammer), we figured it wouldn't be too tough to tear out the fireplace bricks. And it wasn't too tough. Just terribly messy...

So the Friday after after our vacation when we were mostly healed with antibiotics from our terrible, lingering colds, Terry got started demolishing the fireplace facade. It only took less than an hour to do most of it and was pretty entertaining to watch. Evie thought it was too loud though. Ezra had to be contained and kept away from falling bricks.

Wah-cha! That's my sound effect for Terry's sledge-hammering of the bricks. He was just getting started here.

He should have been a model with those duck lips. Er, he was pointing out that he had just got the stupid shelf out of there (tell us how you really feel Eva. yeah, i didn't like the shelves.).

Progress: taking the mantle down. You can see the pitiful insulation around the fireplace pipe. Under the pipe was no insulation, just cold air in the winter.

After 45-60 minutes he had done all of this and we took a break for the night.

I lose track of what we did on what days... But I think over the next two days, Saturday and Sunday the 19th and 20th, we cleared out the above rubble. Terry and I dropped the bricks carefully out of that window for the kids to pick up and put in Terry's trailer. Terry's dad was here for a little bit and he helped a bit too. After that Terry busted apart the remaining bricks that were built around a box to form the outcropping where we used to set wood or sit in front of the fire. It was kind of like a bench. You can see the remaining frame below.

In the above photo Terry's trying to figure out how to take that board off the foundation wall. But he found all of these strange seed things! We have no idea what they are, if they served a purpose or if the house had a mouse or squirrel problem in the past. But they filled the area behind that board. Weird. It's a mystery. 

Here is the mess of bricks, shelving and iron framing on the trailer outside the window. See how weighted down the tires were? Yeah...

Terry could not go to bed that night (Saturday I think) until he had figured out how to take the pipe off the fireplace. And figure it out he did. Then he scooted the beast off it's support so we could rip those up later.

The following day, Sunday, we spent about an hour or so chipping motor away from the whole and half bricks so we can re-use them for a garden pathway. Plus we wanted to lessen the load that the poor trailer was suffering under. The day before the kids also helped me with this while Terry was sledge-hammering away at the rest of the brick bench thing.

There's the load once we took out all the larger bricks. Still heavy. But he filled the tires and made it to the dump just fine the following day, Monday.

There is everything torn apart. We had a friend over that evening, David, and he helped Terry carry the monster fireplace outside. Then all the remaining rubble and dust had to be cleared out. That Monday, the 21st, I filled up as many buckets of rubble as I could find and waited to deposit them onto the empty trailer the next day.

So the following day, Tuesday the 22nd, I tackled the remaining rubble in the photo above all by myself. I figured Terry had enough to do and the sooner this got done, the better. I don't like a projec to be left sitting. I just want it DONE. My secret? Having self-entertaining kids. And it helps that they're not all little like Samuel and Ezra. If they were, I could only work during nap time. But as it was, I cleared out all the remaining rubble in the morning and did another project (scraping the ceiling) that afternoon. I was pretty tired that evening though. Oofdah. Oh, and this photo was actually take a few days later (Monday the 28th) when Terry had removed the fireplace frame, hammer drilled those insulation support boards into the foundation and cut and placed the insulation to fit. He also put up a few new car siding boards (what I previously thought was wainscoting). Plus, he blocked up the fireplace pipe with insulation, covered the hole with boards and then stapled insulation over it to be covered by drywall (which is now done, but I'm saving that for another post). So yeah, we've been busy but it feels good and it's gonna look even better than it feels.

paige and zach's wedding

The reason we ended our Nebraska vacation, and left Rachael's wedding, when we did was because we had to be back to Rapid to attend another wedding the very next day. 

Paige and Zach are youth workers of ours that who we've gotten close to, being their mentor couple and stuff.

We began to get to know them our first summer here in 2012, especially during the bike trip and disconnect, both of which they went on. I know this memory sticks out in Terry's mind, perhaps because of the sticky peanut butter Paige slapped on him during the bike trip. The punk!

Terry also fondly remembers when Zach and David stuck these yucca plants in their helmets for the final miles of the 2012 bike trip. 

Two months after the bike trip we went to Wyoming for our disconnect trip. Paige and Zach attended that and I have a feeling some attractions were starting there...

 They started dating December of 2012 and stopped by our house before Paige's senior prom on April 20, 2013, the same day that our kids were trampolining. I never posted these photos of them on the tramp so here are a couple. Wedding practice ;)

The kids had to show them the cool moves they learned earlier that day.  

Naturally, we had to be back for their wedding! It was the day after we returned from our vacation, Sunday July 13, and we were feeling pretty sick actually. That didn't stop us, though we didn't stay until midnight when it ended either. I'd seen weddings take place up there at Sylvan Lake (where National Treasure 2 was filmed) and it always seemed like the idyllic spot. Chyeah! Talk about beautiful photos!!!

The kiss :) 

After they got to the back Zach put Paige in a wheel barrow and wheeled her up to the reception. It was so cute with her little feet sticking out of all her dress fluff.  

We got to sit with all Terry's co-workers (who are our friends of course!) and another couple, Andrew and Alyssa (who are moving to Nebraska :( ). It was a beautiful and moving wedding. We felt so blessed to be a part of it. Love you Zach and Paige!

Alyssa, Andrew, Dave, me, Terry, Carol, Paul, Jana, Russ and Denise.