Sunday Pics: The Tour Le Grande

Hooookay! Did I promise y'all a tour? I think I may have. I think I may have also pissed off a few of y'all by my reluctance to get to the money shots earlier this week.

Tough patooties. This has been a little traumatic for me, and I am a delicate flower.

If you would like a closer look at any picture, just click on it.

Come with me now, on a magical journey through a series of once magical and echo-ey rooms that are now just rooms. Granted, they are rooms that have just doubled our living space, so yeah... there is THAT magical aspect of them. But first things first, let's head on downstairs.



When you arrive at the bottom landing, if you turn to your left you will see this lovely sight...

Bear left from approximately the middle of this first room and you will see the beginning of the hallway, the door to the media closet, and the entrance to the Love Den of the Dadguy a.k.a. the Gameroom. The cute girlie in pink is just the spokesmodel, pay her no mind.

This shot was taken while the photographer was standing next to the Twilight Zone Pinball machine. That Defender cabinet is actually a Multi-Arcade-Machine-Emulator, or MAME machine. If ever there was an arcade game that was fun? It's loaded on this baby!

On the other side of the MAME is a Magic Sword arcade game... that will probably get sold to make room if Dadguy ever gets his dream-come-true of an Addams Family pinball machine. An event that I am now realizing will likely come to fruition before my own dream-come-true of new furniture. Say La Vee... in the end it will all work out. It better.

Again with the spokesmodel.

So, c'mon with me now down the hall way here...

The first door on you right will be the laundry room. Woooo. Eventually (if the guy ever wants to get paid) there will be a shelf on those boards over the washer and dryer. Eventually.

Here is the bathroom, the second door on your right. Obviously it still needs a little work, but we are aiming for the first of August to have it up and running. The tile flooring was just grouted yesterday afternoon, and needs a coat of sealer yet. Then the tub surround goes up next weekend, and the plumber comes in the week after that to hook up the workings.

We hope.

But this is Reality in Chaos, so we'll see what really happens.

Third door on your right is the currently very over-burdened cold storage. In between the shelving is stuffed a number of pieces of furniture that will be making their way out into the household. Later. When we get around to it.

This shoy was taken from the doorway... but I see no sense in overwhelming your eyes with more food storage and a bunch more crap.

Well heck yeah! Let's get all the ugly out of the way here! This is the first door on your left, it is the closet under the stair, also known as BOO! Dadguy knows what everything here is. I think. Let's just keep moving along, shall we?

Second door on the right is the guest bedroom, sewing room, eventually one of the girls' room. This is the last room of our circle.

This room has the larger windows, and is actually part of what is usually finished as the family room in the model of house that we have. It is situated directly below the front room upstairs.

We actually had to break down a framed and rocked in wall (along the left hand side of the stairwell going down, where the banister now is) in order to get the stairs to open out into the family room in the way that we finished it. Because of the way we chose to do it, we ended up with a cold storage (has no windows) instead of an extra bedroom. But I have been in houses that are finished the other way, and I cannot repent of our decisions. I love the way that we have done it too well (the banister, the archway, the open feel) to feel badly about that lost bedroom.

In this shot you can also admire some adventurous Hollyhocks growing up out of the window well.

So now you turn and realize that the guest room has a door that also leads into the family room, passing along the bottom of the stairs! A loop! My favorite! Yay!

Ooop! I think we are done... there goes that girlie!

The End

Ode To A Carpeted Basement

I had no idea, no idea the the act of laying carpeting in your rooms would vault you from the realms of dreams, into mundane reality. Truly, how could I know? I mean, intellectually I knew that once carpeted we could begin the trickle down of our upstairs life down into the newly formed rooms, but I didn't really know.

We had you framed, your bones showing the basement that you would become... and you retained every bit of imaginary beauty and promise. Then as you lay fallow but for the stringing of electrical and networking tendons, that year or so you never lost your magic. As we slowly, over the years purchased lights and hardware for you, made decisions, and imagined how you would be... still you eluded us in you un-being. The sheet rock and texture gave you a sculptural quality; an almost third dimensional, but still ghost like reality. The finish carpentry delineated you even more, but honestly... you were still in an untouchable, state of non-existence to me! Paint? No, not even close.

Just one afternoon of two men laying a horizontal textured surface, and my lists of all the thing to be done before you would become, has become a list of inconsequentials. A list of nit-pickery nothings.

As I walked down your now padded and carpeted stairs and entered your rooms.... ROOMS! I was shocked to my core that all of the dreams and maybes of your creation had been made reality, and that they had indeed been ripped out of the ether and made into rooms. Empty rooms smelling of paint and new carpeting; They had become rooms, complete and finite. Rooms like every empty room of every new apartment or house that I have ever moved into.

The dreams that had been forming over the years of your planning and creation are now locked in place, like a butterfly caught and displayed in solid lucite.

Don't get me wrong, your empty rooms waiting to be filled and lived in are exciting to me in their own way... the flow of our family life will be forever changed with these additions. But the state of un-being and anticipation is gone now, and I can see how home improvement can be an addiction. The thrill of the chase is over.

It has been ever since Monday, and I still cannot bear to take your picture. You seem naked to me. Now that you ARE and have being, your emptiness seems to need covering, filling, living before I expose you.

Love
-bon

To the Internets: Perhaps this Sunday I will be able to give y'all that promised tour.

Opinions?

It's not really that I have nothing to blog about... it's this odd combination of fear that I cannot write any more, and an actual lack of coherent thought. I will just chalk this up to the pregnancy too. Like I do everything that ails me now-a-days.

But also, I am living this dearth of bloggage in light of the fact that this blog o' mine is not anonymous. And I am having an uncomfortable neighbor problem.

Not that the neighbor in question reads my blog. But other neighbors do, and the day that I write about what is going on is the day that she will find this blog and read it... and then it will be veeeeery uncomfortable around here.

And I think that today is the day.

So next door to us is this family... they have a boy who is around ten-eleven... a girl who is eight and a girl who is four years old. The girl who is four is more or less welcome at our house, although I will say that near the end of the school year it was getting freaky. She would come over almost every single day around one-ish, and stay till we sent her home when we had dinner. On days that she didn't have school she would come over earlier.

Come to find out that her mom is pregnant (due a couple weeks before me) and was pretty sick... and that's more or less cool... but they never once called to make sure everything was OK, they never once said anything to me about the fact that their youngest was practically living at our house during the daylight hours. Plus several times they would send her sister over to our house to get her to come home... when she had either left hours earlier, or had never even been at our house that day. I had also watched the mom and dad get in the car and drive away together while she was playing at our house... I suppose leaving the older brother in charge? Who knows? This had been going on for months and I was getting worried for the summer time, thinking that this girl would be over even more.

Good new: she's not over all day every day.
Bad news: Her older sister wants to come over now as well. Older sister is NOT particularly welcome in this house (she has a history of cruelty to Birdie and LaLa), and older brother is absolutely not welcome. Ever. The following is a perhaps unkind, but true summation of my problem with the older children... they are mean, verbally abusive (screaming, name calling and swearing), and sneaky and are generally up to no good. The girl will will bully when my back is turned, and try to get Birdie to do things that are sketchy. The older brother simply scares the crap out of me. He is violent and abusive, and that's his public face. Seriously.

So now, the older girl is insisting that MY girls can go over and play at their house... a thing that will never happen with my approval. Ever. Up to now it hasn't even been a question, the younger girl had never even brought it up as a possibility, and never seemed interested in having the Chaos over to her house. So. Good. Plus as near as I can tell, they do not ever have friends over to their house, so I wasn't much worried about it. Only now...

Without going into great detail and conjecture in this post... they just never, ever will have my permission to play next door... but how do I explain this to the girls without it coming back to bite me in the can? How can I abridge my reasons of why they may not play next door with their little friend, when they are allowed to play at many other children's houses in the neighborhood?

And how do I keep the older girl away? Two years ago an incident happened that I witnessed, with this older girl and Birdie, and I actually went next door and told the mother that I would not be letting the girls play together as a result of their age disparity and the differences of their temperament. Do I have to do this again? I have tried turning the girls away when they come together to play, but the older girl has figured this out and will send the younger over, and then follow about ten minutes later.

Seriously... this sucks! The younger girl seems cut from a different cloth as the two older kids, but now it's looking like a package deal with the two sisters. I am so frustrated with this whole mess that today I am just taking a break. No friends today. Nyet. Nada. If it comes to it, I guess I will go ahead and explain again to the mother that older sister really is not a good fit for playing with the girls... but this WILL cause a chilly-ness between the two household again, and I feel sympathy for the younger girl. She's a good girl and needs friends. She has demonstrated that she can be a good friend for the Chaos, when not being influenced by her older sister.

Am I just being way too overprotective? Can this be done peacefully? Sighhhhhh.

This post may disappear in a day or two.

Sunday Pic: Progress

Y'all... I hurt. I have tweaked, pulled or torqued something in my upper back/neck/shoulder region by vastly overdoing it yesterday. I cannot turn my head all the way to either side, but I also cannot yet repent, because we are ready. READY! For the carpet to be laid tomorrow morning. Against all odds, we are now ready. Mind you, it didn't have to be this way, this close of a race. The guy that we had contracted to do not only the finish carpentry, but the painting and tile in the bathroom (a series of jobs that he assured us would take one single week and a day to complete?... six weeks later finally completed the carpentry and paint leg-o-the-journey on Thursday and promptly went out of town.

And then the paint dried all the way and we realized. Was not OK. And then we freaked. I believe I used the eff bomb. Several times. I had already paid him.

So Saturday morning we hired the neighborhood uber-sitter and proceeded to roller coat the entire basement with another coat of the white that we had chosen. Not difficult, as we had five and a half extra gallons of the color (mixed and un-returnable) left over, that the guy had had us purchase for the job. Luckily, as anyone who has painted before knows... the roller coating part is the fast and fairly enjoyable part of painting.... it's the masking and cutting part that takes time, is tedious and generally bites.

Ceiling, walls doors and trim were all same color, no carpeting or furniture to hassle with... the job was pretty fast, but it has made all the difference. But then we also had to scrape and shop-vac the entire basement floor in preparation to the carpet coming in. These are not a combination of jobs that a pregnant woman really ought to tackle all in one day. So today I pay. And pay. And pay. I'm betting that Dadguy is paying as well... but as he was up and gone by six-thirty for his church meetings today, it's a little tough to say for sure.

Yeah. Pretty sure he's paying.

He also got the lights up in the family room, one of the bedrooms (what will be our game room), and one of the hallway lights. Looking good, yeah?



Still left to do, but not in this order:

• switch plates
• plugs and plates
• smoke alarms
• cable and network plates
• phone jack plates
• vent covers
• umm... oh yeah... the carpet
• lights in closets, bedroom, hallway, bathroom
• bathroom tile
• tub surround
• install toilet and sink
• doorknobs

holy cow... we are never gonna finish. We will need blinds for a total of five windows too. If we are cool, it will be most all of it done by August fourth when my parents come to visit. At the tectonic pace that we have been going? Not a lot of hope. Sorry Ma... but at least there are no spiders! Seriously... the worst I have seen down there in months has been the 'tato-bug we found trundling across the concrete yesterday, and as he was hustled out by Pearl in her hot, grubby paw... I doubt we will be seeing much more of him!

The color is Behr's "Silk Pillow." This shot highlights the lovely texture.

A preview of the carpeting.

The way that we finished our basement, at the base of the stairs you can either take a left into the family room, or a right into a bedroom. The bedroom also has a door that opens into the hallway which at the arched end attaches to the family room. The floor plan is a big circle. I love circles and loops. Next week I will take y'all on the extended tour of our basement circuit. It'll be fun... if you like that sort of thing!

Sunday Pic: Basement

Piffle dee pfeffernuese. So there is not nearly so much going on in the basement progress as I thought there would be. The guy we have contracted, spent an average of a half an hour a day down there this past week. To be fair we added the equivalent of one doors worth of trim and one shelf in the laundry room to his docket... but the truth of the matter is that we have been in a painting holding pattern since Thursday. As in... my laundry room is down there, and I have thought for sure each day that the painting was starting THAT DAY... so no laundry has been happening. At all.

Hello Mount Washmore!

What am I complaining about? I haven't even managed to fold and put away the four baskets of clean clothes that sit at the foot of my bed.

So... a few pics just as I promised...

I know, the unfinished laundry room. Riveting.

In other news... there is a decided lack of news. All I seem to be able to think or talk about is this pregnancy. I am starting to bore the hoopty out of myself, and it's all just TMI if you ask me. But don't ask me. Because I will share the TMI goodness.

I will mention the fact that I have gone from a woman with the appearance of being six to seven months pregnant, to that of a woman with a mere four month belly... overnight.

Dude... my six year old noticed. The behbeh is still plenty active, so no worries, it's just one of those goofy pregnancy tidbits that no one else really cares all that much about.. Except for me. And mostly because I cannot keep my maternity pants up any more... AND it has heralded my usual pregnancy tailbone/pelvic/hip pinched nerves and pain. And I thought that I was getting out of that party this time around.

Fine... it's worth it, see?

As cute and as goofy as ever.

Sunday Pic: Facepaint

Lazy summer days... a little bit o' decoration.

We accidentally left that Kiki (binky) of Pearls at Grandma's house yesterday. It has been almost 24 hours of no kikis. We've come this far. I think we will just be done.

Next Sunday Pic? I will take you on a tour of the basement progress. The week after that? We ought to be done.

Done

Done.

Or maybe the week after that.
.
.
.
.
.

Or maybe next year sometime.

Birdie's Early Christmasssssss

Last night was a banner night for the Eldest Chaos Girl, a.k.a. Birdie. At nine-thirty PM, she properly formed the sound of the letter "s" and used it while saying several words. She is six and a half, and until now the letters "s" and "z" have completely eluded her, to her deep frustration. She has done it, she has made that breakthrough.

And that breakthrough kept her up until well past eleven last night, practicing her "S's", the same breakthrough woke her up this morning with a hissy sissy snake sound coming out of her mouth!

On this blog, I have only ever mentioned this speech pathology of hers once. In my book, while it is a problem that has stumped her, it does not define her. Up until a few months ago she was dead set against Speech Therapy, and any conversation I had with her regarding her "s's" would leave her panicked and near tears... enter the beloved and wondrous Mrs W, the Kindergarten teacher with the magic touch. She casually mentioned to Birdie during a Parent/Teacher/Student meeting with the two of us that classmate so-and-so in Birdie's class goes to Speech and loves it. Good enough for the B girl, and so with her blessing I started the wheels in motion and got her in to meet with the school Speech Therapist. From that point on, there was no question that she would qualify, it was all formalities. The Therapist had never actually encountered the particular speech eccentricity that Birdie has. I know this is true, because she told me so, AND because she persisted in referring to the sound that she makes as a sound on the inhale. It isn't. Trust me, I have listened to it for five years. It is an exhaled nasal.

Details. Whatever.

In the end, the T's never got all the way crossed, nor the I's entirely dotted until just before the end of the school year, so Birdie never actually got any therapy. They figured that a week and a half (three appointments) would have confused her more than helped, so they just sent home a packet of summer Speech Therapy homework. Which I thought was pretty great until I looked through it, and realised that it was full of endless ways to encourage her to practice making the sounds correctly, and cute little charts to put nifty stars on for the days that she completes her assignments.

GAGHK! She has never been able to make an "s" sound! What do you mean practice? I was back to square one. Only now I was annoyed!

Birdie is a highly motivated little girl who loves to learn. She also has a little friend who's older brother is homeschooled, and thusly the little girl insists on some schoolin' herself. Plus several of the Chaos's cousins are homeschooled. She and LaLa had begun to pester me for some homeschool this summer.

Sigh.

I have NEVER thought of Homeschool as anything I was interested in doing. At best I had planned on supplementing their plain-old public education with art and a few science projects. Only now the pressure is on. Great. So this week we started with "Plants and Seeds." It was gonna be "Wildflowers" but there wasn't even enough literature in the kids section of the local library to even do a full week on "Flowers," so "P & S" it is. Frankly I think it's pretty funny to hear my kids talking about Monocotyledons, Dicotyledons and Disseminules, so we aren't dumbing down the vocabulary for them... but we generally lose Pearl within her first three thwarted attempts to engage us in a good wrastle while we are hitting the books. We lose LaLa about five minutes later as she hits the pantry for a good snack scrounge (although she can still hear every word, and I think she IS still listening). So last night I didn't feel at all badly about continuing our study of how seeds travel even after the younger two had gone to bed. But after a half an hour of study, plus an expedition outside to see if we could spot any winged disseminules (helicopter seeds) in the local maple trees, I started to cast about for something to distract Birdie from the all-seeds-all-the-time focus she has going. So I brought up the "Speech Therapy Homework Packet" that was awaiting her. I figure that it has "Homework" in the title, so it must have a bit of appeal for the Birdster in her current must-learn-everything mode that she is in.

Ayuh. Sure did.

For a thing that has brought her to tears so many times and completely stumped her, last night it was easy. It was effortless. It was immediate and it felt like a miracle. It is the very first step, and today she mastered the "Z" sound.

Had I mentioned that Birdie is a highly motivated little girl? She is motivated. Talking with her today has been like speaking to a stranger. She doesn't sound like her old self. She is going full bore into the land of "correctly pronouncssssed sssspeech." She is sibilance itsssself. She is thinking, and practicing and I swear it's like Christmas around here for her. I am constantly reminding her that this is a process and she will have to practice long and hard before she gets it right every single time. She is undaunted, and digs away at the practice like her life depended on it.

I am so PROUD of my little Bird