Living Amidst a Mess!

My kitchen has undergone a transformation this week and is now officially “moose mousse” in color! At the same time, my entire house has undergone a transformation too...and it’s now officially a “mess mess”! I’m excited about the first transformation, but the second one is still throwing me out of kilter! As anyone who knows me (or lives with me) knows, I’m not a person that likes my house to be messy and so this is truly hard for me to stomach. I almost have to lock myself in my room (which is probably one of the only rooms in the whole house that is still in its “normal” state) and try to imagine what my house is going to look like in a few weeks, and not what it looks like right now! I’ve really tried to stay on top of this remodel by keeping things clean as we went, but as of this weekend, it is no longer possible!

My "moose mousse" walls in my "mess mess" kitchen

Yet another "mess mess"

My husband promised me a week or so ago that when we got the painting done, we would have about a week in which we could clean things up and have things at least semi-normal around here. When he made that promise, however, he had no idea that he was going to have problems with the paint sticking to several spots on the walls, which in turn has led to his painting, patching, repainting, repatching and repainting the same walls over and over again. To say that he’s been a little frustrated this week would be an understatement...but with that being said, he’s also shown a lot of patience through the whole mess and that shows just how incredible he is! Now aside from a couple of bubbles that still remain (which Rod refuses to try and fix anymore), it’s actually looking pretty good! Unfortunately, it also took him at least 2 or 3 days longer to get the painting done, so that promise of getting things back to “semi-normal” doesn’t look like it’s going to materialize!

Nice paint job huh?

On top of the mess that has been caused by the painting fiasco, we got our new front door and basement windows on Friday and Saturday, which caused yet a few more remodel dilemmas. The door was measured wrong, so the installers had to cut off an additional ¼ inch of the wall above the door, which wasn’t easy, but they did it without too much of a problem. Then when they went to install the basement windows it all went well until they got to the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 7^th windows (out of 7 total windows) and then they had a problem! Apparently, the guy who had measured for the basement windows (and it wasn’t Rod) only measured the ones in the family room downstairs and even though the other basement windows are all the same size, they had been sheetrocked over after they were originally installed, which made them impossible to replace unless the sheetrock was cut out all around them. So guess what else is now a mess? Every room in the basement!

Look at my beautiful new door...from the inside!

The mess doesn’t stop there! While I was gone Saturday morning running the 3^rd of my 5 Winter Circuit races (which I’ll get to in a minute!), Rod finished painting the laundry room and had time on his hands, so he decided to tear off the mantel on our fireplace to get ready for our new fireplace. That’s all well and good, but our fireplace won’t even get installed for about 3 more weeks when our cabinets come, so I’m not sure why he had to take it down so early...but it was gone when I got home from my race, or at least it was sitting in a pile on the floor! Yes...another mess! But that’s not all, I decided to add to the mess too. I wanted to paint the wall where the new fireplace is going to go and since we still had all of our painting stuff out, I suggested to Rod that we paint that wall before we put it all away. He seemed to think that it would be no big deal because he didn’t have any patching to do on the wall, so he told me to get it ready and he’d go pick up my paint.

Doesn't my fireplace look "naked" without the mantel?

While he was gone, I started to wipe down the walls so I could get ready to tape them and guess what I found? A huge crack in the wall where one of the chairs had been pushed back too hard...so it looked like there was going to be a little patchwork that was going to have to be done after all! As long as I was at it, I also wanted to paint one wall in the family room the same color, so I suggested that we might as well get that one ready too...so we moved some more furniture and took some more things off the walls and I began to clean and tape that wall as well!

Of course, once we got started Rod began to find a lot of holes that needed to be patched and he also discovered that one of the intercoms to the old intercom system (from when the house was originally built) was still in the wall behind the stereo. So he ripped that out and decided that he’d patch the wall, but that also meant that he was going to have to paint the entire room...and not just the one wall that I had originally planned on painting! Needless to say, because of all of the patching, we couldn’t paint yesterday but we also couldn’t put the furniture back, so my walls are now sitting bare, my furniture is in the center of the rooms, knick knacks are piled everywhere...and Rod is leaving for Boise in the morning! That means my house will be like this until he gets back and when he gets back on Wednesday, his number one project is to get the cabinets out of the kitchen so that the flooring can be laid on Thursday. So what does that mean for my painting job? Who knows when it will get done? I have this feeling that my house is going to remain in chaos for a while too! Isn’t it funny how our one “little” project of remodeling our kitchen has turned into this? I just keep telling myself that it will be worth it when I see the final results!

As I mentioned, yesterday morning I ran one of my Winter Circuit races. This one was a 10 miler and by all accounts, it was incredibly hard! They had combined the 5K and the 10K that we ran a few weeks ago, which all by themselves were very hard because they consisted mostly of running uphill, so to combine them just made the race pure torture! But I finished it and even though I didn’t run the race faster than I did last year, I ran it stronger, so that was an accomplishment for me!

My friends and I after the 10 mile race

Just like last week, it feels like the remodel thing has overtaken our lives, but there are so many other things going on at the same time that are exciting too. The two little boys started soccer this week and it feels like they’ve been eating, drinking and dreaming about soccer ever since...Connor especially! They got their new uniforms at their first practice and Connor has all but lived in his...in fact I think he would live in it if I’d let him, but I have to draw the line somewhere. They do look awfully cute though and they’re both having so much fun! I just hope that their enthusiasm keeps me going through the remaining 6 weeks of it because I’m still wondering why I signed them up knowing that it involves being there on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of every week! I’m sure it will help when the weather gets warmer though because a couple of times this week, it was unbearable even sitting out there in the cold!

Hayden loves to play soccer

Connor just learning how to handle the ball

Hayden...always the jokester on the sidelines

Also this past week, Patrick left for Korea...and a day and a half later, he called to tell us that he was finally there! I had to laugh because that same day we got a message on our phone that sounded like it was Japanese or something and I couldn’t figure out why. Then the more I listened to it, I thought I recognized a Korean word in the midst of the babble, which I only knew because my friend went on a mission to Korea and had taught me a simple phrase that included that word, so I immediately started wondering who we knew in Korea that would call us. It took me a few minutes to realize it but...duh! Who else would be calling us from Korea? It was Patrick! He’d obviously tried to call us and even though it hadn’t worked on our phone, he’d been able to get through to his dad so at least we know he got there safely!