First Fall Break: Pack Rats, A Basket Case, and a Two-Headed Pig

We *finally* took our first week off from school this past week. There's always a rush this time of year to prep for our annual All Saints' Day party, get in our fall field trips, and winterize things. And by week 10 of school, which we just completed, the house has taken a hit in the orderliness department and desperately requires us to regroup for sanity's sake.

Monday morning dawned gray and drizzly, which was perfect. It was such a luxury to let everyone sleep late while I cozied up with a book and my cup of coffee in the comfy chair in the school room.

I was able to get a couple small projects completed, which ended up being the extent of my Monday productivity. The boys played with, fought over, and spread Legos from one end of the house to the other until they were banished for everyone's sakes.

A new ceiling fan wasn't in the budget this year, so I gave the old one a face lift. I flipped the blades upside-down and spray painted them. I scraped the dated flowers off the shade with a paring knife and a green scratch pad~something I would never like to do again! 

I've been working on the back room updates bit by bit. This is the door into the kitchen. Green and orange were the prevailing color schemes throughout the whole house.

My expectations always exceed reality, but looking back I accomplished most of what I had hoped to. I tackled some problems areas in the house that get neglected when we're busy. The ancient carpet upstairs has been a concern for a long time, and one of the boys developed a dry cough since moving here.

Years and years (at least 50 since this sculptured wool avocado carpet was all the rage in the 1960's) was hauled out of this old house this week. I vacuumed years of dust and things out of the cracks in the floorboards and felt peace of mind knowing I could scrub and disinfect the wood. I was hoping to find some exciting artifacts long buried. The most interesting was a 1940 wheat penny, and I can't really say where it came from. It just materialized on the floor in my absence. I found several sewing pins and a hair pin.

And then I started on the hallway...

While everything was pulled out of the bedroom I decided to rearrange them AGAIN. I don't know why I ever decided on child-specific decor. Ah well! We have discovered as boys age different personalities work better together than others. It keeps changing.

This smaller room has been Aidan's plus another boy (each has taken turns), but always Aidan's since we moved here. The bed has a trundle bed underneath that ended up staying pulled out because of how tight a space it was crammed into. So we ended up with over half the room covered in beds, underneath of which were unreachable. We decided that Gavin needed his own space for a while, so the trundle bed was switched to the big room to accommodate three boys.

There's still some rearranging to do and stuff to sort, but this project is a huge weight off me at the moment.

And this is the mess that was left in the wake of the bed moving. All this stuff fell or was stuffed under the beds. Pack rats. I live in a nest of pack rats.

And while this post is much longer than I had planned, I wanted to share shots from the highlight of our week, a field trip we took with my mom. One thing that always amazes me is the amount of craftsmanship that was put into things "back then;" the beauty and attention to detail is breathtaking.

The day ended with our annual visit to my old "home" library, where we again came home with a whole box of discarded treasures.

To think this was the height of fashion when our house was built!