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! 

Aidan and Liam's Bedroom Makeover

Slowly, room by room, we are getting this old house fixed up how we like it. It's been two years this summer since we bought it, and I have to say, we've accomplished quite a bit. Of course, I wish we could just do it all at once and be done with it, but our budget and free time won't allow for that. We might get done just in time for kids to move out and to start all over again undoing their rooms. But that's a terrifying thought, so I'll just quit there. 

Last summer when the two big boys went to camp, we received a heart-wrenching letter from Aidan about how much he missed home and how he wasn't fitting in with the other boys. As a parent you want things to always be okay for your kids, but that's obviously not how the world works, and not at all how they learn to deal with things. So, instead of hopping in a vehicle and racing 200+ miles to go pick him up like my mama bear's heart urged me to, I decided to do something nice for him as a surprise when he got home. He had been asking me to paint his room for so long I finally decided to do it.

The first time we saw this room while viewing the house, Aidan picked it as his own. As you can see, it boasted lovely striped carpeting in various shades of green. The room lies over the southeast corner of the kitchen, and is very much a "morning room" as it gets the full force of the sun in the mornings. I have no doubt Aidan picked the room because it contains the door onto the upper porch. The room also shares a walk-through closet with the neighboring bedroom, which immediately took away the option as a master bedroom for me. Since the boys generally end up sharing all their clothes, it made sense that those two rooms would be theirs. So the porch door was padlocked shut for safety, and it was declared Aidan's room, with a younger brother bunk-mate to be decided. The younger brother was initially Ian, but Liam's and Aidan's personalities ended up being more alike, thus resulting in a more peaceful set of roomies.

After we closed on the house, my Mom and my sister-in-law, Carly, came to help scrub it from top to bottom. I decided to rip up the ugly green carpet last minute, and Carly was a dear and humored me...she dove right in and helped me roll it up and dump it over the porch railing. The floor underneath was the norm for this house: painted soft wood, which we gave a good scrubbing.

After we moved in I ordered a few things for the walls from Hobby Lobby. Aidan loves baseball and Peanuts. This was pretty much how the room looked until July 2017 when I decided to do the surprise makeover.

Aidan had talked a lot before how he wanted a blue and yellow room, so the littles and I took a trip to Wal-Mart to pick up a couple gallons of paint. Their ColorPlace brand in satin finish is my go-to paint, cheaper than most, and durable.

This is how it turned out! The blue is called Brittany Inn, the yellow is Lemon Ice (and is the same color I used in the front porch). The curtains were Liam approved, and were about $5 a panel at Wal-Mart, so $20 for both windows. I threw out the dusty, sticky yellow mini blinds that were in the windows and replaced them with new (less than $4 a set), installed inside the window trim rather than over it like before. Along the wall on the left there is now a large Minecraft poster, but Aidan wants me to paint a space-themed mural there. We'll see if I ever get around to that one. Liam is simply happy if he has a play sword to fall asleep with, and seems to care less what his surroundings look like. He is my minimalist child.

A few things have been rearranged since this photo was taken. That little blue bookcase was repainted white and gray and rehomed in Addie's room. The cedar chest now sits where the bookcase was, opening up room to walk around the trundle bed that Aidan sleeps on. It rolls under the double bed, but generally stays out most the time. We added Liam's name to the wall and hung the poster Aidan got for his birthday. 

Aidan has had his share of mental struggles, and it helps him to have visual comforts while he falls asleep. I gave him my collection of framed holy cards from when I was in high school, and ordered him a nice, larger, colored crucifix overlooking the bedroom. 

The last step of the bedroom makeover will be the floors, but there is no time frame or decisions made regarding those yet. Since this room accesses outdoors I don't want to replace it with new carpet. So we have yet to decide on a durable hard floor that fits within our budget. I would just paint the floor, but there are sections of boards that are not in great condition, and painting a floor is so much work without being a permanent fix. I'll be sure to update when we get this figured out.