It was a wild weekend...

How wild was it?

I found a snake in the basement...it was a small snake..so small I thought at first it was a worm.

Rich saw this spider by the front door.  It's BIG...and look at that web...he did a zigzag stitch...

And this frog was spotted on one of the windows..

And this little "wild thing" came to visit Saturday morning and proudly showed us her first "writing" from school.  She is three and just started going to a local day care.  She was so excited to hang the paper on the refrigerator.  If you click on the photo you will notice that she only traced the A's and B's.  When I asked her why she didn't trace the C's, she said "well, I don't like them as much".  LOL

Our tools for the weekend..

A.  New Front Light...

B.  New floodlight installed on the corner of the eaves of the house.  Sorry, no photo..

C. I had no idea that you could buy Magnetic paint.  It comes in a quart and you use a foam roller and do three coats.  This is in the sewing room and there is only one coat so far.  There will also be a piece of white trim added to the top to finish it off.  I can't wait to do the second and third coats and try it out.  Walmart had all the lime green school supplies on sale last week and I bought a new pencil holder, new stapler and 16 matching magnets..  I think the board will come in handy..and it was kind of fun to do something that was an "extra"...and really not necessary to us moving here..

D.  Those are the knobs for the closet doors in the back hallway.  We thought we lost them and refound them this weekend so I had to make sure they stayed in the kitchen and don't get lost again.

E.  We bought this little metal cart at an auction last summer..We paid less than $2. I always knew that it would end up in the laundry area and after painting the back hallway white I thought this would be a perfect pop of color...and I love orange.  I had one can of spray paint so it only has half of the first coat and doesn't look so good...but more will be done on this in a couple of weeks. 

F.  New dryer vent.  The previous owners had the dryer venting into a plastic trashcan in the basement.  Not a good idea for so many reasons...

Ha Ha... Rich asked for a soda while he was cutting the hole...

And that was all on our little list for this past weekend... of course that means there was a big list...right?  

Insulayment...

Flooring...

With those items...we did this...

just a plain back hallway

Insulayment down and first flooring going down...

Hallway done

Closet floors done

laundry area done...

You know what this means?  All the floors are done...every last floor in this house has been ripped up, removed, hauled off and new floors installed.  That's 2009 sq ft of flooring..   Yes, we still need to add baseboard..heck, we have to buy and paint the baseboard...but my legs are so happy the flooring is done...

We also did some touch up painting on the garage...that back wall where Rich dropped the bucket of paint now looks perfect..

And Saturday night we did a DATE NIGHT!!  Can you believe it...  We knocked off working around 3pm...took showers...put nice clothes on...and went to dinner...   After dinner we had tickets to tour the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo.  This prison closed in 2004 and all the inmates were transferred to other Missouri prisons.  They now give history tours, ghost tours and occasionally do over night paranormal ghost tours.  We took the history tour and it was fascinating.. We had a wonderful tour guide named Mark Schrieber who was an investigator for the Department of Corrections and a former Deputy Warden at this prison.  If you are thinking about taking a tour do it before November as he is retiring and he is the best.  Our tour was listed as two hours...we left at two hours 20 minutes and they were still standing around talking at the gas chamber...

Here are photos I took..

Front of prison

One of the housing units

typical cell

Cell of James Earl Ray..who escaped in a bread truck and later assassinated Martin Luther King.  He was incarcerated here on a different charge and Mark said he was a model prisoner and gave no indication to anyone that he was capable of doing that murder.

J.E.R. is for James Earl Ray... click the photo to make it larger for dates of imprisonment

One of the inmates made this sign...

Sonny Liston was housed in this cell.  Note the clear TV set.

The gas chamber

When this gas chamber was being built, there were two people on death row that were to be executed at the same time. Hence the two chairs...  

These are the photos of all the Men and One Woman to be executed in this gas chamber.  The last two photos on the right in the fourth row are of Bonnie Heady and Carl Austin Hall.  They were the Greenlease Kidnappers.. you can read about them here andhere.

Nancy

still painting...

 We spent the weekend doing what we have been doing forever...well, not really, but it sure feels like it..

We finished up the house and garage and now we look so much better...  I will be so happy when I can take a photo of the house without a trash pile in front...

Trim on two windows done.  My sewing room is on the other side of the long window on the left.. The other window is in the long hall way that is waiting for flooring,.

The front of the house.  That horrible wooden walkway is on the list to be removed..but doesn't the new paint color look nice?

The front of the garage.  Yes, the garage sits in front of the house.  Hate the location, but there is no way to change it.  As it is, we are struggling to find the perfect place for the work shop.  And no, this will NOT become the workshop.

We still have a blue door, but that will change next weekend..It will be painted white to match the front door.  And Rich will paint over those three spots on the wall where he spilled the bucket of paint moving the ladder...with the paint hanging from a rung...he wiped the paint off but of course he couldn't get it all off...

Look who came out!!  This is our youngest, our only son, who came out and did a whole lot of work this weekend.  He mowed all the grass, moved firewood from the basement to the OUTSIDE firewood pile, moved two or three different wood piles to the trash pile...and then we let him go home...lol   "Somebody" might have told him he could leave as soon as all his work was done..  He sure sped up after that...BTW, "somebody" might have been his oldest sister.. getting your car insurance paid for is a great motivator...

This is the pile of wood he moved from various areas to this trash pile.. 

i put the doors back up on the cabinets in the laundry room.  So glad I took the time to paint them white..

OK...this is what the side of the house looks like.  The bad before...We can't paint this side, or the other side or the back.  It's two stories and we don't like heights...  That yellow/cream/beige color gives me the chills..along with the bad paint job of the dark country blue... There is paint all over the windows and the trim is all sloppy..it's quite obvious someone was a little drunk while painting...  And look at that planter!  That window is the master bedroom and inside that stupid bird feeder is a dead bird.  And the dang thing won't disintegrate..it's been there over a year and it just won't go away... The whole planter/feed thing is OUT!  As soon as I can get up there on the ladder with the drill..

And last week, I forgot to show you what Rich did....  These are all the railroad ties that he pulled from around the garage..the house...down the driveway..all by himself ...last weekend... in the heat...

This week we pick up the flooring for the back hallway and decide on a front porch.  I want concrete, Rich wants to use TREX...  Your thoughts?  Has anyone used this? 

Nancy

I want to do something besides....

PAINT!!!  Please....

Saturday was my monthly Modern Quilt Guild meeting so I didn't make it to the house until around 3pm...or maybe later...
Rich took off around 7am and got the rest of the front of the house painted.  By the time I got there he was ready to quit, so I helped him finish trimming the windows on the garage.  There were three windows and none of them had any trim...  Then we ate dinner. Rich put a pork butt on the smoker and we had pulled pork sandwiches and then headed to town to see Cowboys and Aliens.  It was ok...a great way to spend the evening...

Sunday morning  Kristin brought over already cooked homemade pork sausage, a coffee cake and some mini-muffins..I added scrambled eggs and fruit and we had a great breakfast.  With all that food, we didn't even stop for lunch..The grandkids start school tomorrow.  Owen will be in third grade and Ava starts kindergarten.  Where has the time gone.  The other grandkids will start school on Thursday.  Grace in fourth, Jackson in third and Abbie started a new day care that is working out wonderfully... 

 before photos...

after photos...

I hope the mosaics look OK.  I am learning how to use Big Huge Labs...  I hope they are click able and you can see them better.  This is Before and After of the garage..  And the weather was fantastic..in the low 80's with a nice breeze and we were in the shade all day...

Next weekend we will start on the trim... let's keep our fingers crossed for nice weather then too..

Nancy

what a difference...

This is what the house looked like when we bought it last September...   Good thing we are visionaries...lol   Our daughters were not...they wondered if we had officially lost our collective mind. 
We could "see" the way it could be... Lots of trees, a great floor plan, peace and quiet and close to the grandkids..


This past weekend the temperature was 99F in the shade and the humidity was 4356%... For the first time in my life I had sweat dripping from my chin and running down my neck.  For the first time in my life....I did this...

Ok....that's not me...On Saturday Rich rented a power washer and washed the sun porch screens...and all the windows and well, the WHOLE HOUSE!!   I was amazed at the dirt that came off those screens... you can now see out of them...

So this is what I did...

Ok, I didn't do this either...  I sat on the step and had my fingers poised over the last 1 in 911..as Rich used some kind of saw to get that last piece of nasty fake plastic red brick siding down.  Do you see the electric wires over his head?  Yep, they are live...as in...they carry enough volts to permanently damage your body if you touch them.  He got VERY CLOSE.... but he did it. 

So...THIS is what I did...

I painted all of this myself... I started at 8:30am and ran out of paint around 3:30pm.  It was grueling ...hot...dirty...tiring...arm hurting... work.   All the vertical surfaces and sofits were painted French Silver by BEHR. 

While I was painting the left front and side, Rich was adding the batten boards to this end and then he got up on the ladder and painted all you see in this picture..

And just so you know...the trim hasn't been painted yet.  You can see in that last photo that I started painting the lower trim board the same as the house paint...then all the other dark trim will be painted a darker gray...just a shade darker... that red roof is gonna stick out like a pimple on a big nose...{sigh} hopefully I can bring some red into the plantings in front of the house.  Anyone know of any red flowers or bushes or anything that don't require a lot of maintenance...cause I'm not an outside girl..I would like to spend more time in that BASR  Margaritaville...lol

This is how far we got.  We used 3 gallons of paint...and need a couple of more...

Paint - Home Depot BEHR  French Silver UL 260-19   house
                                 BEHR Dark Pewter UL 260-20     trim

Nancy