Smudging Our Home Feb 21, 2010

One of our good friends offered to come over and smudge our home with Sage to get out all the bad feelings and negativity that this home has experienced. We walked through each room and did all the corners.

The way smudging works is "the smoke attaches itself to negative energy and as the smoke clears, it takes the negative energy with it, releasing it into another space where it will be regenerated into positive energy."

She noticed some bad feelings in the kitchen. I jokingly said they were probably mine since the garbage disposal wasn't currently working. :) She felt some negative vibes in several places in the house, but felt they were gone by the time she was done.

She also shared some Feng Shui with me and the set up of our home.

• The master bedroom is in the right corner of the home--being the happiness space. Woo Hoo! ;)
• Our wealth/prosperity corner is where our office will be located--so good news there too!
• There is good ventilation from the front door and back windows. It's not a straight shot to bring all the good air in and then just have it disappear out the back door or windows when they're open.

At Work:
Our Backyard. We walked around the whole perimeter to make sure nothing was left untouched.
The Shop/Garage

Thanks Laurie! It was both educational and fun having you over!

The Ultimate Guy Magnet

This is the Excavator we needed to rent this week. (The yellow one)

By the end of the weekend, we had to:

1. Dig our drain field

2. Pull 15+ stumps out of the ground

3. Dispose of 15+ stumps

4. Flatten out remaining soil and ground

5. Move tree trunks to central location for future bonfires

We had some good friends come help with this enormous project. Steve, Chris, David and our new neighbor Jeff.

We're just hoping we can get everything accomplished before we have to return it to United Rentals on Monday morning.

One of the blessings from this whole experience happened when our neighbor, Jeff came over to offer his help. (he is the one that handled cutting down all of our trees) It was a huge blessing because he pulled up almost every stump in a quarter of the time that it would have taken us to do it. That was important because we were being charged by how many hours the excavator was "on".

Chris also knew how to operate the machine, between the two of them, they did a lot of the excavating in a timely fashion.
The roots of these stumps were amazing! Humongous! They left a lot of holes in the ground.

By the end of the weekend, Mike had become very comfortable in maneuvering the excavator.Decker was in heaven watching this tractor at our house. As soon as we arrived at home after it had been dropped off, he saw it and started making his tractor noises.

Then once all the stumps were pulled up, Dave came by saying he could dispose of the stumps for us. Here is the dumptruck with the container.

Dave used the excavator to move the stumps from the yard into the container.
And Steve, along with Mike were the masterminds behind the piping. Even though Steve was not feeling well during this weekend, he was there to offer support to Mike and getting this job done on time and on schedule.
A HUGE THANK YOU goes out to everyone who helped in tearing and cleaning up our yard. What a miraculous weekend and getting this huge project completed! Now it's time to reseed and make the yard a fun safe place to play. :)

Bonfires and Brambles

Living out in the country has it's advantages...especially if your husband is a PYRO...and especially since the previous owner left much to be burned.

We've had fun having bonfires in our pit in the backyard.

We've burned:

The strippers' dancefloor

The leftover pergo flooring from the kitchen that we didn't end up using in the laundry room.

Baseboards that we replaced

The old kitchen floor

The old Deck

Scattered pieces of wood scattered throughout the yard.

Tree limbs that are just lying everywhere.

Brambles--more on this later.

Ping pong table

Poker table

Doors with holes punched in them

Cabinets

...and the list probably goes on...but I can't think of anymore right now. It's been a lot, allowing us to spend many evenings sitting by the bonfire. ;)

We've got a little bench for Decker that is just his size.-- it came from the remnants of the old deck that has since been replaced, but had just been left to rot in the yard. ;)

Love the smell of dandylions...

Our yard hasn't been maintained in probably years. As I've walked around in the backyard, my clothes and my skin would be attacked by what I called "brambles". I don't know where I learned this term or if I made it up, but I've been getting a lot of questioning looks when I say there are "brambles" all over in the backyard. When I say it I'm referring to this pile of weeds that I pulled out of the ground. They are thorned weeds to blackberry bushes and they just sprawl all over the yard tripping you and hanging on to your skin and clothes if it can. So I spent an afternoon pulling up as much as I could and added it to our burn pile. What a great feeling to see that all go up in flames.

As of today, 5/13, I googled "brambles". And surprise surprise: Wikepedia has a most interesting definition:

"Brambles are thorny plants of the genus Rubus, in the rose family (Rosaceae). Bramble fruit is the fruit of any such plant, including the blackberry and raspberry.

Bramble bushes have a distinctive growth form. They send up long, arching canes...Many types of brambles bear edible fruit, and many have recurved thorns that dig into clothing and flesh when the victim tries to pull away from them. Some types also have hair-like thorns."

Well what do you know? I'm not as crazy as everyone thinks. ;)

Now that we've got a lot of the yard cleaned up and burned, we now have an even bigger woodpile to burn...

We had to have six trees cut down. Some were sick and some were leaning too far into the house. It was sad to see, these fall down. But, I have a feeling that this wood will last us a long time!

LONG LIVE THE BONFIRE!

Job #4 Putting the Wood in...

Randy, our Wood guy delivered the oak wood flooring a couple of weeks before installation, so it could get used to it's new surroundings. :)

Mike pulled up the pergo flooring in the kitchen--which we will probably use down on our laundry room's cement floor--and discovered the orignial linoleum to the kitchen floor. This all had to come up to get to the sub floor for the wood to be placed on. Mike borrowed Randy's toekick saw and if you notice in the next picture one of the kitchen cabinet doors is missing....Ooops! Thank goodness it wasn't an arm or a leg though... Randy's laying it all out...

down the hallway...

Then we get to choose the stain... left to right
1. Golden Brown
2. Golden Brown, Blood Red equal mix.
3. Blood red
4. Golden Brown with 1/2 Blood Red.
They look a little different, since one picture used the flash and the other didn't.

Which did we pick?

Getting the stain down. matches nicely with our cabinets.
moving the island back...

Now it's all done and Decker had to try it out. I know Randy was just cringing as Decker rode across the floor.... ;) (This is a video you have to go to the blog to watch.)



Then a week later, fridge and stove put back in and all clean and organized!

Oh, and by the way, we chose #4! We love it and are so excited!

Job # 3 Getting all the carpet up

In a way to save money, we told our Carpet supplier that we would pull up our own carpet before they installed the fresh new clean smelling carpet. Mike did most of this work. We had ordered a No. 8 carpet pad and after taking off the old carpet, noticed that the pad underneath seemed to be in really good condition and a No. 8 pad. So in an effort to save even more money, we decided to keep the pad and just install the new carpet on top.

Here's the bonus room's cement floor. We had to put some KILZ on several "Dog" spots.We got a cool surprise when the carpet was installed. The existing pad ended up being a No. 10, better than what we were going to put in. We still had to replace the pad downstairs though, so that had a No 8, but we were pretty excited about that.

Then after all the carpet was laid, Mike started replacing the brown 1 1/2 inch baseboard with this white 3+ inch baseboard.

Next come the hardwoods....

Job #2 Paint, Paint and More Paint

We are painting the whole house and since we retextured the ceilings, means we're painting them too. That's a lot of paint. There was a sale at Home Depot a few weeks ago, so we bought 28 gallons of paint and primer and hopefully it will cover all the walls and ceilings...We thought we were going to have the painting all done before the carpets went in...hahahahahaha!

White Ceilings and Eggshell colored Walls

Taking a break....

Love the paint in the hair and on the face...

I didn't realize how time consuming and tiring painting is...I'm tired of painting and we still have the downstairs to do....did I say I'm tired of painting???

Anyways, while many times we worked late into the night with Decker there, we had to figure out a way to keep him off of wet walls, fingers out of paint, and put him to bed when he got tired.

We made a little bed for him in the hall closet with some extra blankets. He didn't seem to mind-- and was tired enough that he would lay down and go to sleep.

When he was awake and wanting to run around, we would put him in his saucer with lots of treats to keep him occupied. (Decker's room)

(Living room)(Master Bedroom)In all this painting, we even had a visitor....We caught Decker with the ceiling paint lid in his hands brought up to his tongue. We called 9-1-1 to be on the safe side, they got there in less than 2 minutes from our phone call and they called Poison Control and they said that it was a water based paint and he should be fine. Maybe we were a little over protective, but you never know....Decker loved hearing the sirens and seeing the big truck.. What fun!

And did I say? I'm tired of painting....