home sweet home (some of the time anyway)...

Almost 4 months? Really? It's been that long? Well, now, that's just plain ridiculous. This is long overdue, I know.

In advance, I do feel badly for fast-forwarding you through the last very fun and exciting and crazy and busy and story-filled months in our lives...sorry!...Let's see...since April 29...our top two events were ::

• Packing our good ol' (newer) house
• Moving into our good ol' (old) new house (pictured below!)

we also trained for and ran in another 25K race, celebrated Lauren's 8th Birthday!!! (deserves far more pomp and circumstance than a tiny little italicized item), started renovating the new house a bit (wallpaper removal and new carpet on the second floor...and removing carpet from bathrooms...ewwwww....), and then a lot bit of renovating...(more on the "lot bit" later), said goodbye to pre-school for Sarah and second grade for Lauren, left for a week to Maryland, cleaned up from that trip, unpacked a few more boxes in the house, then packed and left for a week to the cottage,cleaned up from that trip, celebrated Julia's 3rd birthday!!! (we are blessed with such a sweet little lady with a mind of her very own!), unpacked a few more boxes in the house, then packed and left for a week to Grand Haven ("camping"), cleaned up from that trip, unpacked more, enjoyed the new neighborhood and began planning for a small scale kitchen remodel when....

The "lot bit" of renovating (mentioned above) began a week ago.

All we wanted to do was pull down some very annoying overhead cabinets that blocked our view of pretty much anything outside the kitchen. We also wanted to pull down some wallpaper. (see the "before" shot below...from when we walked through house)

So, this fun tale of mayhem begins as I'm ever so innocently meandering about the kitchen area one evening a little over a week ago, when I look up and see our ceiling looking droopy in the sad, got-water-in-me, kinda way. A few curse words began swirling about my head that I won't repeat here, but get creative and you'll think of a few.

That evening unfolded a week of insurance company hulabaloo and the superman-like swooping in of a building contractor. We discovered two things at fault for our saggy ceiling : master shower leak AND air conditioning condensate pump leak ('cause that device belonged in the attic above the dining room table...how brilliant of you, former homeowner!...).

Happily (but not so much for the contractor...who threw up three times when pulling down our wet ceiling and all the wet insulation), we also discovered the source of the "why-does-the-house-have-a-funny-smell?" issue, when it was obvious the pump perhaps had a slow leak for the entire five years it resided in the attic and made the insulation and drywall not only wet...but also rotten.

Picture below is of insulation mound in dining room...Yes, yummy... And the stuff in the air is a very lovely fine dust that seeps into every last corner of the house, even behind cabinets and inside drawers...

We also had to demolish our master shower, which had a tile that was apparently adheared to the wall and floor with some sort of 1945-era monster glue that desired to make it next to impossible for anyone to ever disagree with anyone's design choice. The strong-will and sharp chisel of our contractor removed all of it, but also created a very fine and oppressive dust.

Which brings our little unscheduled reno tale to today...when we came home to this :

In the picture above, the opening on the upper left next to the white brick is our demolished master shower, which happened last week. With the tear-down of a wall or two, we now have a fine view of our bed from the kitchen sink. Below, the girls are standing in our shower and I'm in the dining room, looking up...

Because we never want to be without dinner conversation at our table in the future, we obliged letting the girls jump out of the shower into the dining room. So that in the years to come, we can sit and look at the wall and smile when we think of this pain in the blip on our life-radar. Enjoy the video of their fun :

But, hey!...at least we got rid of those pesky upper cabinets along the way :

Bear with me and I'll do my best to wipe the dust off the computer and update a little more frequently on the this project and the other goings-on in our little lives.