One Crazy Week

 

The Box Gang

What a week! You know when you have a week that really isn't bad...it just is difficult and every day seems to go a bit sideways. That was this week. 

The highlights of crazy ~ 

• Around 11 pm this past very windy Monday, Elijah came flying into our bedroom to announce that Rosie (gray 100% indoor cat) had fallen out of the window and was now missing outside. (He forgot to pull the screen down in his window when he took his A/C unit out a few days before and had opened his window without noticing the lack of a screen. He likes to listen to the wind.) The entire household got out of bed and ran outside in the howling wind to look for the cat. We were barefoot and in makeshift PJ's (which meant boxers and a t-shirt for my husband). We stumbled around with flashlights, calling for her. I'm sure we clinched the crazy neighbor award for the year. Thankfully, she was found at the back door, waiting to be let in. 
• Elijah's boss was fired on Monday. This is the boss who had Elijah so confused and nervous, because he would act like Elijah was doing a great job one day and a poor job the next. He hasn't received a new boss yet but had a positive and less stressful week. 
• A dear friend has been in crisis for months with her ailing mother and was just hit by so many other issues this week. She called me in tears multiple times over the last few days, which is very unlike her. Outside of providing lots of emotional support, we are trying to find another way to help her. She is one of those people who is resistant to help. Ugh!
• Our daughter Katie has gotten herself into a lot of serious financial problems. Her group home is not supporting her needs enough, and she has way too much freedom. We are working to get her phone turned back on, but most of her peril is just going to have to be suffered through by her. I hope it teaches her a lesson, but I am not counting on it. 
• Rehearsals are increasing for Rebekah...it must be Nutcracker season. LOL!
• Salem (pure black cat) knocked over a glass of water onto Rebekah's cell phone. The glass fell from her nightstand onto the phone, which was on the floor, and smashed it. Then it sat all night in a puddle of water because Rebekah didn't wake up. The phone is ruined.

I think that is the majority of the crazy this week. I just want to point out that my tuxedo cat Eve didn't do anything wrong this week. I keep telling the kids that she is the best cat in the house. Ha! 

My major accomplishment this week, besides keeping this crazy boat afloat, was re-caulking the bathtub and sinks. It is a pain to do, but always looks so much better. 

Blessings, Dawn

The Big 50!

Hello 50! Dear Husband turned 50 this week. I decided to have a farewell party for the first 49 years and a celebration of what is to come. I wanted to make the table look creepy and took inspiration from Miss Havisham's wedding table (Great Expectations). The kids and I collected the silver from around the house, which included David's silver baby cups. We set the table with a black twin sheet, silver, white plates and paper birthday plates. We then added a tombstone, which I had purchased for Halloween decorating. It had a window on the tombstone for adding a photo or you could keep the provided skeleton photo. We added a picture of David from his high school graduation. We added 49 years under RIP to represent the ending of 49 years of life and the beginning of (hopefully) many more years to come. Then we covered the table with cob webs. It came out to look very close to what I had imagined. He was so surprised! We had to break through the cobwebs to have dinner.

David wanted to do a challenge for his 50th birthday and decided to try ziplining. He did a course near our home that had seven ziplines and one swinging bridge. He was very brave and completed the entire course. He wants to know if I want to do it for my 50th in a few months....NO WAY! Not a chance. I did do ziplining when I was a teenager. One time was more than enough for me,  thank you very much.

 

David with his chocolate peanut butter cake

In other news...I finally got the basement stairs painted. We peeled up lots of broken no-slip tiles, sanded and then painted the stairs. They look so much better. I am really relieved to have that job accomplished. 

Before

After

Everything else is going pretty well. Elijah has many more positive days than negative at Target. He is really getting used to the job and is making a few friends among his co-workers. He still worries that he isn't working fast enough sometimes and doesn't understand every single instruction, but he knows how to get help now when he is confused.

Rebekah is stressed that she isn't improving in dance fast enough but is overall pleased with the program. She is very hard on herself. She also got her driver's license the day after her birthday. They didn't have her take a road test. They just said her record was good for the last 18 months of learner's permits and handed her a full 8 year license. She is one lucky girl.

Blessings, Dawn

Happy 18th Birthday Tea Party!

Rebekah requested a mismatched tea party. In other words, she wanted to use china, but not our finest china set that all matches. I came up with the theme of pink and white with blue and gold accents. Then I started pulling things from around the house. We had almost enough tea cups that had been picked up from thrift shops for our picnic basket, but I was lacking one. I also found that it would be nice to have some simple white plates to pull all the mismatched items together. So,  I headed out to a few thrift stores. I scored at the second-hand store and found a tea cup, six white plates and several tea bag coasters for a total of $15. I plan to keep the plates. We may donate the tea cup and some of the tea coasters back to the thrift store, because they are not really our style but worked for the moment. I sometimes treat thrift stores as rental stores. I can use it for the moment but don't need to litter up the house with tons of rarely used and uncherished belongings. After all, it would have cost $15 to buy all these items in paper form, and then they would have been thrown away. It is better for the environment, too. I also picked up some country pink roses from Trader Joe's.

Finally, I was ready to set the table. I didn't have a pink table cloth so I used my daughter's childhood twin Matelassé blanket which was packed away. It worked perfectly as the base. Then I took a lace dresser runner that was in the waiting to go to Goodwill bag, because it had a snag in it. However, the roses and tea pots covered up its flaws. 

Next, I added all of the dishware and flatware. The table was really starting to come together. I made roses with our pink napkins. YouTube has so many instructional videos on folding napkins. 

Rebekah's place setting with one of her favorite cups. 

The final touch was the candlesticks I had found at a thrift store last year.

I overheard Rebekah saying she hoped there would be balloons at her party, so I stopped by the party store and picked up this adorable bat bouquet. One of Rebekah's favorite animals is bats. It was actually meant to be a Halloween bouquet, but I added the #18 balloon and it worked perfectly. 

Lastly, the food...Rebekah requested all of her favorite foods. She wanted homemade 18 hour bread, ham quiche and apple pie. I made the apple pie in advance and froze it until it was time to bake. The bread was started the night before and the quiche was made that day, with pie crust my husband had made and frozen in advance. 

She was a very happy birthday girl. I love my kids so much! It is amazing to realize that they are now all adults. I am so enjoying watching them bloom. The harvest is beautiful.

Blessings, Dawn

Our Home, Autumn 2021

This very photo-heavy post was inspired by an evening of looking at our family photo albums a few weeks ago. We all had a lovely time looking at old photos, and we realized that we wished we had taken more pictures of homes/rooms that we had lived in through the years. It was neat to see how things had been laid out and how much things had changed through the years. Our last home and current home were both fixer uppers and experienced many changes while we lived in them. I do turn our blog into blog books, and we use those as photo albums, as well as having traditional photo albums.

In writing this blog, I stuck to photos of common spaces in our home, with the exception of our bedroom. The kids weren't sure they wanted their bedrooms in the tour, and I respect my young adults' feelings. The majority of the contents of our home is thrifted/gifted or inherited. I love to hunt down special finds and pay pennies on the dollar for them. Also, we have been on a journey to drastically reduce our belongings since 2019. I do believe we have currently reduced our possessions by about 50 percent. We maintain "a one thing, in one thing out" rule at all times, in addition to routine decluttering. This has created a much easier home to maintain. There is still plenty of reducing to go, but I can manage our home so much better now. We are all much happier and calmer living in it.

The front of our home

I spent a week in September painting the siding, doors and shutters on the front of the house. The shutters were a very faded and sad blackish-grey before. The two "front" doors are brand new and a wonderful addition to the home. I was going for a little bit darker sage green, but when I opened the paint can, it was this color. Nonetheless, we are adjusting to this lighter, cheerful green. I still need to paint the floors of the porch and stoop, but that will probably have to wait for the spring. Our house is funny and has two front door entrances. However, one leads to what we use as a bedroom for our oldest son. I think it must have been an in home office at one time with an entrance for clients. The front door entrance that we use is on the little yellow porch and leads into our library room. 

Our library is a work in progress right now. We ended up moving our sofa and loveseat downstairs to the family room this summer so that Rebekah could have a larger room to dance in for a virtual summer intensive she was taking. We felt blessed to have a traveling dance floor that could be picked up from its normal room and laid down in this room with just an hour of effort. When the intensive was over, we moved the floor back to her usual dance space, but decided that we really liked the TV and sofas downstairs. That left us with a very empty library for the summer. I have slowly found things at yard sales, thrift stores and moved furniture around to make a new space. The goal for the library is to have three comfortable chairs in a nice arrangement on the carpet. Then I plan to have a chaise lounge or settee on the wall near the curio cabinet that could be moved around for more seating when needed or could be a separate area for reading. Overall, we want small pieces of furniture that will be easily moved around to make the room multi-functional. Some of the pieces in the room right now are place holders while I look for something more appropriate. 

The rug was an extremely lucky find a few weeks ago. It is a hand knotted rug in very good condition (perhaps Persian). One of my friends is a rug collector and did a bit of research for me. Her guess was that when new it had likely been worth upwards of $4,000 and I paid $40 for it at a yard sale in the rich part of town. That is the kind of deals I like! 

The fireplace below still doesn't work. The chimney still needs a new crown and it probably needs a new liner. It has been on the dream list for several years now. 

Gifts are for Rebekah's 18th birthday, which is coming up. Be still, my heart!

Our home had two additions before we purchased it. Orginally, it was a one bedroom home and this hallway below was part of the living room. The wall with the piano would not have been there, which would have created a larger living space. On this side of the house, previous owners added on the front two rooms (what we call the library plus a master bedroom) years later. The bathroom, which we use for the males in the family (the door just beyond the arch), had been an eat-in kitchen. The doorway leading to the current dining/kitchen (you can see blue cabinets beyond that last opening) would have been the end of the original house. The area beyond was added in the early 1970's.

 

This is a courting candle. The parents could crank the candle up or down to determine how long the date between two young ones could go on. When the candle burned down to the first metal rim, it was time to end the date. 

This is currently Rebekah's workout/dance space. We call this the room of requirement because it has been many things in the past few years. It was our oldest daughter's bedroom when she lived here, then it was an office, then a guest bedroom and now a dance space...and it was the original living room when this was a one bedroom house in the early 1950's.

We consider our bedroom the master bedroom because it has a wall of closets on one wall. However, there are two potential master bedrooms in this house, and our son Elijah's room is actually the largest in floor space. Neither has a bathroom. 

We have made many changes in our bedroom this summer. The curtains were a steal at the thrift store for sixteen dollars. The sleigh bed was purchased from a friend who was moving across country. She threw in a dresser which ended up in our son's room and meant that we could take back from him our men's maple chest of drawers. It matches our women's maple dresser. The chests, which date back to the 1940s, were handed down from my grandparents to my parents and then onto us. The mirror for the women's dresser is on the piano. I love having family heirlooms. The quilt was our most recent find from the thrift store for just a couple dollars. I love it. 

The mirror and hairbrush set was my step-grandmother's and I use them every day. The wooden jewelry box was made by my mother and given to me when I was a little girl.

Moving on to the other end of the house, we have the largest and last major addition, which took place in the 1970's. It holds two bedrooms, the dining room, kitchen, and downstairs family room. I feel like I have shown pictures of our kitchen and dining room many times. We spend a lot of time in these two rooms. So here is a quick look.

The dishwasher hasn't worked in over two years and I don't miss it.

My pretty things shelf

We have two leaves that can be added to the table for parties.

The downstairs family room is working so much better for us. We enter from the carport into this room, and giving it a true purpose has helped cut down dramatically on the drop everything at the back door issue. I would still like to make lots of changes to this room. The biggest change would be to get the walls all painted to match. Right now, we have the exterior cedar shake from when that basement wall was the outside of the house, cinder block on two walls and the final wall has paneling and dry wall. In addition, there is a fake brick wall that used to be behind the wood stove that we no longer have. It is a mess of textures. 

Tim and Elijah's game area

So that is the public areas of our home. I may show the behind-the-scenes areas of our home in the coming months. The basement/laundry room is huge and really needs to be tackled. The garage also needs tackling. The house is 3,400 square feet, if you include the basement and family room. Those areas are not counted on our taxes, because the lower level's ceilings are too low to be considered living space. This house had definitely felt too big to me at times. It is a lot to maintain, especially because it was a terrible wreck when we bought it as a foreclosure. Electrical wires, sockets, outlets had been torn out. Lights had been removed from the ceilings with wires hanging loose. Cabinets were missing doors and drawers. I was raised and lived in less then 800 square feet for most of my life, so this is really big to me. However, by reducing our belongings and embracing empty space, we are finding it so much easier to keep up!

Blessings, Dawn