Chalkboard love

The board is cured. It will never be as gorgeously black and clean as it was before I chalked it up... and a little part of me want to wash it all down and protect it from the kids. Maybe just use it for a super inconvenient message board/menu planner? 

Nah. Let's put magnets on it.

All the magnets.

Let's practice our adorable flower gardens.

And I'll do over-the-top Pinterest tutorial banners for our marble run.

CARPET!!

Heavenly, heavenly carpet. It's so soft and it's new and no one has ever peed or barfed on it. 

Not yet, anyway.

The window seat is up! And I love it. It's the perfect place to read and play and take a little peak out at our fairy village.

The rest of the room is unfurnished, so it seemed like the perfect time to have a dance party!

Basement progress - Giant chalkboard success and Playroom

The painting is done, the ceilings are done and the trim (hallelujah!) is all done. 

Now for the fun stuff.

I want a giant chalkboard and I want it to be magnetic and I want it to be awesome.

I found a company downtown to cut me this giant sheet of galvanized steel. I only dented it in two spots on the way home. I called Julia to come over and help me get it up on the wall.

Then I started with the primer coats.

Then it needed about 8 layers of chalkboard paint. It looked streaky for a long time....

But then it looked flat and black! I scrounged through the baseboard scraps and found a couple usable pieces for the border, then picked up the rest at Home Depot.

I tell you what. I love it! It's exactly how I pictured it in my mind... and that never happens. I will use the flat side of a piece of chalk to cure it and then we are ready to go. Can't wait to get our marble run up on this bad boy.

In other news... the playroom is done.

After 10 stressful minutes at Home Depot trying to figure out what house number to put up...1234? 525 (Payson shoutout)? 1999 (wedding)? It occured to me that we should put our ACTUAL house number up.

duh.

Looks cute!

Now all I need to be happy is a flower box and a welcome mat.

Carpet. Carpet would be nice.

Basement projects

First I assembled my work crew. They dressed for the occasion...it's pretty standard to go barefoot in construction zones, right? 

We are going to sand these two "nightstands" down, paint them off-white and then make them into a window seat. I have the whole thing in my head, and absolutely no experience. Should go perfectly!

The swinging door to the playhouse is up and we're painting it blue!

This beauty is going to be my new sewing table.

Viola!

Things are shaping up!

Royals, Tony Taupe and Toddlerhood

1. When you have hours and hours of manual labor that needs to be done on your basement, it's clearly time to go to a baseball game. 

It's time to attempt to get through 6 innings with 2 lemonades and a bottled water....and a bag of smuggled Laffy Taffies.

Thank goodness for refills!

2. It is time to paint!!!

And paint and paint....

and paint.

The good new is that I never got around to painting the upstairs, so I had 3 cans of paint just sitting in the garage waiting for me. Score!

3. This is my baby.

I got my eye on the prize

The drywallers, mudders and tapers have come and gone. 

And the left quite a mess.

That isn't dust.  It was once wet and now it has dried and stuck itself onto the floor.

Here's a spot where a square drywall kept a spot "clean".

Time to get out the duct tape and face the music.

It took me two solid days of scrubbing, scraping and rag ringing, but I finally got to my last square. If I could have dug it up and framed it, I would have. 

It was hard work and I was glad to have it behind me. 

Next was painting the ceilings.

Not the funnest.

The girls were in for another couple days of playing on the concrete while I worked.

Everly dipped her finger in the paint and I thought it was sweet, so I didn't stop her....I mean, how bad could it be? She'll do a little finger painting!

Sometimes I wonder if I've ever met my children before.

Fairy houses and unfortunate mozzerella

1. So.

It turns out I have found my one true calling.

It's building miniature houses out of plastic bottles and pine cones. 

Any chance I could make a living at this? Because I am so completely addicted to it. I could shingle bleach bottles all day. 

I started by spray painting an old bleach bottle, cutting out a window and sneaking to a park to scoop up a tupperware-full of landscape pebbles. Laney and I found the perfect pine cones along Ridgeview...and discovered a nice supply of bark under the same pine trees. 

We were ready to start!

The pine cone shingles curled up a bit, after the started to dry, but I figure the fairies can make any repairs necessary.

The finished product:  (my favorite is the stone chimney)

All the kids got excited and decided to make their own houses.

Meg's hobbit house:

She is know working on the bell tower. Check out that spiral staircase!

Mathew is in mid-production with "Ash's Inn".

Ethan is working on a house and has focused most of his attention on the roof. I love his chimney garden! I can picture little creatures sitting on the bench and reading a book.

I decided to make a clock tower. I started with an orange juice bottle, two sidewalk chalk containers and a little scrap wood to make a roof.

I am having WAY to much fun making mini flower boxes...

and porch lights.

I might be neglecting my housework/dinner making responsibilities.

Just think of the possibilities!

I have plans for fairy-sized raised bed vegetable gardens, picket fence with arbor, sandbox, teeter totter, clothesline, pathway, fishing pond with seed-pod kayaks....mercy!

2. In other news, I purchased these fresh "mozzeralla balls" at the store, thinking they would be yummy and maybe something I could slice up with fresh tomatoes for a side dish. 

And then I opened them up and realized I had just spent 3 bucks on cheese boobs.

I'm thinking they would be better chopped up and put into a lasagna.

Canning, Mustache Monday and a Fatty

1. One of the consequences of a fun family outing to the apple orchard is....

So.

Many.

Apples.

I figured it was finally time to buy a canner and start a jar collecton.

So far I've canned 12 jars of applesauce and dried several batches of apple chips in the dehydrator.

I also made a quart of apple peel syrup out of the cores and peels. It was pretty tasty!

2. In other news, Spirit week is upon us and I am thrilled to find out that we have ditched "Sports Day" and "Crazy Sock Day" for "Mustache Day" and "Tie Dye Day". Not that those are inherently better....just DIFFERENT!

We simply don't own crazy socks.

But we can paint mustachios with water-proof mascara.

3. I thought our caterpillar season had ended for the year.

I was wrong.

We found this fatty (Horned Tomato Worm) chomping down on my tomato plants with gusto.

He will be transformed into a Sphinx Moth and so we will let him move into the sprouting jar and see what we will see.

4. So....the mudders/tapers are down with the drywall and ceiling texture. It is a total mess and it's going to take me forEVER to clean it up and then paint it.

Sweeping is futile.

This is going to take a bucket of water, a scraper and on-hands-and-knees scrubbing. HOORAY!

hooray.

Laundry, spackle and fairy house construction

1. It's funny how I will go for days without finding the strength to walk into the laundry room. The piles grow and they cease to be divided into 'whites', 'lights' and 'darks'. If there ever was a load of clean laundry sitting in front of the dryer, waiting to be folded, it has long since been compressed into a dense mass of wrinkles or dumped out and mixed in with the stinkies. The dirty clothes simply get chucked into the room....somewhere...anywhere....because the whole thing is a lost cause and it's obvious to everyone that I'll be starting from scratch anyway.

And inevitably there's the day when someone runs out of something...undies, pants, favorite shirts...and I pinch my nose and get in there. Start sorting, get loads going. And I am always surprised at how satisfying it feels to do load after load. It becomes a pleasure to turn that disgusting mess into lovely, warm, clean piles. Today was a laundry day and I've had the machines going non-stop and I'm starting to see the floor and it feels amazing. There will be favorite shirts available tomorrow!

2. I made kale chips today. I washed the kale, dried the kale, sprayed the kale and seasoned the kale.....the baked the kale at 275 for 25 minutes.....

It looked like:

And it tasted like:

So I decided on:

3. I finally spackled, sanded and repainted the holes and dings in the walls that I've been meaning to get to in, oh...I'd say, a year and a half. It only took me about 10 minutes once the spackle was dry. Why is that? Why does it feel so absolutely overwhelming to get the paint cans out? It's not like we store them on a mountaintop. They're on the bottom shelf in the garage, for crying out loud!

But still! I did it! And now I don't have to cringe everytime I look at the huge hole by the pencil sharpener or the blob of dry spackle under the two-sided clock.

And that....is awesome.

4. The basement is coming along! A few progress photos:

The framing up and the girls sweeping up sawdust:

The drywall is hung! I am so excited about the playroom under the stairs!

Mark testing out the projector...

The consequences of drywall dust....everywhere.

5.  I've decided to put a fairy garden in the window well near the kids play area downstairs. It is going to be so fun! I love creative stuff....as long as it doesn't really matter how it turns out.

I'm hoping I can achieve something like this:

or this:

How cute is this?

And hey, I wouldn't mind this:

I'm hoping it doesn't end up like this:

But I'll settle for

So much fun!!