Happy Birthday, Gavin!!

No. 5!!! Our "baby" hit a milestone a few weeks ago. Hard to wrap our brains around how fast these years have gone. This is a belated birthday post about Gavie's day. ;)

Gavin's birthday fell on a school day so we celebrated as much as we could that day and made plans to take the boys to Legoland for G's birthday outing. I enjoyed my view from the kitchen as he ran down the hall and out to greet me, so proud of the fact that now he is 5! I had to put that memory in print here, because I hope I'll never forget it. I was touched with his pure, sweet innocence and youth. In that moment, I saw him as the little boy he has been and yet at the same time, I became very aware that he has indeed grown up, and all too quickly he'll be coming out to greet me as a young man. Crazy how we can have these flashes of visions. I want to bottle him up just as he is. :)

We opened presents and then Daddy ran out to get donuts. After school, we had dinner and dessert with family and then had some friends come over for a little play and some brownies and ice cream. Gavin loves friends! Both boys really enjoy people and having people over!

Opening presents in the morning!

A 5 dollar bill!!!! 

I loved that Gavin wanted Kyle to read him each and every card.

 You are special, Gavin! Love the red plate tradition from my childhood...thanks, Auntie Jan!

Painting in Mommy's classroom after school! Then, a trip to the yogurt store with Brother.

Grandpa, Grammie, and Auntie Michelle helped us celebrate when we got home.

Then, a GG package arrived! Those are always loads of fun to open!

Since my boys love blowing out candles, I give them every chance I can think of to be sung to and blow at some flames.

 Gavin's friends helped celebrate him, too.

Gavie and his friends! :) We didn't come up with a birthday plan until pretty late, so we are grateful to these wonderful friends for coming over on such short notice!

Then, Saturday morning, we headed for Legoland!! None of us had ever been so we were excited to check it out. I love smaller amusement parks that aren't as crowded or ginormous as Disneyland. Legoland also allows you to bring in your own food and beverages, so we were able to snag a few "buy one get one free" coupons that helped make this trip financially reasonable.

 This was the cutest ride, ever!! K and G never did get enough time to get their cars over towards us for a closer shot, but we saw them driving around, obeying the traffic signals all around the town.  There's Gavin rolling up to a stop sign.

 Kyle running back to help Gavin get out of his seat belt.

Helicopter rides!

And a little rest by Uncle Fred.

 They tried to Urkle their pants up, too.

The temperature was awesome (considering we'd had such a heat wave for weeks prior) but you can always use a popsicle/ice cream break!

I didn't take any pictures of the roller coasters we rode, but aside from a really fun Dragon roller coaster (that even Daddy thought was good!) we enjoyed smaller rides, too. Look at the Birthday Boy's smile!! Makes you feel like every penny was worth it!

Gavin drove this green boat all around the harbor of New York City.

This Lego masterpiece of big US cities was super cool.  They even had some South Dakota represented...!

After this, we had to head home. One of the fast roller coaster rides didn't agree with Kyle and he spent the rest of the day showing us the food he ate ... :( Poor guy. The boys did have fun, though, and it was great to celebrate Gavin as a family while away from the "House of Projects" back home. 

"Alive!"

I'm typing this post from the comfort of my couch. A couch that spent over 3 months covered up in the garage and now sits in the living room. The living room of my house. I still can't believe it. We've lived in complete construction disarray for 114 days (but who's counting?!) and sometimes thought we'd never see the end of it. We all woke up this morning and walked barefoot...BAREFOOT!! throughout the house. No stopping to find socks or slippers in order to walk anywhere without sanding/drywall dust making your feet white and tracking that back onto the carpet. The house is clean in it's important parts and getting clean little by little in the rest. We are so grateful. All of us have enjoyed sitting down IN the house on actual furniture. ;)

Here's a look back at the last month...a month where I didn't blog because we were working well into the morning hours each night and falling into bed. Sweat equity, they call it.

A lil' recap... the drywallers came and completed the ceiling. They patched many places and took out the window between rooms in the guest house and drywalled. The tapers and mudders came, too. A project that should have taken no more than a week ended up taking 3 because trades people can come whenever they want to, not when they say they will. We sanded, primed, and painted the walls ourselves with multiple coats at night when it was over 100 degrees. We had to keep the doors closed to keep the bugs out since they were attracted to all the lights we had on and kept getting in to our paint.  This created a lovely sauna experience! :) Bless little Murdo for wanting to be with us the whole time, even when we all were miserable and sweating (or in Murdo's case, panting) profusely.

Then, the morning after all was said and done, all the paint peeled off in sheets. Nobody's ever heard of such a thing and though this only occurred on the walls the drywallers did, they of course will not assume responsibility. 

We could have paid more $$ and waited a week for the drywallers to come back, or a certain stellar handyman named Rudy could take a stab at it immediately. We took the plunge and Rudy's work turned out perfectly smooth. :)

The delay cost us another week since you have to wait for everything to dry and there are multiple layers to fixing a wall. By this point, our friends who are staying with us had arrived and they brought the moral support we needed as we redid everything.

My Lisa. We are supposedly blessing them with a place to park their trailer and live life for 3 weeks, but I think it's a very mutual blessing.

After redoing an entire wall and thinking we were finally done, some more paint started peeling off. We began the fix it process all over again and tried really hard to not feel defeated.

We took a nice break outside and started trimming our front trees. 

 Martin family projects!

I forget if this was a happy dance or just us really losing our mind. Maybe a little of both, but Elvis was playing and you can't not get down to some Elvis.

While inside projects were drying, I started to clean out and deep clean the back house for our friends who could use the air-conditioned space to use as an office or homeschooling area. I pulled together a few things we had and tried to make it feel somewhat cozy instead of the storage shed it had been. (We've since painted this room and I have to say, it's looking so much better already!)

A place for their little Kyle to play while the others do their thing in the other room. 

Back in the house, we knew we were getting somewhere when we could finally take the paper off the floor. This meant the walls were done! Finally, done. (Think, a week of priming, painting, edging, cutting, detailing, spotting, re-edging, re-detailing, etc. etc. again and again.)

It was still quite messy at this point but it felt amazing to be able to see the finish line. Though "finish" is a relative term.

These pictures and the various lighting do funky things to the real colors we have going on. You'll see from picture to picture that the floors, beam, and wall color look different with every shot.

We finally began the clean up process and dusted and wiped down every square inch. Ru said at one point during last week's middle of the morning sanding escapade that he had an inch of sawdust accumulated on the floor. Sounds exaggerated, but I'll vouch for it. We have been cleaning construction dust for almost 24 hours straight and I'm only 1/4 of the way through my kitchen. Each plate, utensil, and do dad has a coating on it. It's a little (a lot) tedious, but I'm not complaining.

 The boys joined in on the family project and were really good floor wiping helpers.

We swept multiple times, shop vac'd, mopped, and shined this baby. Looks a lot darker than it is in these pics. But oh my gosh, do you see we have a ceiling? And recessed lights? And a soon to be installed fan spot? And there's paint, and a clean floor, and it looks like it's ready for furniture!!!!

 Woo hoo!!

Not the official placement of the blue chairs  but waiting to mount the TV (on the wall you don't see from this angle). We pulled the couch away and over from the wall more. Need to get a larger rug, or combine a larger rattan rug under the patterned one. Eventually, we will get different furniture but we use what we have for now.  Still, this is my corner where I'm typing now and I'm loving it! Amazing how your "big furniture" looks so small in a larger space.

Gavin took this picture of the opposite side. I've got plans for that fireplace wall. That's just a shadow on it now. SO nice to have a table to sit at to do homework and eat (when the outside tables are currently being used by our company).

This corner isn't put back together yet, but I still enjoy the view.

It finally feels clean, bright, and we are starting to feel like we'll be settling in. :) :) :)

 Remember this shot of the entry way?

Well, now it's looking like this. 

I had bought this light for the boys' room but it turned out to be twice as large as I thought it would be. So, we tried it out here and I think it works. Isn't it amazing what paint will do?
This is a view from the front door. Though we're not yet done, it feels like a home now.

My current view from the kitchen...lots of projects still in the works as the counter top suggests.

Our gardener's son came inside and remarked that it looked so different than when the previous owners lived here. He said, "It looks alive." That's exactly what we needed to hear to keep our momentum up for the rest of the day.