When It Rains, It Pours

When people say they have a "Case of the Mondays," it must feel something like today. In the past 24 hours, things have been not so good, to say the least. I must begin by saying the basement has been coming out wonderfully. I have been very busy and haven't been updating as much as I should. To begin with, Matt and his dad finished the ceiling and my Uncle Paul did a fantastic job with the recessed lighting. We weren't sure it was going to work out, but he made it work and I love it. We've just about finished the trim and the rest of the basement as well. Matt and his dad spent all day redoing the stairs so that they could be stained to match the rest of the basement. I spent all this time in Home Depot with some guy in the paint department (not my usual Sal or Gary) and he supposedly matched the floor as best he could. It turned out like this...

And Matt HATED it. It was much too dark and he couldn't stand it... so off I went to Home Depot where Sal tried to save my butt by giving me this stain stripper stuff. I spent about 45 minutes on the first stair with my hands in elbow-high rubber gloves and my goggles on... The stair color went about 2 shades lighter.... and I mean 2 very, very slight shades lighter. In the end, we tore up the stairs and Matt redid them. We got all new treads and started over. This
time, I'm staining and polyurethaning them a lighter color which matches the rest of the trim in the room. It will have to be better.
In the meantime, I told you that when it rains, it pours... and I wasn't kidding. Yesterday morning, Matt mowed the front lawn, finished up, headed around back, and the mower seized up. We bought the mower the second week we were here, around the first of May... brand new... and now it doesn't work. Matt has to take it back to Home Depot and hope they'll help us out. Then, this morning, my friend Tom comes over to replace our hot water heater. He goes to shut off the water at the water valve and the valve breaks. I call a plumber to come and help us while Tom decides to come back next week to do the hot water heater. While all of this is going on, the refrigerator stops keeping things cold and Comcast stops working. In less than 24 hours, it has poured, literally outside and figuratively inside. Hopefully, ALL of these issues can be reconciled without too much pain or money on our ends!!

The Writing on the Walls

We've acquired quite a bit of trash through all of this demolition. I don't know if I'd be exaggerating if I said that we had about 50 or so contractor trash bags full of drywall and plaster, nails, dirt, and dust under our sunroom. Fifty might even be an understatement. My Uncle Bobby has been awesome enough to get rid of a ton of the trash for us, and so he was here for a few hours today helping out with that. While he was getting rid of the trash, I put my cousins to work. Tiana tested out our new lawnmower. She did a fantastic job on the front of the house, but I think it was a little more tiring than she expected. We'll get to the backyard later in the week. At least our neighbors won't think we're slobs!I decided to put my godson Cory to work as well. I brought him down in the basement to the half bath and let him go to town.

He did such a good job, we even let him write his name on the walls. This may be the only time it is okay, right, and appropriate to write on a bathroom's wall.

Tiana wanted to do a little as well.... get out some aggression, so we let her take a hammer to the wall a few times, too.

Besides Uncle Bobby, Tiana, and Cory, we also were lucky enough to have my mother here cleaning the entire basement out once again, Matt's parents and Uncle Mike working on the basement for a while, and my Uncle Paul and cousin Anthony doing the electrical in the basement. Once again, we've been so lucky and so blessed to be able to count on so many people. We even had our new neighbor, John, come by yesterday and offer us the use of his lawn mower until we bought we one. I told him we had bought one just a few hours previous, but if this was his way of telling us our grass needed mowing, we'd get right on it!