More Sidenotes

This is the day we started pulling up the carpet. We were so excited! We started in Jess's room and we were really pleased with what we found there. Too bad all the rooms didn't have the same result. Jess's floor was in better shape than the rest of the house.
Jess babysitting Rylan on one of the work days. Playing dress-up.
Our first burning of the stuff we pulled out of the house. It was a good fire! Here are the kids giving the dads (Cody and Curt) a cheer after they got the fire going.
I wish this picture could have gotten more details. This was Trio and me after we spray painted the fridge black. We wore masks and everything, but after we were done the inside of our noses were black, our arm hair was black, it was everywhere. We had to do some serious scrubbing with those green Scotch-Brite scrubbers to get it off.

Isn't this an attractive picture? We were getting a shot of the black up the nose. Nice one, huh?

Fun Little Sidenotes

Sorry I'm still finishing up from last summer!

Maleah was helping Cody mix mud for the seams in the boys' room and they had everything in the bucket and Cody turned on the mixer and it sprayed across the front of Maleah. She had a really good attitude about it. It was pretty funny!

Here are the kids playing in our mess of a house. This was the only room we had any of our stuff in during the remodeling process so they had some toys to play with and stuff but, Man, was that room a mess. It was literally a foot deep in junk that the kids got out. But this was their entertainment when they weren't outside.
This was Rylan's hair-do after Jess was asked to put sunscreen on him. Yes, all that grease in his hair is sunscreen.
Rylan's sleeping arrangements during the remodeling. Pretty fancy get-up, huh?
This is a really random picture that has a funny memory for me. One of the first days that we were working on the house Cody and the 3 oldest kids came out before me in the morning. I was just 30 minutes or so behind them, but on my way I got a frantic phonecall from the girls saying that there was a bull in the barn. Apparently they had gone out to the barn to play and they walked through the door and found a rather large visitor greeting them. They both ran screaming back to the house to find Cody. Anyway, when I got there I had to get a picture of one of our first visitors before we went out in search of where he belonged.

I Have a Hard-Working, Talented Husband

I know I've been married to Cody for 12 years but I am still amazed at what a hard-working and talented person he is. It was fun to work along side him on this big project this summer. This has always been a dream for us.

Here he is sanding the walls in Jess's closet.

On his stilts taping the walls in our bedroom
Here's a picture he took when he was at the house alone in the middle of the night after sanding the walls upstairs. It was so muggy he was sweating and making mud on his arms as he sanded it off the walls. Awesome, huh?
I love this picture!!!! He took a picture in the bathroom mirror to show me what he looked like after sanding that night. He's actually on the phone with me. It was about 11 pm and the rest of us were asleep at the Springers and all the fire alarms in the house started going off and it scared us to death. We couldn't figure out why they were going off, though. There was no smoke or fire and we couldn't get them turned off so we called him to give us some ideas. It was kind of funny after it was over, but during the hour that the alarms were sounding we were a bit frazzled. It didn't bother Isaac, though, he slept right through the alarms and the lights. Amazing and scary at the same time. We now have a safety plan at our house that includes the girls going in to get Isaac if there's an emergency at night!
Here's proof of how hard he worked this summer. If you can sleep on a hardwood floor like this you've got to be tired!

I love you, Cody. Thank you for your wonderful talents and big dreams.

More Help from Friends and Ward Members

We even received service from our younger ward members. Here's Maren helping us scrape old carpet pad off Maleah's bedroom floor. Maren was a good sport when she came out. She came out a lot and was a great help to us.Here we are eating one of Teresa's meals that she brought us. She brought us a warm lunch meal one or more times per week to help us out. It seemed like a small thing to her but it was huge for us. The only thing we had every day other than that was PBJ and we got to where we didn't even want to eat we were so tired of that. So thank you Teresa for your wonderful meals!
In September the young men and their leaders came out and helped us mow the lawn. We hadn't had time to even think about doing that in the 2 months we had been working. It looked so good to see the lawn mowed again. Here's JR and Joseph helping in the yard.
Here's Nathan posing with his mower.
This is the group that helped: Matthew, Bro. Scarlett, Bro. Carlson, Nathan, and Joseph. I still can't believe all the sacrifices people made for us. Thank you to these young men and their leaders.

Stairway and Upstairs Hallway

No major changes to the stairway. This is just when we were tearing off the last layer of wallpaper. It was fun on this part to get to the wall underneath and there were little pieces of history. There was a note that said "Corey was here" and little scribble marks. I just wondered how long ago Corey was there! I love that this place has some history.
Our stairway now. We still haven't had time to lay the new carpet. We have it rolled up in the upstairs library, but I'm guessing that will be a spring or summer project too.
This is at the top of the stairs between the kids' rooms. There was a false ceiling up here and when we tore it out we realized they had wallpapered the ceiling. That was a chore to get off. It gave me a serious shoulder workout. Here I am cleaning up after Cody re-mudded and sanded the walls. It looks like it snowed!
Here's the end result. No major changes to anyone that didn't remove wallpaper, then paneling , then 3 more layers of wallpaper in this part of the house. This looks wonderful to those of us that saw the scraping process on these walls. I wish I had pictures.

Front Room Continued

This is what the front room looked like in mid-October. When we moved in Cody just put up a sheet of plywood between the rooms so the kids couldn't come in this room. We finished this room on Halloween.
Cody laying the mud for the tile.
We did a little tile entry way.
This is what the room looks like now. There's still some trim to do and cleaning up to do on the ceiling but it's mostly done.

The Front Room

This was the front room when we bought the house. We actually planned on keeping the wood stove until we started tearing into things and saw how many problems it had, so we took it out. The roof and ceiling were also leaking so we had to take the roof off. It was quite the project. I guess I should say it was quite the project for Cody because I didn't even help with that. He did it with the missionaries.

Cody is just getting started tearing out the brick. We had no roof for a week or so if I remember right.
This is the view from up in the boys' room where there was still the hole from the old door that was there.
It was interesting when we tore into this room to see the front of the old house before they added this part on. You can see it on the right side of the picture. Cody got the roof put on just before it was dark and rain started to come down the night before we left for Nauvoo. While we were gone our friend and neighbor from our old house, Leo Dominguez, came and shingled and finished off the roof for us. He did a great job!

Current Kitchen

This is what our kitchen looks like now. We still haven't finished all the cabinet doors, but we will when things warm up. The folding table is to help me with my lack of counter space for right now. We eventually want to remodel the kitchen but that's a few years down the road. I think it will look really cute as soon as the doors are covering my disorganized cabinets!

The one bonus to my kitchen is that when I have friends over they never have to ask where things go. It's all visible!

The Kitchen Floor

I mentioned before that the floor was really bad. The man that owned the house before us smoked and it left the floor yellow and really dirty. Cody tried to clean the floor with Steve's steam cleaner. It would have taken forever that way, so when we talked to Steve he told us to strip the floor and put a new finish on it.

Here are a couple pictures of the process.

Disgusting, huh?!

This is how the floor looked afterwards.

The Gift of Service

The end of July Cody and I went to Youth Conference to Nauvoo. We were gone from Thursday until late Saturday night. It was really fun to go, but we were really stressed and overwhelmed by the house and it was hard to leave over a weekend when we could get so much done. We experienced proof that when you do what the Lord asks your little sacrifice brings blessings that go above and beyond your little sacrifice.

This is how we left our kitchen when we went to Nauvoo. I was so stressed about it I was even dreaming about it while we were there. When we got home late Saturday night we went to pick up Isaac and Jess from Diantha and Curt's house around midnight. They told us some story that Paul had been out to the house for something and he noticed that the window in the shop door had been broken out (that actually had fallen out before we had left) and he was worried that someone had broken in and he wanted us to stop out there and check on it before we went home. So we stopped out there and saw that everything was fine with the shop and we weren't even going to go in the house, but when we were turning around the head lights went across the back door and there was a big note on it. I told Cody to stop and I went to see what it was. It was a note from our ward.

These pictures are what I saw when I went inside. (It still makes me cry to see these pictures!)

I came out of the house crying and told Cody that he needed to come inside.

This is what we saw when we came in. Our kitchen was nearly finished! Maleah's room was mostly done. They had worked out in the shop on the cabinet doors for the kitchen. They had helped clean all the plaster mess in Jessica's room and helped to strip more wallpaper. One of the sisters cleaned the bathroom that was so nasty I had wondered if I would ever be able to use it. Our laundry room cabinets were even painted. Another one of the sisters had brought her baby and couldn't work inside because of the vapors from the primer so she held her baby in one arm and weeded the flower bed and patio area in the back of the house with her other hand. From what I understand there were people from our ward out here working on our house every day that we were in Nauvoo. Our friends estimated that there were over 100 hours of work (probably more. I think it made up about 2 weeks work for Cody and me) put in during the time that we were gone. One of the nights the priesthood brethren came out. Another night the Relief Society sisters came and on Saturday more people came back to help. There were also people that watched other people's kids to allow them to come out. It was a wonderful service to us from our ward and it's something we will never forget.

Trio and Diantha were the ones that organized everything. They knew what the plan was so Trio had a list of to-do's for each day and people just came out and worked. Diantha spent most of the time out in the shop in the heat and humidity (I guess it was like that in the house too because we didn't run the air conditioning) overseeing the cabinet doors. I can't express what this has meant to Cody and me. I hope our friends and ward members know how much they blessed us.

The Kitchen

This is what the kitchen looked like to begin with. From the pictures it doesn't look too bad, but it was nasty!! The cabinets aren't actually oak they have and iron-on veneer that was peeling off and bubbling in some places and the whole place was covered in grease and tar from cigarette smoking. The floor is supposed to be white, but it's also yellow from tar. It was pretty gross!!!

Here's what it looked like as we were getting started tearing into it.

Diantha and Trio spent hours and hours in the kitchen with me trying to get all the nasty veneer and adhesive off the cabinets

Our refrigerator is really old and gross. We didn't have the money to buy a new one yet so Trio had the idea to spray paint it black with appliance spray paint. I didn't even know there was such a thing. Anyway, we covered the floor with newspaper and cardboard and went at it. It was really fun and it turned out really looking really good!