sale.

i will be selling some vintage items in our garage sale this year, but i wanted to post some of them online first to see if anyone that i knew wanted them!  check out the photos and descriptions here.

this morning.

i was on base with justin at 6:30am. 

the sun wasn't even awake yet.

gross.

i spent my morning with this guy:

surrounded by these guys(& girls):

supporting(& i'm sure embarrassing)this guy:

so proud of him.

jump over here and see why.

muddy playdate.

impromptu playdate today with miss sawyer.

we automatically wear rain boots on playdate days at the ross house.

haha, dina.

okay, okay...

it rained a lot yesterday,

so it's pretty muddy around here.

it was a (somewhat)nice day to be outside.

the kids thoroughly enjoyed being in the mud, digging up the ground and planting bean stalks. 

dina and i enjoyed chatting and decor scheming, too.

out of the mud zone, that is.

poly problem.

aiden's floor is done, with only 2 coats of polyurethane.  we quit at 2.  wanna know why??  because the winter is the worst time to mess with poly.  you can't ventilate your house and then your son ends up throwing up from the fumes. 

true story. 

he did round 1 on sunday night.  we had retreated for the day to the basement, but shortly after bedtime, aiden's tummy erupted.  we thought it was 'cause the kids had pizza and chocolate milk for lunch.  i mean, really...that makes me wanna throw up!

i re-coated the floor yesterday morning and he threw up again in the afternoon.  that's when i knew exactly what the cause was for his sickness.  i also was starting to have issues with it.  then round 3 hit at 4 this morning.  that's also about the time we decided to not have the kids continue to share rooms.  we were going to let them share and make his room a play room.  i had everything reconfigured; decor, furniture arrangements, etc.  then he started yelling for us at 4am. his poor sister was woken up, as well.  today it's 36 degrees out, all the windows are open, heater is on.  oh, well.  you do what you can to keep them from getting sick, right? 

new walls.

yesterday we had a darker khaki room, while today it's gone a little lighter.  despite all the scrubbing on the walls, we couldn't get them clean again.  i thought the darker paint looked kinda gross, too, so i wanted to find something lighter.  i looked at all kinds of colors, but just went with something safe and grabbed a shade darker than the trim in the room.  as we painted the walls, i thought for sure the color was the same as the trim.  it was REALLY light.  thankfully it darkened up as it dried.  the floors have their 2nd coat of paint on and will recieve their coats of poly tomorrow.  the baseboards were also taken out last night, so we'll have those to add to, as well.  i've been looking for a new shower curtain for his closet, but that may take a while.  we had the perfect curtain til he ruined it a couple of years ago.  i'm still sad about that! :)  well, that's our remodel update for today! 

surprise diy.

friday there was a little mishap in our house dealing with vaseline.  i'm sure i don't have to name name's and tell you who's little hand was in it, but i will anyway. 

aiden.

the boy had dumped his trash can over, stood on it and pulled the vaseline that we'd been using on his dry and cracked little face, off his dresser to have a party with it.

let me start with the positive and say that his wal-mart brand vaseline smells really good and i didn't mind having to smell it throughout the house.

the negative, however, is that he smeared it all over his bedding.
ALL OVER the back of his door... over 3/4ths of the humidifier.

and of course, all on his carpet.

which brings us to the point of this post.


we hate our carpet.  loathe it, really.  it's a big reason i hate having company over.  we've been hating it for 7 years, but haven't had the extra cash to replace it. 

despite my mom's tips on how to get vaseline out of the carpet, i really didn't want to even attempt to clean it.   i didn't want it cleaned.  i wanted it out of my house.  i had showed justin ashley's post about how she removed her carpet and painted her subfloor.  i figured he'd just say, "absolutely not" and that'd be it.  however, we priced everything out and so far we've spent about $70(we did have some rollers and supplies already, so we didn't have to buy everything) as opposed to a lot of dough that we'd have to fork over for new carpets that would just be trashed by the boy again.  when you're saving for a big road trip to washington state like i am, $70 is a huge relief.

we now have a painted floor.
i. like. it. a. lot.
as does he.

some things we didn't think about when removing this carpet:
you always forget about the major echo and noisy floor.  i'm sure once everything is back in his room the echo will die off.  we also have some rugs that will be making their way into his room to help with the sound.  that and the new "no shoes allowed" rule will also help(i can just hear my daughter tap dancing on it now).  we also didn't think about his door.  his door closes easier without the carpet.  and there's now a large gap underneath for ventilation.  since his humidifier runs 24/7 these days, it will be nice to have proper ventilation in his room.

and no more water streaks on his wall.



now on to the photos. :)

we first had to move everything out of aiden's room.  his bed, clothes from his closet and laundry basket went to emily's room.
his dresser, red table and curtains went to the living room.  wall/dresser decor to the hall closet.  thankfully, his room doesn't have a lot of stuff in it to begin with.  since he chews on things during bedtime, we have never been able to really keep anything in his room that wasn't clothes, sleeping accessories or higher placed decor.  i don't even put his shoes in his room anymore because he's been known to chew on those!  

(the photos all look terrible...i used my 18-55mm lens and it doesn't do well with bad light.  however, it has the power to zoom and i can get a lot more in the shot with it!)

friday night we took out all of the carpet/pad.  i say "we", but really i just yelled at kids to move out of daddy's way while he did all the grunt work.  i'd rather help than yell, but we didn't have anyone to deal with kids.

 all the tack strips and staples were removed friday night, while saturday morning was filled with hammering nails further in, filling holes and gaps with bondo(my new friend), sanding, priming and painting the first coat of porch paint.  we decided to do things a little different than ashley's.  first, this is a kids room...they throw up, sneak things in their rooms that could spill, and we have a dog.  we decided we needed to prime the floor.  we will sand over the first coat of porch paint--ashley's post mentions why(i thank her for mentioning it since we never knew that), we will apply a second coat and we will be putting 3 coats of polyurethane on top.  ashley did an awesome stencil, but let's face it, unless i'm stenciling something to do with toy story on his floor, aiden's not gonna care for it.  skipping the stencil, we just want his floor super coated to deal with any wetness.  we have to wait 24 hours to apply a second coat of porch paint.  once all of the poly is on, we will have to wait 72 hours before to really even move anything in his room and a few more days after that to add any rugs.  well worth it, though.

if you do something like this, just know that porch paint doesn't really come in an abundance of colors.  we had dark gray, light gray and red.  i'm happy with our light gray selection, though the color on the can looks a lot lighter than it is on the floor.  just fyi.

oh, and the baseboards will come off tomorrow. 

we were debating on whether to do that before or not.

i figure it'd be good to just do it before the final coats of paint go on. :)

okay, i'm off to the movies.

i had made plans earlier in the week to see the newest Harry Potter again with Jen. :)

i will post more photos in the next few days.

(emily is really enjoying having her best buddy share her room)

warming trend.

we had some hang out time at dina's house yesterday.  it was pretty warm out and the kids were actually able to do some laps outside in dina's big yard.

things are always eventful when there are 5 kids at one house.
three kids wanting the same shovel. 
two girls trying to smuggle an apple out of the house so they can grow an apple tree. 
one phone call from a sick boy in the school nurse's office.
and a two year old, a tad surprised when "shushi"(that's susie) was at his house to get him up from naptime and not his mommy(she was getting the sick one from school!). 

so during our chat time, dina pulled up this page.  farm chicks antiques show in spokane, wa.  which happens to fall just a mere 4 days after we leave spokane/cheney area. 

ugh. 

my travel dates just changed.  lol. 

honestly, it's probably good that i won't be there. 
1. we're taking a car, not an suv.  no room for stuff.
2. we wouldn't have $$ left for the gas to get us home.
3. we would have to stay in washington.

hmmm.  maybe we should stay for it. :)

anyway....i didn't get a single photo taken while we were over there.  we sit and talk too much, i guess.

after we got home, we did all of these photos.

i'm working on some projects for some friends with magnetic paint.  i'm pretty excited about them.  they're gonna be fun to use once they're done! :)

the boy hadn't had his treatment in his mouth for a full minute before he'd crashed.

all that playing at dina's house paid off.

 i started cleaning this basket in the fall.  it was a $6 purchase from an antique mall and very rusty.  the kids and i had gone to lowe's in the morning for paint and supplies, so i was able to spray it down with some rustoleum primer.  i love that stuff.
i'm not planning on painting the basket that aqua color...not yet, anyway. :)

the kids allergies kicked into high gear last friday after the drastic weather change...they're pretty snotty these days.

emily has really been wanting to dig into the dirt lately.  i'm going to have to get her some gardening tools and gloves and send her over to her granny's house. 

her boots still have missouri mud on them. :)

the sidewalk chalk made an appearance, as well.  i took this shot as we were cleaning up our things to go make dinner(all of this happened while aiden was sleeping. without the nebulizer still in his mouth, of course).