In the middle of a renovation

As the title states, I'm in the middle of a renovation. I'm waiting for the wall paper stripper to do its job so I thought I'd stop for a minute or two and post a few pics of the work in progress. We moved in here in May of 2009, and what would become Michelle's room looked like this...

I did not photoshop that color-it really was that green! Mind you, I love green, it's my favorite color, but that was too much, even for me. So, we let Michelle pick a pretty shade of blue and repainted her room. My original plan was to paint a garden mural on the walls and sky on the ceiling, but when we found a cute wall paper border and stickers on sale, we opted for the faster route so we could get moved in sooner. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of her room once we finished it.

Anyway, fast forward a year and a half into last winter. While rearranging furniture in her room, I discovered a thick layer of ice on her wall behind her bookshelf. Now, mind you, I am no contractor or anything, but I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to find ice inside your house.

(Wow, that was a lousy paint job we did along the trim.) We contacted our contractor and, after a lot of paperwork and phone calls, we had the wall opened up and found this lovely sight...

Oh, look, you can see the border and stickers in this picture. Unfortunately, you can also see the black mold in her insulation as well. That probably explains the nagging cough and sniffles she had all winter. :o(

So, fast forward a few more weeks and you can see where we are now. I'm just now getting to repainting the room. Since we can no longer find the border, I'm having to remove it along with the stickers and start over. I've decided to go ahead and do the mural we originally wanted to do, but it will be done in stages. Right now I'm repainting all the walls and ceiling, since the new paint we got "color matched" didn't exactly match, and I'm painting a border of grass along the baseboard. Once we decide where the furniture is going to go, I'm going to paint flowers, insects, birds and such around the room.

This picture looks like the blue in the corner doesn't match this wall, but it really does, there was a shadow from the bookshelf along that wall. I put the green from the grass onto the baseboard to help hide our previous not-so-great paint job. Looks much better now. :o)

Well, the wall paper stripper should be about done doing its job, so I better get busy scraping and scrubbing the last wall. Hopefully the next time I post I'll have some pictures of a pretty new room to share.

Till then...God's love and blessings.

Christmas in June?

Actually, I'm just getting to pictures from December 2010 and thought you might like to see our annual Gingerbread project. Several years back one of the home school moms started this tradition of a Gingerbread Party for all the home school kids, and I continued on with it once they moved away. Now that we've moved to WI, I have a sign up sheet at church for anyone who would like to decorate a house. All they have to bring is a couple bags of goodies to decorate with, I provide the houses and frosting. The girls had fun helping me out with several of the batches this year.

First step-mixing the batter. Love the tongue sticking out!

After the dough is mixed, I put some of it on a WELL greased cookie sheet that has only one side.

Then I dust the top with flour and roll out directly on the cookie sheet.

I used to use paper patterns and trace around them with a knife, but a year ago I found these cookie cutters that work MUCH faster! I found them at Michaels and I'm pretty sure they were Wilton, but not positive.

After the pieces are cut, I remove any excess dough from around the pieces and pop it in the oven. The cookies expand as they cook, so as soon as I take it out of the oven, I re-cut the cookies with the cutters to make sure they are all the same size and quickly remove them to a rack to cool.

After all the pieces are baked, we take all the pieces over to our church kitchen where the girls and I and a couple other volunteers assemble all the houses. As the families come, the goodies they bring are divvied up among the tables so everyone gets a little bit of everything to play with. Here's a couple of the tables. I think we made 30 houses this year.

So far, I haven't been able to decorate one of my own yet, as I am usually busy helping everyone get settled and making sure there's enough frosting to go around. That's OK with me though, as I have time to walk around and snap pictures of all the fun. I love to see how focused the kids can get on their houses. I love the look on her face because she had just popped a piece of candy in her mouth and that is totally an "I didn't do it" look. :o)The older ones seem to plan out their houses in advance and bring special candies to make it with. I love to see how creative they get and the fun they have while they're working.I could show you a bunch of pictures of the finished houses, but I think I will finish here with this cute one of the poor guy who fell off his ladder while putting up his Christmas lights. Too cute!

Well, I think that about does it for now. Hope you enjoy seeing and reading about our holiday fun. Let me know if you are interested in making houses yourself, I will be happy to post the recipe and give you any tips I can to make it easy.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!!