Now A Family of *gulp* Six.

Since we don't think we will move in the next, oh, 10 years at least, Doug and I decided it was time to systematically go through our entire house and clean out. "But you're always throwing things out!" I can hear my mom say. :)  Yet we are hoarders of other things. So we decided that every Wednesday (trash night) we would clean out a small area of our house - something we could do in an hour or less. "Is it beautiful or are we using it?" is our mantra. If the answer is no, it is donated or trashed. We started in the basement food storage area, then moved to the back room shelves and cleaned out enough to have an empty shelf.  Next I went through the drawers in a dresser in storage down there, cleaning out 2 drawers. Feeling empowered, we have moved on to the kitchen. I started on the "lazy susan" then moved to the cupboard above it in the corner. I shifted some things around, and now we have not only clean & organized areas, there is also ...

Family members not on Facebook, this is for you!  I'll get to my family in a future post, but today - projects. We've attacked many. Over winter break back in January, we had the wood floors refinished. Over spring break in April, we finally decided to act on our daydreams and redid the living room. I can't say remodeled, because we didn't change much.... but gutted? Definitely. We were excited for this project, but you know how one thing just snowballs into something else? Well, we pulled the old insulation down and besides a mouse nest (complete with baby), we found rotted deck boards. A lot of them.  After a couple of estimates and some discussion, we also got - a new roof! All in all, we had 13 deck boards replaced, a new roof, and new soffets & downspouts too. On the upside - we've noticed a temperature difference in our house already. Anyway... after our budget was surpassed (thanks, roof) and our couple-week timeline turned into a month, it...