Home Remodeling Progress February 2008

Since we currently have no linen closets, we have to be creative in where we store things. I bought a whole bunch of large storage bins from Costco, but I still don't have room for these blankets and quilts, so they are on the ironing board in the laundry room.




Mom is getting a new closet in her downstairs bedroom.

Here is a view of the great room as you enter the house. Notice the new back door we just put in this week!

The main bathroom got a new door too, plus we removed the door that was on the linen closet you see here, and we are remodeling the closet so it will look good without a door. This is as far as Dave could get today, because now I have to remove everything including the old shelves from the closet. Then we're either going to panel the inside or paint it a fun color before he replaces the old shelves with nice new alder shelves.





Here's Tulla trying out the new see-through door to the basement. Dave wanted to remove the old door entirely, while I wanted to keep it because I use it to hold the dogs where I want them. So we compromised.



Here's a view of the front door (not new yet) and the french doors leading to the master bedroom. Our carpenter, Dave M., just finished building the coat lockers on either side of the french doors.



A closer view of Dave M. and the lockers. They will have coat hooks inside and trays for shoes underneath the seats.

The right-hand locker. Dave M. is waiting for us to decide how long it will be before we can afford a new front door so he knows whether to fill in the paneling between the locker and the door or not. The new front door will be 42 inches wide instead of 36 like it is now.

The new bathroom door from the outside.

Looking down the hall towards the fireplace.

Looking at the end of the hall from the great room. The hall will have family photos all the way down both sides, with a photo of the SLC temple at the end above the wainscoting. Dave M. is going to invent some nice way to panel the opening for the attic in wood. Notice the floor has drywall mud all over it. They assure us it all sands right out.

Percy's First Mouse

Ever since I got back from my mission in 1987 I have been allergic to cats, even though I love them. But we have a problem. The field mice from the backyard keep invading the house. A few years back when some of them took up residence inside one of the kitchen walls and I had to rip out the wall when they died because they stunk so much, I put out poison. I felt guilty doing it, and I worried about the dogs or, heaven forbid, someone's child finding the poison, but now I have puppies, dogs and chickens, and I babysit nieces and nephews frequently, so I really don't want poison anywhere around my house. Heck, I don't even use toxic cleaning supplies! To me, cats were the only answer to get rid of the mice.

So in September of this year I got our friend Ardie to cure me of the cat allergy using EFT (see http://www.emofree.com/ to find out more) and voila! We started looking for cats! We got Percy from the people who rent my Aunt Beth's apartment. They found him as a stray, but already had two cats, so they couldn't keep him. Aunt Beth told me about him when she was giving us a ride home from our Workman Family Reunion in St. George in September, so a week or so later we went over to see him on a Sunday afternoon. He got interrupted as he was playing with their other two cats, so he didn't seem terribly friendly, just dang cute, but after I held him for a couple of minutes, I looked over at Dave and asked him what he thought, and he just emphatically nodded his head yes. It was love at first sight. He's such a confident, feisty little guy. And very friendly, when he wants to be. The people who found him told us he could already beat their cats in a fight, even though he was less than half the size of either cat.

We got him home and started looking through name databases on the web, and Dave made a list of the possibilities. After a few days of looking, Percival was the one that stuck out to me, and Dave said ok, so that's his name: Sir Percival. We call him Percy for short.

When I took Percy to the vet for his first exam and shots, they told me he was about 4 months old. Then they gave him tests for all the horrible diseases that strays in our area commonly get, but he got a clean bill of health. They checked him for a microchip, and he didn't have one, so I got him microchipped under our names, and he was officially ours! Yay!

I think everybody should get pets in pairs, so they have each other to play with. That meant getting one more cat. At first Dave wasn't so hot on the idea, but I talked him into it and about a week later we adopted one more cat, a Siamese, from some friends of my sister Laura. They were going to move to Singapore, and couldn't take him with them. He was a year and a half old, his name is Nimitz, after a cat in one of their favorite books, and he's gorgeous. He got his shots updated and got a microchip as well, and then we were the proud owners of two cats!

When we brought them home we were camped out on a mattress in the basement, crammed into the smallest bedroom ever constructed. (It has now been reborn as the study, where I am typing this.) The room is connected to a bathroom, so we put the litterbox in the bathroom and kept both cats in there for a month or so, until we felt they were adjusted enough to let them out into the main basement areas. Then I spent three incredibly boring days sitting around with each of our dogs (we had three large dogs at the time because Becky's dog Mickey was staying with us while she was in Germany) one at a time, on leashes, jerking their leashes and saying "no" whenever they went after Percy or Nimitz, until they learned not to pay attention to the cats. In retrospect it was totally worth three looooooooong days, because now the dogs and cats all get along fine, but at the time I was seriously considering gnawing off my own arm, just for entertainment.

We never saw any mice until I found Nimitz in the bathroom chasing one, the day before I took these photos of Percy with another mouse. I didn't get any photos of Nimitz with the mouse, because I had to leave the room. It made me feel kind of sick. The mouse in these photos was already dead by the time I noticed it, but Percy was still having a great time playing with it. The next day I watched Percy kill a mouse in a window well, and in the morning we found a dead mouse left outside our bedroom door as a present. So between the two cats, they have killed at least 4 mice so far, without us ever having seen a live one except with a cat in hot pursuit. Go cats! (I do like mice, and I feel sorry for them getting killed, but I draw the line at letting them live in my house.)

This Week's News

1. Dave passed his series 66 exam on his first try! There are others he knows who didn't quite manage that. He needed a 71% to pass, but he got something like a 78%, so he's getting razzed by the guys at work for "over studying".


2. The dryer is still running.


3. Annalyn and Brian made some more progress on the tiling job in the entryway. It's ready for our carpenter to build the lockers next to the front door.


4. The new master bedroom has been primed, we bought the paint today, and tomorrow our friend Ruthie starts painting the mural in there.


5. We went to an excellent "Leadership Training Meeting" at the Stake Center on Saturday evening. Did you all get a chance to see the broadcast? If not, you should. You'll love it. It was all about families.


6. 
12. OK. I just have to show you the cutest photo of Dave on the night the puppies were born. This is him holding Mikey, who is now owned by my sister Katie's family. Can you believe how tiny they used to be? Mikey now weighs about 23 pounds.

Dave passed his Series 66 Exam!

Dave has been studying for his Series 66 exam for work. Here he is in the computer room hard at work. This is a tough test, and he's taking it this Saturday, Feb. 9th, so all prayers on his behalf will be welcome. On Monday our dryer all of a sudden made a horrific noise, so I ran in and turned it off. A few weeks ago I had dropped a fork down the lint filter, and it finally fell down into the motor. Figures. I was worried about too much lint falling down into the motor, so I tried to clean it out with a fork, but then the fork fell in. :)Sears couldn't send out a repairman until later this week, so I figured I'd better fix it myself or the dirty laundry would take over the house completely. Just having puppies, even though we're down from 7 to 3, I can't keep up with laundry. I don't know how you guys with kids do it. Trying to figure out how to get the front off to get into the lint filter took us awhile, but my friend Ruthie helped me, so eventually we figured it out. I'm so proud that we fixed it ourselves! And I don't think it did any damage, since I caught it so quickly when the fork fell.

I also took the puppies for their first three runs in the gully this week. They can go 3 miles already with no problem. And they stay right with me the whole time, with no leashes. This is Molly and Sean during their second run, and Penny too, off by himself as usual. Isn't it a beautiful place?

We are currently on the downhill side of a huge home remodeling project. This is the main floor of our house. We took out the old kitchen, knocked out the wall between the living room and the kitchen, added a new window where the kitchen sink used to be, and replaced the old aluminum sliding glass door with a new vinyl one. Notice the hole in the ceiling where our carpenter nearly lost his life when the ceiling fell out while he was installing a sun tunnel . Turns out the old ceiling was never nailed up properly. That hole is right over the stairs. Good thing he caught himself on one of the trusses. We also removed the old flooring and then the chipboard that was underneath it, but once that was done we found the plywood flooring underneath was all rotted, so we ended up replacing the entire subfloor on the main floor. Notice the darker brown sheets of plywood that are new and the old ones which haven't been removed yet. Tulla is asleep by the door, and Mickey is watching her.
These are the stairs half ripped out. We took out the wall around the stairwell and put in new alder stairs with new handrails.
Here's the front room with the fireplace ripped out and the old blinds still in, but all new ceilings and walls.
Here's the first window to get a wooden sill and new casing.

We ripped out the old front closet and the bedroom closet behind it to enlarge the entryway. Then we installed french doors where the closet used to be and knocked out the wall between the two small bedrooms behind it to make one large one. You can see the holes in the wallboard where the electrician had to make modifications. He kept finding old wires up in the ceiling from previous remodeling projects which hadn't been capped off or boxed properly. Good thing he fixed them all. You can also see some of the new oak floor and the hole in the ceiling where the old swamp cooler was.
This is the enormous truck that brought in all the new drywall. They loaded up the hook thing with big sheets of drywall and then swung it over the lawn up to the front door, unloaded it from there, and then did it over and over again until it was all in the house.
Here they are bringing in one of the 12-foot sheets. They used these to hang a new ceiling right over top of the old ceiling.
A view from the new master bedroom of the fireplace right after we ripped out the old mantel and hearth.
Notice the sheets of plywood stacked by the stairway and Mickey waiting with his ball for us to throw it. Mickey belongs to Dave's sister Becky, but we babysat him for 7 months while she was in Germany with her family. He is an aussie and we bred him (actually we just let him do the work himself) with our border collie, Tulla, while he was here. They had 7 adorable puppies.

Welcome to our first blog!

Last Sunday was our niece Allison's missionary farewell. She is going to Fukuoka, Japan. It was a beautiful meeting. We especially enjoyed her testimony and we know she will be an excellent representative of our Lord, Jesus Christ. We stayed at her ward for the rest of the meetings, and the RS meeting was about journals, which is why I decided to start this blog. Some of the older ladies talked about blogs that their daughters were doing, and how much they enjoyed them. I have been wanting for awhile to keep a journal where you could include photos, and this looks like something along those lines which I would like to try. My sister-in-law Julie sent me a link to her family blog here on blogspot, and she says it's not very hard, so here goes. Hope you enjoy sharing with us.

Another thing that we talked about during that lesson was something that one of the GAs (unfortunately I forgot to write down which one) used to ask himself every day when he wrote in his journal: Have I seen the hand of the Lord reaching out to touch me or my family today?


To answer that question I share the following experience I had last week: We were blessed with seven beautiful puppies the day before Halloween this year. I knew giving them up when it came time would be hard for me, but it was harder than I expected. Several people wanted to adopt TJ, shown to the right, but the first couple fell through, I just didn't feel right about the second lady who wanted him, and then we didn't get any more calls for awhile.

Last Thursday when I went to rehearse with the Tabernacle Choir, I wasn't expecting to enjoy the rehearsal because I was soooo worried about the puppies and finding good homes for them. For some reason, I was particularly worried about TJ. He was starting to show a tendency to be fearful of strangers, and I worried that whoever came to look at him wouldn't like him if he barked and was afraid of them. I didn't want to give him up unless I was sure that he felt comfortable with his new parents and that they would be good for him. I was also preoccupied with the remodeling project, and how will I learn to take care of this beautiful home that we are building, so that it will stay nice. That night we rehearsed a song called My Shepherd Will Supply My Need. As I sang the words:
My cup with blessings overflows.
Thine oil anoints my head.
and later:
Oh, may Thy house be mine abode,
And all my works be praise.
I thought about all the many blessings I have received lately, like puppies, and money to remodel our house, and realized that I needed to be more thankful and faithful and less worried. I also thought about several marvelous blessings that Dave has pronounced upon my head lately. Another song we rehearsed, called . . ? . has the phrase:
There's not a plant nor flower below but makes Thy glories known.
The seas arise, the tempests flow by order from Thy throne.
Lord, all that borrows life from Thee is ever in thy care,
And everywhere that we can be, Lord Thou art present there.
As I sang those words, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that the Lord has a plan for everyone, including puppies. He sent those puppies down here according to His plan for them, and He knows where they are supposed to live and who will be the best owners for them. I was inspired then that I should pray to the Lord and thank Him for his blessings, ask for help to care for the blessings I receive from him, and acknowledge that he has a plan for our puppies and entrust them to His care. I think I forgot to do it that night, but when we woke up Friday morning, that's exactly the prayer I prayed. That day I talked to a person at Brickyard Kennels who suggested that if I wasn't getting responses to my puppy ad on KSL.com that I should delete it and then create a new ad, so that when people search for puppies they will see my ad at the top of the list. I did that, and Friday evening when Dave and I returned from the temple, there were two messages on our answering machine from a couple in Provo who wanted to adopt TJ. It was too late in the evening to return their calls, and on Saturday morning I was scheduled to go down to Springville to rehearse with our niece Allison at 10am, but I was delayed, and right as I was leaving Dave answered a call from the couple in Provo and arranged for me to take TJ and Molly with me so they could come to Springville to see them. I didn't want to do it, and got really mad at Dave for insisting, but it turned out that Dave was following the promptings of the Spirit and the people loved TJ from the moment they laid eyes on him, and he went willingly with them. Have I seen the hand of the Lord in my life today? You bet I have.


We still have one more puppy who needs a forever home. If you know someone who wants an absolutely gorgeous female puppy, please tell us. Her name is Molly and here are a couple of recent photos:


Happy Anniversary to US!

Dave and I just had our third anniversary on Dec. 28th, 2007. I adore him. Talk about the hand of the Lord in your life, Dave is the best blessing I've ever gotten from Him. Here's to many, many more happy years together.







President Hinckley: In Memoriam


I have a friend who is a nurse for many of the LDS general authorities, including President Gordon B. Hinckley. In light of his recent passing, I thought I'd tell you something she shared with me a couple of months ago. I mean this with the utmost respect. As my friend was about to retire from the Tabernacle Choir, she was telling him that she thought it would be difficult for her. He said something like this. "Think of it this way: when you retire, you will get up the next morning and figure out all sorts of fun things to do with the rest of your life. When I retire, I'll be dead." Despite being dead, I know that he is having a wonderful reunion with his wife Marjorie and all of his loved ones who passed on before. We love you, President Hinckley! Congratulations on your graduation!