The spill....

Deep breathe...

The name of those involved will be changed to protect the not so innocent...

One typical Monday morning a family was waking up going about their normal morning routine...3 little boy were playing before breakfast, Rett was getting ready for work, I was working on getting breakfast ready, while taking care of little things here and there.  Emma saw..."Trooper" pick up a gallon of paint that Emma brought up the day before, she told him calmly, not to pick up the paint bucket, because if he dropped it, it would hurt his toes and possibly spill.  The boys continued to play while Emma cleaned up after breakfast and got laundry started.  Then Emma heard a scream and crying- definitely a "Kevin" hurt cry.  She went over to the playroom...shock and panic came over me.  Don't worry, the kids were all okay, that is the important thing.  However, her favorite, newest, best rug now had white latex paint on it.  

Trooper had brought the paint can over to the play room and dropped it, landing on Kevin's toes and spilling.  Kevin was screaming.  Palmer toddled over to check out the commotion.  Trooper stood there- fortunately, Emma got there before he moved.  She was able to pick him up and put him in the kitchen (on tile) and take off his socks which had paint splattered on them.  Panicking, not knowing the best way to remedy the spill, she looked it up online as fast as the internet could respond.  She thought the rug was a goner.  She envisioned a big permanent white puddle.  For the record, one might ask, why she has her favorite rug in the playroom...well, it's all a temporary set up while they are renovating the basement.  

Anyway, back to the story...  So per the internet instructions, she scooped up as much paint off the top as she could.  After that, she poured water on the spill while using the shop vac to suck up all of the paint and water and repeated the process until it was as clean as it was going to get.  Fortunately it worked pretty well.  Unfortunately, Palmer does not like any vacuums, so the shop vac terrified him and he continued to scream.  Kevin recovered once he realized the heat was entirely on Trooper.  In Emma's frustration, she told Trooper to go to his room, then while cleaning trying to figure out how to impress upon Trooper this incident was not good- as he didn't seem to be terribly remorseful- she made him come back out and sit on the chair so he could see how much work was going into the clean up...  The clean up took a while, but this gave Emma time to think and calm down.  She was still beyond upset about the rug, but also super annoyed because Trooper blatantly did what she had told him not to do less than 30 minutes before.  This particular behavior had been an issue of recent...  He knows...  If it had just been an innocent accident, Emma would not have been as upset.   After the clean up was done, Emma sat down with Trooper and they talked about it, Trooper was sent to his room for 5 minutes to think about it. 

Emma remained a bit annoyed because she didn't feel that Trooper understood.  Trooper likes to make cute faces to try to change the subject.  He says he's sorry, he won't do it again.  You can tell he's not remorseful though.... 

He's not full of it or anything....

:-)

Planning Stage: Boys' Playroom

It's a bit of a challenge planning the boys playroom because the space is pretty small and well, I have big, fun ideas for my boys...  I had to scale back- no swing, no slide, no climbing wall...  ha!  I think it'll be great though!  

Last night, I used my Pinterest board put all the ideas together and to see if I had everything covered. For the most part, the Pinterest board contains all the elements that we'll be using in the basement.  There are some extra 'art area' pins.  I like little parts of each one, and that will come together when I start physically putting the room together.  I also need to pick the fabric for the curtains and pillows!  Can I use a flower print, even though I have all boys? 

 Follow Emily's board Playroom for my Boys on Pinterest.

We had one big snag during demo.  I was hoping to open up the boys room to the playroom more, by making the single door a wider one and using a barn door.  For the most part this door will be open all the time anyway.  This would have made the space feel larger and allow a little more versatility, but as it turns out there's a support post...boo!  That's okay, we'll work it it!

I would love to put a small scale love seat- pull out sofa bed down here, but for now, we're going to put our green slipper chairs together and use those.  I figure we'll let these get destroyed, then eventually replace that with a love seat after we are out of the jammy hand phase.  We're also reusing our off white shag rugs.  They are soft and they were inexpensive, if they get destroyed- no biggie.  I really struggled on what type of shelf/cabinet set up to do on the wall with the big window...but we're going to re-use the shelves that were  mounted on the wall and just put them below the the window.  I'm really hoping to use our ABC's too!  I love these!  It's going to be a squeeze.  There's only one wall these can go on and I'm not sure they'll fit...fingers crossed!  Yeah for re-using and re-purposing!

Anyone have a chalk board wall?  Should we do this?  I'm a bit torn...

I'm super excited to get the stair area put together too!  We're going to put cabinets and shelves under the stairs- very similar to the the pin on my board.  This storage area will be HUGE for us!!!  I can't tell you how desperately we need this space!!!  Our photo albums are currently living under beds, all of the craft, art supplies, etc are stuck in our one storage area that exists in the house.  The stairs themselves will be painted and have a runner.  We're using the cable  railing to keep things open.

Any ideas, suggestions, comments?  Let me know! 

 

Basement Progress!

Let's start with some before pictures!  Now don't get excited, there are no 'after' pictures yet... it's going to take us some time.  First up, the front exterior.  This picture is actually after we took down 2 giant bushes that covered the bottom third of the big picture window.  You can see the little hole, B was getting started figuring out where the window would be.  Unfortunately, we couldn't center it on the window above, because that wouldn't work for the interior space, but it still works!

Here's the playroom!  Yep, it's small, this is really the whole thing...  As you can see the previous owner loved brown...brown carpet, brown trim, brown light (already swapped out, because B couldn't stand it), and brown walls (as a bonus- they are burlap covered!  That's going to be a pain to repair the walls after pulling it off....)

Here are the stairs coming down.  They did have storage under them, which is great...but well, I have something else in mind.

Here's the boys' future room! Again, small, but bigger than the current set up with 3 in one room (which is going surprisingly well!).

Where are we now???  After an entire day with a concrete saw and sledge hammer.....

 Ta da!  Windows!

Here's a better shot of our very awesome window well!  Love it!  Brett added a terrace level in each window well, that we can use for plants.

 

 

Most of the basement is fairly level, but we had to use some self leveling concrete in one area that had a bit of a dip.  

Since we need to get rid of all the demo debris...we figured we'd go ahead and do the upstairs wall removal while we were at it...why not right?!?!  Who doesn't love living in a construction zone?  This was a cramped enclosed stairway.  We remove the wall to the right, which opens to the living room.  The unfinished area above the stairs was just a void... this house is too small to have wasted spaces!  Yeah, we really can't make use of the space for storage, but at least it will open the area up visually!

Well, now everything is torn up...now time to start putting it back together...the way we want it!  Planning post coming tomorrow!

Hippity Hop! Happy Easter!

Saturday we started the day with carrot cake waffles and fruit, then hit up the Woodland Park Zoo for their annual Easter egg hunt!  It was pretty crowded, but well organized!  It was great and the boys had a blast!  Then we got to enjoy the rest of the morning walking around exploring the zoo.  They have new baby lions cubs...so cute!  Here are a couple of pics from the egg hunt:

Sunday we had Brett's aunt and uncle and one of their friends over for dinner.  We also invited another newly transplanted family, they came for a short bit to hang out with us! 

Bunny Pancakes

 

Each boy had a puzzle piece that they put together to make this fish.  They still didn't get what that meant....

After some help, they finally found their big (well, little) Easter surprise!  A fish!  Introducing, 'Shark,' the newest member of the family.

Evan giving Oliver a bubble

mmmm...Carrot Cake

Yep, he's cute!