Summer Projects

Mya's room was one of the summer projects. This is a picture of Mya's stuff that I piled in the living so we could sort it out. For the most part I let my kids determine how and when they clean their rooms but Mya asked for help. One day I decided to tackle it. It took 1 1/2 hours just to take everything out of the room. We sorted through it all, threw away a lot, recycled a lot of papers. I think it's pretty reasonable now. I told Mya she could no longer give Cor a hard time about how gross his room is. That was over a month ago and I walked in there this week and it looks about the same as it did before I cleaned it. I don't go in there unless I have to. It bothers me that her and Cor's rooms are so messy but kids have to have their own space. We help Cor with his more often.

This was another project. The roof wasn't great when we bought the house and we knew we would someday have to replace it. Four and half years later we decided it was time to get it done. The priests (16-18 year old boys) from our ward came and helped tear it off for a service project. That was a huge help. A friend of ours who does construction gave us a great deal and had some of his guys come out and put the new roof on. It was a noisy week abut now its a beautiful new roof. It's hard to get excited about your roof but we tried.

Here's the new counters. The old ones were white with blue and pink speckles. Icky. The picture of the new ones looks very green and I don't think they look that green in real life. The sample we got didn't look green at all. We like it and this weekend I worked on staining the mitered corners. We are still looking for tile for the backsplash. Our great friend Brent helped DH insall the new counters. They just glued it on top of the old laminate, formica whatever it's called. It's has a cool texture that makes it always look wet and the dark color hides the dirt well. If you look at the above picture and the cupboards look different colors. That's the difference between regular light bulbs and the fluorescent. The cupboards closest to you looked so much warmer. We took out the florescents and felt a little guilty but we've gotten over it. We still use florescent bulbs in the other rooms but not in the bathroom because they made my hair look green.

Right after we got back from Fiji I decided I couldn't stand the sick color of the walls in my Master bedroom any longer. We painted all the walls white and one accent wall blue. It's lovely and serene. I am working on decorating the rest of the room but it's still kind of a mess. We both love the blue color which is a relief since picking out paint color can go very wrong sometimes. I also like the clean feeling of the white walls. Our room is getting closer to being a sanctuary than a place to dump our junk.

I wanted to do the floors in the entry, hall, kitchen and family room with some laminate wood flooring but the savings account was not sufficient to fund that project so it will have to wait a little longer. We also need a need a new entry chandelier, new kitchen faucet, bathroom faucet, door knobs and the list goes on and on. But that's how it is when you own a home and a limited amount to spend on it. I am very pleased with what we've accomplished this year. We had to buy a new dishwasher and a new microwave too which wasn't really fun but necessary.