Hello everyone, thanks for joining us again! Things have been going well here, and I hope this finds everyone else doing superb! Brooke is still in love with the bears at Costco, and this past week Monica let one of them take a ride around Costco with Brooke! She was in heaven.
Jelly is still all about helping us reach peak productivity, but seriously, maybe a little less micro-managing?
For mutual this past week we went geocaching. There were a few pretty close to the church, so we just walked around and tried to find them. We went 0/2... :( We were going to head over to a third one, but it was too close to time up, so we headed back to the church and played basketball for a few minutes while waiting for parents. While we were out searching for the caches I stumbled upon this! Fortunately I saw it before I walked into it!
There was a relief society activity this past week and they did water color painting. Monica had a lot of fun and decided to do a little water coloring the next day too! Of course, this means that Brooke had to join in! Brooke loved it too!
I think they both had a lot of fun, and Monica painted some pictures to make some cards. Here's one with flowers.
And here's one with some ACL repairing bandages! We're going to send this to my sister who just found out she tore her ACL (13 years ago, but finished off the tear recently). It turned out great! I think I'm going to have Monica do water color paintings for a game, I just need to come up with one first!
Monica and Brooke headed to the zoo Friday morning. They had a lot of fun, though Brooke was a little bit of a wreck so they didn't stay too long. They did manage to get a great picture of a snow leopard for me though!
Yesterday just about everything arrived for us to get going on our basement. Here's a panorama of it now that we've cleaned up the carpet and stuff. We still have some things down there, and some/most of it will stay down there and get rotated around as we work (I'm looking at you, treadmill!).
In the morning our pressure treated wood arrived. This is what I needed first, but I got a little worried because this was far from the majority of the order. We called Home Depot, and after a short investigation they called us back, said they weren't sure what had happened, but they'd get the rest of the wood over ASAP!
And within an hour or two it was at our house! That is hopefully enough wood to frame the entire basement, guess we'll see how my estimating skills were.
I moved all of the wood into the garage, so now Tuna is out on the streets. I guess my real motivation to finish the basement is to have a parking spot for my car again! Between moving all of this into the garage, and the pressure treated lumber into the basement I moved over 3000 lbs of lumber yesterday! It didn't hit me until I tried to get out of bed this morning, at which point I promptly gave up, rolled over, and slept for another 2 hours.
In the midst of the basement storm yesterday we headed over to Chik-fil-a because we had some coupons for free food! Chik-fil-a does a bunch of little things that definitely makes it the best place to go with kids. One such example is the stick down place-mat that was on the high chair, and the little container of cheerios over by the straws and ketchup. Perfect to tide Brooke over while we waited for our food.
Coming back to the basement, once I got all the wood sorted out it was time to get started. I spent a little time with the air compressor and nail gun making sure I was doing everything right before I started on the wood that mattered. Also, when my frame nailer came I learned something about frame nailers. When you ask someone if they have a frame nailer, and they say they don't know, they don't have a frame nailer. Just look at this thing! It can drive a 3 1/2" nail! I just needed 3 inch nails, but still, it's huge! I was thinking about letting the teachers come over and learn about framing for mutual one night, but now... I'm second guessing that decision...
I wasn't able to make too much progress on Saturday, what with the late arrival of the wood and we were actually quite busy. I started to put up some fire block around one of the walls though. It's a code thing, since I'm not going to put my framing right against the cement wall (because of the insulation) I have to have a fire block at the top, and blah blah, no need to go into details. Anyway, I got the fire block up along one side of the house, and started doing some measuring for other places. As I looked around and tried to do some planning for what walls should be done first I realized just how much of a mess the builders left... Guess when you don't have to finish the basement you just do what's easy... sigh. Anyway, I anticipate having some interesting pictures of work around throughout this process, and I'll chronicle them all here!
There's just a few more days until my kickstarter ends (67 hours to be exact (at the time of this writing)!)! If you haven't yet, now is the time to check it out before it's too late! Here's the link:
Today in Teachers Quorum we talked about keeping the Sabbath holy. It was a great lesson! I think the best part was that everyone participated. Various questions came up about the Sabbath and what they did to keep it special, how they helped others, etc. It was great to see all of their examples about the choices they make on Sunday to ensure they get to church on time, get the Sacrament ready, spend time with their families, etc.
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