The house is structurally great. The “bones” are good, but my grandparents had not done much in terms of updating since they had moved in 50 years ago.
Both my grandparents grew up in the Depression Era, so they saved EVERYTHING. The downstairs was full but tidy, but the upstairs overflowing and overwhelming. So our first job was cleaning it out. I enjoyed it because it was a job where I could see immediate progress. The girls LOVED it because they got to throw stuff over the bannister to the first floor landing. What kid wouldn’t love crashing stuff down a flight of stairs?
Here are some of the before pictures. Each bedroom is painted a different color, so we refer to them as their color.
That is the top of the landing for the stairs. Yes, that is duct tape on the windows. We haven’t tackled that yet. This is the blue room. It was the least cluttered and easiest to walk through. Each bedroom also has a large, walk-in closet. The girls will now have plenty of room for their clothes.This is the closet to the blue room. Morgan will be in this room. She already knows how she wants her closet and it was exactly how I would have arranged it. The pink room was the worst of all of them. It was jam packed with basically no room to walk through it. I remember riding that horse in my parent’s house. And the baby doll crib was mine that you see in the background. The pink room’s closet is huge. I thought Morgan would pick it based on the closet, but this room had a hole in the ceiling and she thought she was going to have to live with that, so Natalie gets the big closet! (The hole has been fixed.)The green room was a little cleared out by the time I got a picture, but it wasn’t terrible.
We knocked a lot out in one weekend with the upstairs. It was pretty easy to toss most of it. The pink room was the worst but really the easiest to clean out because all those boxes you saw in the pictures were empty. They had kept every appliance, gift, or random box they had ever gotten. We would always joke that Grandma always wanted us to keep the box and bows off presents. Now we know where they all ended up. The pink room.
On the next few trips up the girls asked if they were going to be throwing boxes. We found a few more things they could toss down the stairs and over the banister, but it’s pretty much all cleared out. Those pictures are coming…
Our cat, Clarence (named after the great Clarence Clemons. Someday I’ll get into my love for The Boss) is a great hunter. And he is allowed to go outside because he’s happier that way. My previous cat (Teddy) could not have cared less about going outside. He knew where his food bowl was and that was good enough for him. Clarence loves the taste of fresh meat and he’s good at getting it.
He’s really thinned out the mice/mole/vole situation around the few houses he ventures to, so he will get birds, bats, and rabbits as well. This season has been pretty slow for him so far which I’m perfectly fine with. I don’t always have time in the mornings to dispose of the carcasses. Then yesterday I left the back door open while I was letting Dexter out before picking up the girls. I came in and found Clarence with a live animal. At first I thought it was a rat because I thought I saw a long tail. For a split second I almost bolted out the door, but then it squeaked. Unfortunately, I recognized the squeak of a bunny in trouble.
So I was able to get the bunny away from Clarence and get it outside. I’ve done it before and the bunny has usually just hopped away. This bunny did not, so I knew I was in trouble. I picked it up and saw it had some nasty cuts on its belly. So nasty that I could see bits of the guts. At that point I knew I couldn’t leave it in the grass because Clarence would most definitely get it as soon as I let him outside, even if the bunny was able to drag itself to a more covered area. At this point I had to get moving to get the girls picked up from daycare and swim, so I was trying to think of something to put the little guy in and keep safe. I was slightly panicking and it took me longer than it should have to think of the cat carrier . So I got him (I have no idea if it was a boy, so I’m generalizing) settled in that while I got the girls.
This was before I realized the bunny had some pretty bad wounds.
They were both pretty excited to hear I had a baby bunny waiting for them at home. I’m pretty sure Morgan thought we were getting a new pet. We had to make a stop at CVS for some bandaging supplies and then went home to treat the patient. The girls did a great job at listening to my directions and helping to get him sprayed with antibiotic, bandaged and wrapped. I pretty much held the bunny while they did the rest. Then it was just a waiting game…
All bandaged up! Clarence waiting for his chance to finish off the bunny.
Both girls checked on him before going to bed and as soon as they woke up the next morning. I had already made sure he was still alive, and he was looking okay at that point. A graduate school classmate had messaged me the night before after seeing my post on Facebook that the bunny would need antibiotics immediately in order to survive because the saliva of cats is deadly to rabbits. I had no idea. I found some amoxicillin we had leftover from a few years ago, but I attempted to get some in him. By the time I was taking Morgan to school, the bunny had done from sitting upright to laying on his side, and I knew that was not a good sign. I took the bunny to work with me and put him in the sun to keep him warm. He moved around a bit so I was a teeny tiny bit hopeful he might be turning the corner.
I had him on the windowsill and kept checking to make sure he was still breathing, but one time Velvet (my supervisor) came in and looked and said “I don’t think he’s breathing anymore. Is he gone?” I had just checked on him a couple minutes before she came in, but it only takes a moment. Poor little bunny didn’t make it. I buried him when I went home for lunch. Next time I’ll be quicker with the antibiotics and hopefully have a better chance of success. But this little guy had some pretty big wounds, too. I’m not sure there was really anything I could have done for him, but I had to at least try and not just leave him for Clarence’s next meal. That seemed way too cruel.
Now I’ll have to tell the girls tonight. Morgan will be upset but I’m hoping she will be distracted by her dance recital pictures and getting her hair and makeup done. Fingers crossed on that one. Natalie is young enough she doesn’t get it yet, so she will roll with it. That’s the beauty of being 3.
I mentioned in the first blog that we have some big changes coming up and that’s all due to us moving into my grandparents house. It’s a great opportunity for us to live in the country which is something both of us want. Natalie seems to be fully onboard with the idea, but Morgan is more hesitant because she realizes she will be moving away from her friends and school. She has a definite pattern of liking it when we are up there and working, but once we get back to Macomb, she says she wants to stay there. I get it completely. And I am hoping once we are up there and she meets some friends, which she is a total extrovert so she won’t have any issues with that, she will be just fine with the move.
The house does need some work. My grandparents really didn’t do much in the area of updating. The flooring has been the same since I was born and I’m 42. My first goal was to get the main living area painted so we could pull up the carpet. It only took a few hours of being in the house before I was affected by the dust. Then it took me a couple of days to recover once I was out and away from all the dust.
We’ve already done quite a bit and I’ll continue to document that all here, but here is list of things we have done and need to do (and this is an incomplete list.)
Empty the house (it was FULL)
Fix cracks in plaster (upstairs and down)
Fill in all the nail holes (my grandma loved to hang pictures)
Paint the entire interior
Pull up carpet
Remodel bath (reconfigure)
Remodel kitchen (mostly cosmetic)
Rework the entry way
Get electrical checked
Buy new couch
Landscape
Refinish all the floors
Clear out the wasps (they seem to like all the windows)
Refurbish the windows
Outside play area for girls
Like I said above, there’s way more that we will have and want to do, but this is what we are focused on right now. There’s other “fun” stuff like adding some beehives and making the extremely large front lawn into a prairie, but those will wait until some of the other things are done. Structurally the house is great, so it just needs some attention to make it more efficient for us. Brandon and I are planning to do a lot of the work ourselves since it’s things we can do, but other things like the electrical and bath remodel will probably require an expert.
Obviously, there is much more to come with house updates!
That title is a little ironic considering my 6 year old is a better swimmer than me. I would never jump in an actual pool with both feet.
I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a blog for a couple of years and finally decided just to do it and see how I liked it. I read a lot of blogs and like how they chronicle their lives. We have some big changes coming up in our little world and thought a blog would be a good way to document them for us and the girls. Morgan may remember all the work we are doing but I doubt Natalie will. This blog space can be a reminder for them and us all the updates and projects we accomplish on our living spaces.
So my goal and focus for this space is to show how a middle income, middle aged household lives while raising a family in the Midwest. I spend a lot of time doing activities with my girls so I plan to show some of that plus how we meal plan, cook, organize our lives , etc. It will be very rare that you will see staged photos from me. More than likely you will see laundry piles and toys in the background because I don’t have time to create a “perfect” setting. My kids move too fast and I like the real moments captured.
