Grab a brush and come on over!

As a heroine in a Shakespearean play would say, "Ah, me..."  My house is pure chaos right now.  Or I should say, "even more chaotic than usual."  Because let's face it. My house is always chaotic.

As we wait for a billion years for our new house to close, we're making improvements on our existing house to get it ready to sell.

We have to fix and paint some of the outer window trim, so I thought it might be nice to clean the windows first.  I don't want to clean them after the trim is nicely fitted in and painted.  So my dad and I worked on that on Saturday.  The hard water stains are really intense.  I used to wash my windows every summer, but after I had my third kid, that kind of went out the window.  Get it?  Out the window??  Someone told us to use toilet bowl cleaner, and that has proved to be the most effective for getting hard water stains off.  I still have to clean all of the backyard windows; I've been waiting for a nice day to do it.  And then when we have a nice day, I usually get hit with an allergy attack or have to sleep because I've taken Benadryl to ward off said allergy attack.  My worst allergies are in the fall, for sure.

Last week when it was basically a temporary wintertime, we were stuck inside, so we started the painting process.  Our living room has been a gorgeous pumpkin color for several years, and I can honestly say that I've never regretted it.  However, we've had several realtors recommend changing interior paint colors in the living spaces to neutrals.  One realtor told us that there was a study that showed that only 10% of potential home buyers can look past the paint color and appreciate the actual bones of a house.  90% see a color they don't like and say, "Ew, I hate this color.  Therefore, I hate this house."

We decided to go with a taupey grey color.  And we reallllly like it.

See the furniture all over the place?  So stressful for me.

Ben has informed me that it's my job to paint the trim.  He's moved on to spackling the dining room.  Have I yet painted the trim?  Nope.  Allergy attacks. Exhaustion.

I'm really into grey lately.  We're thinking of doing our new house in greys.  I've pinned a few living rooms that are in greys that make me drool:

I think the middle one is my favorite.

Of course, this means that we'd have to buy furniture, and that ain't happening for awhile.  Basically, we'll have three living spaces, but couches in only one of the living spaces.  Haha!  Baby steps, right?  All I'm saying is, I'm digging gray lately.

Another thing we're doing to our current house is getting our curb and gutter re-done.  It's been crumbly since we moved into our house six years ago.  I remember the first thing Dad said when he first drove up to this house.  He looked at the curb and gutter and said, "That looks like crap."  Haha!  So we're finally fixing it.  They dug up the old stuff yesterday, which was super-fascinating.  Gage thought so:

 Honestly, so did I.  I was staring out the windows right along with him.

Today, the concrete people came and dropped off a bunch of wood, and then left.  And that's all I've seen of them so far.

We took down our display shelves and mirror in the dining room in order to spackle, and we need to take the mirror down to the storage room.  It's been funny watching the kids when they have a mirror at their height.  Micah uses it to dance in front of:

He also stands in front of it to watch himself cry.  He thinks it's fascinating to watch his face as he cries about stuff.  He's funny.

To Gage, the mirror is an open invitation to take a drink from his sippy cup and spit it out on the mirror.  Not kidding.  And to Micah's friends, the mirror is a place to kiss and lick.  Also not kidding.  So it's time to take it downstairs.

Status on the new house:  We decided to use the money to paint the house instead of putting up new siding.  New siding would have taken our entire rehab budget.  However, we can't paint now because the house hasn't closed yet.  And once it closes, it will be too cold to paint.  Apparently, you can't paint when it freezes at night.  Soooo, it's going to look crappy all winter until next summer, when Ben and I can hopefully have enough money to buy paint and then paint the house all by ourselves.   Yikes.  Bikes.

It took us a few weeks to find some contractors to say yes to fixing our house.  Most of them called us back and said, "We're too busy doing really big, expensive projects.  Your house isn't cool enough for us."  We finally found two to give us bids.  We have to send both bids into the government dude in Boise, and he chooses which bid he wants us to accept. 

The two dudes forgot to put some things into their bids, so we're having them fix them so we can send them in.  We found out that we need to replace all of the windows.  The seals are broken on all of them and some of them don't even open properly.  They're from 1979.  So that's eating up a big chunk of our rehab budget.

It was really important to Ben to replace the entire top floor.  In fact, he went and got 2,000 pounds of dark laminate flooring from the lumber store while it was on sale.  The contractors will have to buy it from him.

As far as the basement, it looks like we can't afford to put drywall over the wood paneling.  Also, we have a tough choice:  we have to either put carpet in the entire basement OR build a fifth bedroom downstairs.  I vote for the bedroom.  We can carpet later.  We can throw some rugs down there.  I want to divide and conquer my children.  One room per kid.  Ben wants the wall-to-wall carpet, and to add a bedroom "later."  Which, in Ben-speak, means NEVER.

So we'll see who gets his way.  Notice I said "his" there.  :)  Ben loooves getting his way. I keep reminding him that, if Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.