The roof! The roof! The roof is on fi-yah!

That was an EFY cheer.  We were the Roof Raisers that week.  We gave the boys in our group little hats that looked like roofs to wear on our last night.  The hats were hilarious.  Such spazzy times.

So, the house reno moves forward.  Slowly.  And that's my fault.  It's hard to find time to renovate when you have to cook dinner, help with homework, shuttle kids to activities, etc.  My day is already packed - adding painting, packing, clearing, taping, etc. is difficult.

Two days ago, my dad and Ben took off the cedar shingles on our roof.  The back side of our roof is black asphalt shingling, and the front is cedar shingles on top of green shingles.  We wanted the back and the front to match.  Dad put in 5 hours.  Ben couldn't come over until after work, so he put in about 1 1/2 hours.  Here are the results:

You can't tell that there are green shingles there, because there's frost on them.  It's c-c-c-cold outside.  Would you like to see the mess left over?:

We briefly toyed with the idea of bundling the cedar shingles to take over to the new house for firewood for the woodburning fireplace, but the truth is, we have a fire in the fireplace mayyyybe once per year.  And when I was growing up, our woodpile became mouse condominiums.  I'm kind of not interested in having mouse condominiums stacked in my garage or next to my house.  Plus the whole bundling process.  So much work.  So I think we're going to just take it all to the dump.  Unless any of you want them.  Feel free to come and get 'em.  Ben already took an entire truck bed full to the dump, and we burned a bunch in our fireplace the last two nights.  It smelled wonderful - the cedar being burned.  And the kids were looooving it.

(A merry fire.  I've always wanted to say "merry fire."  It makes me feel so Louisa May Alcottish.)

As we all know, I'm going to be the one who cleans up this shingle mess.  Because that's the theme of my marriage with Ben:  He makes the messes.  I clean them up. In fact, this seems to be the theme of my entire family.  My kids make a mess; I clean it up.  I achieved the very huge accomplishment of filling one contractor bag with tar paper yesterday.  I'm rockin' it.

Originally, Ben and Dad were going to pull off the cedar shingles and also the asphalt shingles underneath, but after that night, my dad, covered in dust and unable to get his hands uncramped, said, "Screw it.  Let's pay the roofing guys not only to put the new roof on, but to demo this asphalt.  It's just way too hard."  I agree. I scheduled with them yesterday - the green shingles come off tonight and the new ones go on tomorrow morning.

Our living room is still jacked up. We painted the trim a brighter white.  The taping process is what takes FOREVER.

We have this cute little built-in bookshelf that we painted.

We still need to give the french doors another coat.  And then we need to paint where the tape didn't work, where little bits of white dribbled down on the grey.  Sometimes I wonder why we even bother taping.

Ben made Micah a painting tape frisbee, which Micah promptly put his name on, complete with erroneous spelling.

We're getting there.  He seldom messes up his name anymore.  He used to write it completely backwards, so we've come a long way in the past few weeks. :)

We have a new curb and gutter:

 And after two weeks, we finally got the street asphalted:

Ben painted the door, garage, and attic entry grates.  They used to be a 90's kelly green, as memorialized by Dylan in his homework:

Isn't that cute?  He had to make a poster with pictures of a common noun, a proper noun, etc.  He chose "home" as his common noun and was astoundingly accurate in his drawing, complete with the sunflowers by the kitchen window, the morning glory on the porch railing, and the privet in front of the living room.

Here's a "before" photo of the house with the green accents:

I actually didn't mind the green.  It was a cute punch of color.  And I'm not quite sold on the grey:

I think it's kind of blah, but I think that's because it's kind of the color of the cedar shingles we had on the roof:

(Oh, and Ben took off the crumbling bricks from the chimney. He still needs to mortar the top row of it - those bricks are really loose.)

But I think when our roof is black, the grey door and accents will look good.

Do you like our weeping mortar over on this part of the house?  I call our house the Weeping Wonder.  Catchy, eh?

Ben primed our dining room.  And nothing else has been done on that yet. :)

I finally finished cleaning all of the windows:

The cement guys that did our curb and gutter fixed the entrance to the driveway and part of our driveway:

I wish we could have done the entire driveway, but we couldn't afford it.  Just having that slope fixed makes it look a million times better, though.  That part was really messed up.

The sides of our fireplace had a very, very thin layer of cement on them, and it has crumbled in the past six years.  Ben put these tiles on as a solution (I'm not sure I'm sold on this, either):

Our walkway is now permanent marker-free!  Daniel's mom came over with a variety of cleaning agents, all of which we tried.  The best solution we found was toilet bowl cleaner.  Once again, toilet bowl cleaner saves our skin.

She scrubbed our neighbor's sidewalk, too.  I was glad.

The seals on two of our windows are broken, and there was condensation in them.  My dad took the windows to the glass place to see if we could order some new ones, and we were windowless for a couple of days:

They ordered the windows for us, so we popped our other ones back in place just in time, before this cold snap descended upon us.  (Micah has lost his parka and I'm freaking out.  I sent him to school wearing three jackets this morning.)  We should get them in sometime next week.

And last, but certainly not least, Ben has installed a new doorbell.  Ours has been broken for probably...six years?  Yeah.

There's still lots more to do, but we're making a dent.  And by "we're," I mean Ben and Dad.  I've been precious little help, and I feel badly about that.  But the kids need food, clean clothes, and help with homework, amIright?  It's all about priorities.