Family Room Painted!

We slowed down quite a bit after all that happened but we did work on some things here and there. Curtis worked some more on the bathroom and trying to hook up lights and a fan but got confused by the wiring. He'll need to get help from my dad over the phone some time. By the following weekend we got our texture on the family room ceiling and a coat of primer put on. Curtis also finished moving rocks in our yard around to the back side of our yard for now and attempted to level the dirt as much as he could. It's hard to do with an excavator. We'll have to get something better when it's time to fix up the yard this spring. Much to my surprise, Curtis taught Jack how to operate the excavator and had him move some of the rocks! Jack loved it and did very well. I think he said he only bumped into the garden bricks once along the side of the house.

Trying to figure out the wiring in the bathroom.

Spraying on the texture to the ceiling.

I was on the other end of the room filling in holes and smoothing them down.

Jack dumping a load of rocks.

This is what our front yard looks like now. What a mess! Can't wait to clean this up but the inside of the house is priority right now.

We will need to regrade our yard away from the house anyway and then just replant grass and maybe even redo some landscaping.

On Sunday we had a special Stake Conference to create a new stake in Kennewick. We were in the Kennewick East Stake but they moved our ward to the Kennewick Stake and created a stake called South Richland Stake. That means we change buildings and times. The church we'll be attending now is a newer building and there are only 3 wards in the building so we'll be at 12:00 noon church instead of 1:30. I'm grateful for that! This building is a little further away but it's in a nice area. Curtis, Jack and I drove over to the new building after we ate lunch after church to see what it looked like. Curtis joked that we are going from the Deerflat Building to the Locust Lane building again because that's what these buildings look like over here, the same as the ones back in Nampa. Later we had fun playing Throw Throw Burrito as a family. Alice even played for a little while but she's got that competitiveness in her and got upset when she lost. She decided she would watch us the remainder of the time.

I spent all day Monday filling in holes and prepping for painting in the family room. I started to paint primer on part of the ceiling and a small section of wall by the windows but got frustrated and tired. I decided that maybe using the sprayer would be a better idea. By the time Curtis got home and we ate dinner, it was time to paint some primer. Curtis used the sprayer and Jack assisted him. I came down later to help as well. It was dripping like the closet doors did so it was a little frustrating. We ran out of primer before we finished but I went to Home Depot Tuesday morning to pick up more primer and more paint. I worked all that afternoon trying to fill in spaces that we missed with rollers and brushes, and pretty much just painted the whole thing over again. 

After finishing the sprayer

This is what it looked like Monday night after spraying and attempting to fill in with brushes and rollers.

This is what it looked like after I finished priming it again on Tuesday, trying to fill in the brown.

Curtis was able to spray paint on Tuesday night and I noticed that a lot less paint gets in the air when it's actual paint instead of just primer, so that was good. We both wore a mask anyway. Later I got a phone call from a member of the bishopric. This was a call I was expecting because we were new but I was hoping it wouldn't come until being here for a few months. He called to ask if I would speak in Sacrament Meeting on March 12th. I hesitated and was a bit concerned because we're so busy and I get so exhausted but after he told me the topic and said he thought of me, I went ahead and accepted it. The topic is "the eternal principle of and blessings of change". It honestly is perfect for me because we just made a big change in our lives. He only asked me to speak, not Curtis. He was just looking for a 2nd speaker for that day and thought of me.

Anyway, Wednesday I spent the morning filling in some missed holes and sanding down a few spots. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as the closet doors. Garrett had a special early release day and got home around 10:45am. After he relaxed and watched a couple of shows I cut his hair for him. He asked me to do it on Sunday but I had said I don't really want to do hair cuts on Sundays. So, it was a good time to do it since I was waiting for spackle to dry on the walls downstairs. I didn't think to get a picture of him afterwards but basically we left the top long and shortened the sides and cleaned up around his neck. It looks pretty good! It's just in time too, because he has his first band concert at his new school tonight, so I'll definitely get a picture then.

I went to work painting touch up, starting with the ceiling and got interrupted a couple of times and took a break also. I ended up repainting the whole room again because a lot of it needed it and it was just easier to do the whole thing rather than try to hunt down the spots. Maybe one of these days we'll get that sprayer figured out to where it gets well coated but not too much. Anyway, I worked in the evening and was about to stop and finish up the next day but Curtis was busy working on installing lights in the room, so I decided to keep going. It was close to 11pm when I finished painting and cleaning up. I had to get a shower so we didn't get to bed until about 11:30pm, but I'm so glad the painting is done and we have lights again!

Spraying the first coat of paint on. 

All finished and this is what it looks like this morning.

Ah, so much nicer than that dark brown.  

Curtis thinks it looks like a trailer home. I guess it kind of does but I hadn't thought about it. I think he thought about it because he lived in a trailer home when he was a kid. My thoughts were how much the brown panel walls reminded me of the walls in the basement in the home I grew up in, which was basically the same. They were built around the same year, after all. 

Today has been SO windy! As Winnie the Pooh would say, "it's a blustery day today". It is also garbage day and here they only have the small blue buckets for recycling, no lid. The big garbage cans have been getting blown over here and there but the stuff from the recycling bins are blowing everywhere, and the spot where we live tends to catch a lot of the garbage blown, even our neighbor also. Our garbage got picked up early, around 6:45am, thank goodness. The girls got on the bus around 8:04 and I started picking up a bunch of recycling that was blowing everywhere, including our own. I had to grab an extra blue bucket that we have in the backyard to put more in it. Thankfully, the recycle truck came about 8:20 as I was finishing picking stuff up! So I took one of our blue bins inside to our kitchen and the other out back behind the fence. When I got back from the store later this morning, I saw 3 recycle bins that weren't ours and a bunch of recycling blown back by our fence and in our yard and the neighbor's. They were blown from the newer neighborhood in front of us. I picked up as much as I could and put them in. I later dumped everything into our blue bins so I could carry them to ask neighbors if they belonged to them. The first one I tried said not theirs. Fortunately, the guy across the street said he was looking for his two bins. He was very nice and ended up taking the third and said he'll figure out who it goes to.

These are the three bins that blew into our yard along with all of the stuff inside of them.

I had heard it gets windy here but now we're seeing just how much! Anyway, I'm hungry now after all of that running around and typing this up. Time to eat something!