Deck inna Day

So today was general conference, and we worked all day. I was sad to miss, but we have so much to do. David is watching priesthood session (it's 9:30 pm and dark now), and we are planning on watching the sessions we missed our first weekend in thailand while we recuperate at the hotel. I missed sitting and enjoying being uplifted. Thank goodness we get to sit tomorrow. I tore a muscle in my stomach moving all our food storage last weekend (which goes to show how weak my core is...) and I haven't gotten to spend much time resting since. Luckily I seem to tolerate most movements fine.
  Today we put in all our new molding, tore off our front steps, painted, did laundry AND built a deck. In one day.

This morning we got up early, well 8:30 is early for a Saturday if you get up at 5:30am all week! And I went out to take a picture of our back view, before the building got started. The holes were already dug on Thursday. But nothing else was done. By 6:30 pm this evening the view drastically changed:

What a huge difference a few hours, and a few thousand dollars, made!! :) Our 20 by 16 foot deck is all done, except for the crushed stone, which cannot be installed due to the frost laws (it's too cold to haul for residential stone/mulch-- in fact there was light snow this morning on the grass which you can see in the tire tracks in the first picture!). Should be lifted in the next couple weeks. My favorite feature are the lighted stairs, the led lights are dusk/dawn auto lights...they look so pretty in the dark now.

I wish I could claim we did it ourselves, but in the time it took David and I to tear our the porch stairs, put in the molding and caulk it all, two guys from Cedar Works Deck Co whipped this deck out. I don't think they stopped moving for 8.5 hours straight. Pretty cool.

Time for bed.

The Chaos before the storm

The cherrios crunch underfoot as I clear dishes from our table covered in dropcloths. Mess, yes mess is an ordinary thing. Five kids worth of mess chew through me every day and spit me out.

This though, this is not ordinary.

Boxes of refugee books litter the living room, torn from shelving and left to wander from room to room awaiting a permanent home. The air purifier runs nonstop to alleviate the drywall dust from the basement and endless sanding of patched walls. Brand new carpet lies under old area rugs en route to our Thailand house which has not an inch of soft flooring. Painting paraphernalia peppers every room, and endless baby toys creep underfoot.  Papers are everywhere, they bury our lives in homework, visa applications, school separation packages, deck contracts, parent teacher conference schedules, and sticky notes for every job still left undone... 

The kitchen is barely discernible under the weight of life. Paint cans, spices, pancakes and food storage cans all share the island; while dinner and breakfast plates sit side by side near the sink. I can't keep up with the garbage, I swear two bags go out every few hours. Diapers, old molding, papers (endless as mentioned before), bread crusts (Ava detests those), and an ever increasing variety of food storage dinners make it into the trash. (Anyone know a great recipe that involves a lot of freeze dried green peppers, chopped onion, dried apples, oatmeal, and honey??)

The ladder has sat here for two weeks. There is a spot on the ceiling that is Kiltz'd. I need to paint it. Enough said.

The dining room is no longer one. IT is the "painted molding central-food storage rest stop". Luckily most of the 40 boxes of food storage are now gone to good homes. The random guitar, we have 4, patiently waits for someone to claim it.

The only room in the house that is done is the laundry room, which ironically is home to the never done laundry.

I am quite proud of this room which David and I finished with recycled cabinets. We did everything except the sanding and painting. Framing, plumbing,tiling, flooring custom riser. It's finished after two years. If you drop by today and don't find me upstairs, I may well be curled up in the corner of the laundry room chanting, "not leaving in 2 weeks and 6 days...not possible" over and over.