Busy Little Bees

We've been busy little bees lately!

At work...

              

At Play...

At the fair...

At the house...

Speaking of the house... A lot has happened since my last house related post.


We tore out a concrete pad behind the house.  Which brought up a common conversation in our relationship that usually goes something like this:

Nurse: "So we have to break up all the cement?"
Nerd: "It's concrete."
Nurse: "Ok.. whatever, same thing."
Nerd: "No, not the same thing.  This is concrete, not cement. Concrete has aggregate in it, you know that."
Nurse: "ok fine, concrete!"

We have probably had the same conversation a thousand times.   Maybe for him it would be the difference between a vein and an artery.... then again, I'm pretty sure he knows the difference.  I guess that's why he's the nerd and I'm not! :-)

But I digress, see that door behind Michael?  That door is gone now.  It led into the kitchen.  We wanted to get rid of it so that we would have more cabinet space in the kitchen.  Plus, I didn't really want future kiddos running through the kitchen from outside with river juices dripping off of them. 

Boy was that a day of hard work.  We were exhausted!


Since the electrical work and plumbing was finished, we could finally re-insulate the exterior walls.   We decided to do a layer of spray foam insulation and then fill the rest of the wall depth with blown-in insulation.  Hopefully, it will make for a very energy efficient home.

And, because the insulation was installed,  we got to start hanging drywall !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 First we did all the ceilings.

We worked till the wee hours... you know, like 9:30pm. 

Then we started on the walls.

 Thanks to my Aunt Janet who helped photo-document the day so I didn't have to drop my drill to pick up a camera.

 

Also thanks to all the family that came to help out! 

We got a lot done, had a lot of fun, and laughed a lot.  There was a lot of screw-related humor that I'm not proud of... it got pretty bad (screw this, screw that, screw it, screwed up, screwy, screw ball.  And yes, we laughed pretty hard about "screwing in the closet".  We even briefly considered making it the blog post title, but, hey, this is a family blog.  We're keeping it clean here people.)

screwing in the closet

That's that! Once the walls are mudded and taped, I can start painting.  What?!!?! That's crazy! And awesome!

How I Work Night Shift and Love My Life

 I get asked pretty frequently about working night shift.  I think people are really curious since it is such a different lifestyle than most people live.

I mean look at this!

 

Doesn't it look glamorous?!  Apparently it's going to be a new show on NBC this fall.  Betcha I won't like it.  Don't even get me started about the doctor in jeans and a v-neck with the IV pole.  I won't be able to stop. 

Anyway, Night Shift.  Since I get so many question from people, I thought I would blog about some of the night shift FAQs which are: When do you sleep?  Do you switch back and forth?  When do you eat?  Is it is hard on your marriage?  When are you going to switch to day shift? 

First, let me start out by saying that I love working night shift!  Are you surprised?  For some night shifters, they love it all their life.  For others, it is a season that is very difficult to get used to so they switch as soon as they get the opportunity.  While I would say it is a season for me, its a season I am really enjoying.  Michael and I have a fairly uncomplicated life right now.  It's just us two, no dog, no kids.  A big house renovation,  but that is about it! Someday that will change, and so too, maybe, will my perspective on working night shift.  But for now, I love it.

But it is a very foreign concept for most people so I hope to give you a little insight into the life of a nightshifter.

Source

When do you sleep?

There are two main strategies for switching to a night shift schedule.  

Strategy #1: This is the strategy I use most often for switching from sleeping at night to sleeping during the day.  What I do is I stay up as late as I possibly can (typically about 4am) and then sleep during the day.  Pretty simple.  And the nice thing about this strategy is that I can be pretty productive.  So I cook, clean, bake, blog, research/shop for house stuff, do laundry, exercise, craft, etc.. Sometimes I really look forward to that time.

Strategy #2: In this strategy, in order to switch to a night shift schedule, all I do is take a nap.  Usually in the afternoon before I work nights, I just take a couple hour nap.  This is probably the most common strategy.  You wouldn't guess it, but I typically feel the best when I do this.  It seems to make for an easier transition.  It is also nice if I have things I need to do in the morning.

Do you switch back and forth?

Yes, because I am a nurse at a hospital I get the glorious opportunity to work 12 hour shifts.  That means I get to work 3 days a week and still be full time.  So with anywhere between 3 days off in a row to up to 5, it gives me plenty of time to switch my sleep schedule back to normal.  To switch back to a normal sleep schedule, commonly, most night shifters (including myself) will sleep for a couple of hours when they get home from work -till about noon- and then wake up and go about the day.  Then sleep at night.   It works pretty well most of the time. (Except for this morning where I woke up at 5:30am thinking about this blog post). 

Things that help the transition: Room darkening shades over the window, melatonin, and benadryl!

When do you eat?

I just kind of eat when I am hungry.  When I am on a night schedule, I eat dinner with Michael when he gets home from work in the evening, I eat lunch at around 2am, and I eat a light breakfast at around 5:30 or 6am. 

Is it hard on our marriage? 

Overall, I would say no. Actually, night shift works pretty well for us.  Michael usually gets home from work at around 4:30pm which gives us two quality hours to catch up with each other before I have to leave for work around 6:30pm. We have dinner, I hear about his day, I tell him about my night, we talk about the house, etc.. Michael gets the best of my day, instead of, if I worked day shift, the exhausted worked-all-day Laura.  

When are you going to switch to day shift?

I got this questions a lot from family and friends when I  first started working nights. Probably because, I was so vocal about wanting to work days, and NOT wanting to work nights.  But it didn't take long for me to be hooked on night shift.

 There are so many things I love about working nights
1. You get paid more
 Holla for shift differential!

2. It is less stressful than working day shift
 Less doctors, less orders, less procedures, less drama.... most of the time. :-)

3. I get evenings with my family
This is particularly a plus on holidays.  When I work a holiday, I usually don't have to miss out since I always have a couple of good hours before I go into work to celebrate.

3. I get to work and bond with some amazing people
Since night shift is typically less chaotic and stressful than day shift, we really get the opportunity to bond with our fellow night shifters.  We work hard, but we also laugh, cry, vent, and share life.  I truly have never worked with a better group of people. 

Just some of the wonderful people I work with

So that's the jist of things! If you have other questions or things you are curious about, feel free to ask me!

Laying It All Out

As one of the areas in our house gets prettier...

another area gets pretty ugly.

As you can see in the first picture, we got our wood flooring installed.  Last week the guys from Hoosier Hardwoods came in to patch the floors where we had taken down walls.

They did a great job.  Once the floor is all sanded and re-stained, things will really start to look seamless. 

Since I mentioned taking down walls, I realize it might be hard to visualize what walls were taken down, what walls were moved, and what were bumped out.  So let's talk layout.

Here's our house's layout Before:

1.)Living Area: The wall between the kitchen, dining, and living room came down in order to open up the spaces.  Our biggest goal for our home is to use it to host people and parties.  We hope that the new layout in our living area will allow us to do more of both.  Plus we are better able to enjoy the view of the river without those pesky 'ol walls in the way. 

2.)Master Bathroom: The bathroom has been transformed into a larger room by taking out the many closets around it.  Previously, the bathroom opened to the hallway.  But we decided it was important to us to have our master bedroom on the main floor.  So we relocated the entrance to the bathroom from the hall to the master bedroom to make it a proper master suite. Our new bathroom allows us enough room for a shower, tub, and double vanity.

3.)Master Bedroom & Closet: What was the 2nd bedroom is now becoming the new master bedroom in order for us to be able to have it connected to the new master bathroom. To make it larger, we took the old master bedroom closet and added it to our new bedroom square footage.  It still is probably a small master bedroom by today's standards, but we are sure it will suit our needs just fine.  We also took up room in the old master bedroom to establish a master walk-in closet for ourselves. 

4.)Foyer: Back out in the living space, we wanted the foyer to feel a little more open so we widened the entrance from the foyer to the living room.  Someday we plan to open up the stairway and have a nice exposed banister which will also help open up the foyer to make it feel larger. But that is down the road once we finish the 2nd floor. 

5.)Fireplace: We are removing a window the the left of the fireplace.  We decided to do this in order to create more symmetry around the fireplace.  Plus someday, I would really like to install built-in book shelves around the fireplace. 

Here's the Before again:

 After:

 As you can see in the after, the kitchen is all opened up to the living space (you might remember the beam we installed).  The bathroom is now nice and wide - 9x9ish.  The master bedroom has now grown as well and our master closet has been formed.  Which then creates a smaller office/future nursery.  (Future being the key word there.  Sorry Mom!)  Here's another view for the more technical minded reader out there:

Before:

 After:

Oh and the yellow box?  That is a future project too.  We plan to add on a larger garage and convert the old one car garage to a mudroom and half bath.  To help you visualize, I have come up with a very sophisticated rendering via Microsoft Paint!  It also includes the front porch we would like to add.  You know, just a little weekend project or two for a later date.  :-)

 At this point you are probably thinking...."Geez, why didn't they just scrap the whole house and just build?"

Yep! That question still goes through my head.  But really, I wouldn't have it any other way.  Going through this process has been so much fun.  Michael and I have enjoyed the challenge of having to work with what we got, but still dream a little bigger.  Plus, there is no way we would be able to get our hands in there as much as we have with this house.  We have so many stories, already! I can picture us someday, sitting by our fireplace, gazing out at the river and laughing about all the walnuts we found, or about how bad the basement use to smell (hopefully past tense!).  That, to me, has become so valuable, more valuable than any new foundation ever could be.  Because, lets face it, that's basically the only thing we haven't touched. 

I've learned its good to keep a good sense of humor through a renovation.  When we first set out on this journey, my Uncle Steve (who, if you remember, is doing the majority of the work on our house) told me I had to watch the movie "money pit".  I'm not sure if I completely see the similarities, but maybe I'll let you be the judge. 

"Two weeks!" (If you don't know what that means, then you haven't seen the movie)

Breakdowns and Timbers

It has been quite the two weeks.  I apologize for not getting a blog post to you all sooner. 

I had a little bit of a breakdown last week.... 

Let me tell you the reason for my lapse in house pride.

The beginning of last week the electritians came over to start working.  My brother-in-law also came over to look at our bathroom and to give us his expert opionion on tile.  Little did we know they, along with our Uncle Steve who is doing the majority of the work on our house, were all conspiring against us.  Between the electrian, my brother in law, and Steve, they all decided that we were going to need to take down ALL the drywall in the rest of the house.  That meant the exterior walls and ceilings were all going to have to come down and the insallation along with it.  What?! I thought we were done with demolition, just last week we had been talking about picking out paint colors! We were supposed to be moving forward, not backward! That was my issue with it.  I was expecting to see things start coming together, not getting pulled apart.

What calmed me was our reasoning behind why we decided to do it.

We decided to go ahead and tear the rest of the drywall down because:

-We are doing A LOT of electrical work so opening things up would make things a lot easier/faster for the electrian.

-We found various wires chewed through by critters, so opening things up would help us have some peace of mind about the safety of the electricity in our house.

-The insulation that we could see looked like the same little critters were tunneling through the insulation and we were just worried that there were tons of nasties that we might be breathing in.  Gross!

-We had a lot of repair work to do with the drywall because of all the walls we had already taken down.  And the current walls were textured plaster.  So having to match the new drywall with the old stuff would have been very challenging.  And our drywaller told us it would probably be cheaper in the long run for us to hang all new.  Plus it would look sooo much nicer and be sooo much nicer to have all new drywall vs plaster.

I just kept going over and over those reasons in my head as I was getting blown-in-insulation all over me last week.  It WILL be worth it, it WILL be worth it.

And then, I learned something about myself.  When I feel like everything in the house is chaotic, I sweep. 

"Oh, I have to decide where I want all the electrical outlets?"  I sweep. 

"You need to know where and what kind of lights I want in each room?"  I sweep. 

"There is water dripping from the ceiling after the terential downpour?" I sweep.

"We had a bunch of shingles blow off the roof?"  I sweep. 

And that might have been another reason I was feeling so stressed last week.  That blown-in-insulation was everywhere!! And I didn't have time to sweep it up until the end of the week and it was just stressing me out!

But then I swept. 

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..................... Much better.   I've never been such a clean freak in my life but it just helps me feel like I have some control. 

Switching gears now, this happened too in the last couple weeks:



We had 3 of our trees cut down last week.  That was exciting! It was slightly unforturnate, however, because these trees were all a pretty good size and gave our house some nice shade.  However, that was their only redeeming feautre.  They are walnut trees.  

 

You may recall the waterfall of walnuts I encountered while tearing out the basement ceiling (see above).  Or the tons of walnuts found underneith the bathtub.  Or even the walnuts stashed in our fireplace.  Yeah... these trees are the culpret, or at lease accessories to the crime.  That must have been one ambitious little critter, he stashed them everywhere he could.  In the picture below, you can see he was storing them in the hallow center of this walnut tree. Bob, the Tree Guy, said that when the tree "timbered" there was a rush of walnuts from the bottom of the tree.

So we cut them down.  Many of you probably don't know the unfortunate truth about walnut trees.  I never did! But they are really terrible trees to have in your yard.  They are extremely messy with twigs and walnuts which is enough to drive you crazy.  But then we also found out that walnut trees are actually toxic to most other plants.  So that meant we would have a very difficult time landcaping around those trees.  So they had to go.  And go they did. 

Other things that happened in the last two weeks:

-We chose our front door

-We chose and ordered our bathroom fixtures

-The plummers started working

-Our 2nd dumpster was delivered (that's never a good sign)

-We chose the stain for our hardwood floors

-The electritians started installing can lights and outlets




Next week will be a pretty busy week so I hope to get something posted for you by the end of the week! We'll see!

And also, a quick shout out to our Nephew Max who turned the big 0-1 this week!

Fire!

Fire seems to be popping up as a common theme in this renovation.

You might remember when my dad got the blow torch out and set our carpet on fire day 2 of demolition

Good times...


Or, while examining our old furnace, our geothermal installer informed us he is surprised our house hadn't burned to the ground yet. Yikes! Good thing our old furnace is gone and we have our new system in place already.



Then on Saturday we started a fire... a big one!

If you haven't noticed there are huge overgrown bushes in front and behind our house.

....Or, rather, there were huge overgrown bushes in front and behind our house 

Unfortunately I missed the day my dad came over with the bobcat and pulled them out so I don't have any pictures of that process but here they are sitting on our burn pile ready to be burned. 

Along with ridding ourselves of just about the only landscaping our home came with, we also finished up tearing out the last remaining interior studs in the house and part of the kitchen and bathroom subfloor.

Then we placed all the wood scrap around the bushes on the burn pile.  Setting up the perfect conditions for one big fire.

It was ready to be burned...And I knew just the Eagle Scout to take care of it.

He was so funny.  As he was about at this point in the process, he turn around and looked at me, eyebrows raised, mischievous look on his face, and said "This is going to be fun."  It was less than 5 seconds later that we heard a fire truck ramp up their siren.  No kidding.  The comedic timing was perfect and we had a good laugh.

With no fire trucks showing up in our driveway, we let the flames rage on!



We had a pretty good time watching it burn but we had to step back pretty far because of the heat. In the video you can even see the trees around the fire smoking. But it's not like we care. Our yard is riddled with walnut trees, so we say, good reddens! 

  After going inside to grab something, I came back out and found Michael like this, enjoying his creation.

  A Man and his fire.  Its a very special thing.  

This week we are getting our new layout all framed up! This reno is going to start taking shape into the home we want it to be! Exciting! Oh and if you were curious which windows we chose, it was Anderson.  They had great ratings on Consumer Reports and it seemed that, based on a lot of online reviews we read, people were a lot happier with Anderson Windows vs. Pella.  I guess time will tell! 

Have a great week everybody!

And don't forget what our 'ol friend Smokey says...



Poppin Tags

Since we finished up demolition this week, I celebrated by shopping.  But before I get to that, I wanted to update you on how things are looking at the end of this week.

We finished tearing down walls on the first floor. Looking from kitchen through the bathroom and into the master bedroom.

And after a long day of demolition, I just couldn't wait for a shower! 

Now onto the shopping from this week.  If you know me at all, you probably know that I like a good shopping trip especially if it includes a good trip to a thrift shop...but we'll get to that.

This week I stopped at Wabash Electric to look at lighting - not purchase, just look.  I had a lot of people recommending Wabash Electric and I found exactly what I was looking for in the kitchen.  I'm thinking Copper. Which can be a difficult finish to find but the staff at Wabash Electric were so helpful in showing me my options! At first I considered something that was oil brushed bronze but I really like the idea of bringing copper in to warm up the white and black scheme that I have in our kitchen.  Also I like that copper has a "farmhouse" flair to it. Here's the ones I really like! Picture the wall light above the sink and two pendants over the island.  

And speaking of sinks... We also purchased this sink this week too:



And from sinks we moved to appliances.  Breath in, breath out...that was definitely an area that proved to be extra stressful to me.  Probably because the decision is so technical and less aesthetically based.  I had to leave it up to my Nerdy (consumer-reports-loving) husband to make the final decision.   I hope we made the right one!



Kenmore

Kenmore

LG

I also stopped by Home Depot and Lowes to check out faucets and lighting.  Nothing really stood out except......... on the way to Lowes, I saw the Habitat Restore.  I thought "what the hey, I'll stop and look around."  And boy am I glad I did.

If you have never been to a Habitat Restore, you may be missing out.  I say "may" because it depends on the type of person you are.  If you like Goodwill and you like home improvement stores, you will LOVE the Restore! I like to check out their lighting and their doors, and their fixtures, and their furniture, and their tile. So as I got back to the tile section, there it was: 2.5 boxes full of beautiful new white 3x6 subway tiles! Like the subway tiles I was planning on using in our kitchen and bathroom?  Oh yes.  Those would be the ones.  Something like this and this:

 And once I found out the price?.... I looked like this:



There were 100 tiles in each box and they were priced at 5cents a tile.  So did that mean each box was $5?! It sure did.  My only hesitation was... is there enough here?  Luckily, I called up my brother-in-law (our very own tile guru) and he helped me figure out approximately how much tile I would need.  And we also found the same tile for sale at Home Depot for $22 for a box of 100! Holla! That's a big savings ($5 vs $22)! So although we did not have enough tile to do the kitchen and the bathroom, I know I can get more at Home Depot! Woo hoo!

 I mean, there was really no coming down after a score like that.  I could barely contain myself and hold back from calling Michael and telling him about my big score! But I really wanted to surprise him, so I did.

I was so encouraged when I found the tile at the Restore.  At times, I get a little discouraged by how much things cost and how little I want to compromise on the quality vs the cost of things.  But it is purchases like this that remind me that patience and shopping around can make a world of difference!  

What's next you might ask?... And I would reply: Isn't that enough?! And of course it is not.  There are still sooooooo many things to think about and purchase.  Good thing I'm having the time of my life, huh?  Windows, we are going to make a decision this week on who we are going to go with for windows - It's the common rivalry of Pella vs. Anderson.  So if you have any opinions on the two, I'd love to hear about it!  We also will probably be deciding on siding soon as well.  Fun!

See you in about a week with another update!