I'm back after taking a little break!

I have been extremely busy with organizing and cleaning and just getting things into the summer mode around our home. We have completed some home remodeling projects and I can finally put things away and organize. And I like nothing better than to organize! (Truly!) We’ve been washing and scrubbing and dusting out cobwebs…I’ve washed blankets and rugs and am getting our home into the “summer mode”. I’ve put most of our school books away and organized the bookshelves and art closet. It feels good to get all of this out of the way…now if only it would stay organized and clean for longer than a week or two!

This little quote by Phyllis Diller is soo true:

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”

So, as always, it’s a challenge. But we keep plugging along!

*********

One of my many projects was to deep-clean the little children’s bedrooms. That meant moving all furniture, cleaning closets, dresser drawers, dusting off and scrubbing clean all nooks & crannies. (The dust behind the beds & dressers was very thick!!) It’s always amazing to me how these young children can collect things & stuff…which, in reality, often consists of old papers, broken toy pieces, items found in an older siblings garbage can, candy wrappers, peanut shells, broken Barbie legs…and on & on the list goes.

I moved the bed in the little girls bedroom to find this surprise awaiting me…(the stuff filled a whole laundry basket, most of which ended up in the garbage!)

*********

Another accomplishment is that we (mostly Wayne) has nearly finished a recent remodel project. We have been blessed with a large home (6 bedrooms, 3200 or so sq. feet) but since the older kids have begun moving out, we really don’t need so many bedrooms. So we made the decision to rip the walls out of Shasta’s former bedroom, extending the room into the adjoining schoolroom-playroom…and it has now been made into a very large space (and bright & sunny space, too!) for the kids to play in and do some of our schooling in (or at least have all our school supplies in one area as opposed to all over the house!) Wayne put together a whole wall of bookshelves for us on one end of the new room, and he built a wonderful computer desk, with more shelving & a filing cabinet, for us at the other end of the room. Within the room there is also a place for our school table, the kids’ air-hockey table, a workbench for Colter, and many of the toys. We have made Shasta’s old walk-in closet into an art supply and school supply closet…so everything is in one place! Ahhh, so nice…we’ve homeschooled for nearly 20 years, and finally, finally I feel like everything is organized nicely! This new large room is connected with our family room, so we can still be cozy on the couch while we read books, or the kids can watch a video and still be within ear and eye shot of the rest of us. (This is all just going to be so handy...I’m almost excited to begin schooling next fall!!) The room, however, isn’t completely finished yet…we still have the flooring to put in and trim work as well as a few other smaller projects…but the biggest chunk has been done, and I am very grateful to have that much done…the rest will come in time.

Here are the bookshelves: (and a close-up of the new trim boards around each shelf unit.)

(This isn't the greatest photo...I was still in the midst of organizing and placing books on the shelf when I took this photo.)

Our goal had been to make the bookshelves look “built-in”--- but they are actually 5 single standing units. Over the years, as we needed more shelf space for books, we bought a single bookshelf here and there, till we eventually had several of them scattered about in various rooms. Since we already had so many single standing shelf units, and we try to be thrifty in our spending habits, we came up with a plan to put 5 of our shelf units together and add trim boards around each shelf unit so that they would, hopefully, have more of a “built-in” look. (Well, I suppose they are rather “built-in” now, since it would be impossible to move just one shelf by itself anymore…but what I’m trying to say is that they started out as plain-jane, individual shelf units that we "fixed" up.)

*********

And, so, that's what I've been up to...besides the usual taking-care-of-the-family stuff.