Where have I been?

If you wondering at our absence lately, from blogging and social circulation, wonder no more!

We are simply trapped in our house.

Here is Matt trying to work on a project - doesn't it look like an ideal workspace?

Now, before you call the show Hoarders, let us explain.

Also, you can put away your kleenexes as we are not moving.

The explanation for this chaos is some foundation work that had to be done INSIDE OUR HOME. We had approximately 9 huge holes dug under our slab foundation so we had to basically pack and move our three bedrooms and half of the living room into the kitchen area.

It has been lovely.

And, we had to have all the floors removed.

This is our hall.

This is our hall with a man's head poking through.

They jack-hammered to break the concrete; then they used shovels to dig the holes. We had wheelbarrows going out of our house to the front yard where they dumped the dirt.

It was LOUD when they were using the jack-hammer!

I had planned to be gone with the kids this day, but they were over an hour early.

We were all in the kitchen, in our pjs, finding an empty place amidst the boxes to eat our oatmeal, when they came driving up.

We couldn't get dressed fast enough!

They were covering up closets, etc, with tarp even when we still needed simple things like clothes from them ....

A sight I never imagined.

You can see three holes in this picture.

The generalization of the work is that we needed to lift the mid-interior of our home.

Our front had been raised years ago, by a previous owner. So, the front of the house is much higher than the middle. The back soil of our house is heavy in water, so the back of our house is higher than the middle. With the back and front elevated, and with the weight of the fireplace, the middle of our house was sinking.

There were gaps between our baseboards and floors where you could put your fist, and there were gaps at the wall/roof joints where you could put a fist.

Here is our yard with all the dirt outside.

Believe it or not, the foundation work was a one day job.

Getting ready for the foundation work and recovering from it HAS NOT been a one day or easy job.

And it's been dusty. With all the tiredness and dust, our allergies were suffering greatly.

Here we are putting our house back together.

To save money, Matt and I had pulled up the laminate ourselves and planned to put it back down. There was some water damage in the hall and by the back door, so before we pulled up the laminate we had walked around with a blue sharpie to label the bad pieces. This way we hoped that no warped pieces would get put back done in the living room. To make up for the pieces we lost, we used the laminate that had been in our bedroom, and we planned to go ahead and carpet the back bedroom since we were carpeting the hall and two kid's rooms.

We're in a fight for health, and we thought new carpet might help with allergies. Now that I see how great the carpet looks, I wish we'd done it sooner.

But, now that I think about it the timing is perfect since it is just in the last few months that Evie is fully potty-trained.

The green stuff is moisture barrier between the concrete and laminate.

One Saturday Matt and I lined up all the laminate by size.

Putting the floor together was like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

We actually had fun working together and completing a project.

Very fulfilling.

Cleaning our butcher top counters so Matt could treat them.

Sunflower seedlings

Our hall-bathroom was a workstation while they laid carpet.

Just in case you forgot, this was our only living space for days.

Oh wait, I forgot that the kids found a way to live in the living room, too! Here is Evie enjoying the trail made by our king-size bed that was in the living room.

Our front door. I'm sure the mail carrier thought we were moving.

Here is Simon watching who-knows-what on netflix. There were a couple of survivor-mode days. Especially the days I was also trying to unpack the boxes enough to pack for an unplanned road trip. (As my grandmother passed away ... but that deserves its own post in the future)

Notice Evie crawling THROUGH the entertainment center to watch the movie.

We escaped at one point to my mom's for a couple of days.

My dad had gone to South Carolina to be with his mom after her stroke, so the kids and I kept mom company. Here are some French Pastry Puffs that I made one day for breakfast.

Sitting outside watching fireworks on the 4th of July.

My sweet Simon.

The other day I told him to wash his hands before dinner, because all kings and princes would want their hands clean to rule their kingdom. (Evie responds well to the reminder that all princesses keep their hands clean.)

And here is Simon's response, when we tried our castle-charm on him,

"Mom, I don't want to be a king. I just want to be one of the poor, normal people that live outside the castle. So, I don't need to wash my hands."

Evie, clapping as we bowled one day.

Yes, Evie's bowling shoes might be the cutest things you've ever seen.

Simon's room with new carpet.

Yay!

I'm sooooo thankful.

And I'm so thankful for walls and floors that meet.

We'll have more pictures once we finish redecorating and hanging pictures.

We are going for an army-theme and old-school charm.

He has an antique school desk, lockers, military chest, camoflauge sheets, and a basic bed.

The bed we bought him could also be a bunkbed. But, we realized that with our mattresses he would have very little head clearance, so we just assembled it as a twin instead.

So, we have an extra twin bed in our garage if someone is in need of one.

Evie in her new bed!

Only $119 on Craigslist - and it is a honey pine, with trundle, from Pottery Barn.

She loves climbing up into it.

Simon smiling and overjoyed to have a room again.

The kids have been sharing a room since Thanksgiving, and overall have really loved it and have been very flexible. But, we are ready for Simon to have his own space as he goes into first grade. He has been tolerant of Evie, and tolerancy was quite needed!

And, this is what the kitchen still looked like!

My mission this last week has been to slowly unpack this.