Alabama Ingenuity!

If you’re going to take on a fixer-upper you definitely want to be married to a man who was raised by Winston County people. (Google “Free State of Winston”). My man can get it done. Both of us had attempted to sand down the wood plank ceiling in the living room. Each time we created a dust storm to rival those in the desert. We had masks and goggles, but we knew creating that much air pollution wasn’t a great idea. We tried blowing it out the window with a big fan. That worked ok, still not the best solution.

God has allowed us to leap every hurdle so far – why not a dust cloud in the living room? Eric fixed us right up. With some tubing from Lowe’s, the electrical tape, and our shop vac, guess what? No dust storm!! You gotta love Alabama Ingenuity!

Mavinee was back this weekend with her usual awesome help! She finished painting our outdoor table – this set looks brand new now!

It’s been awhile since I stripped paint off a door! I know our dear readers have been missing these pictures! Here’s yet another door that we are working on – with the same 14 layers of paint. It was approximately 4000 degrees outside yesterday so we all pitched in on this one to try to shorten the work time outside. Wishing for those Spring temps again!

Our FBC choir did a bang up job on this song Sunday…

          Oh, the land of cloudless day
          Oh, the land of an unclouded sky
          Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise
          Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day

and then I got this view yesterday afternoon. Thank you, God, for our many blessings! Thank you for the unclouded days we get here in this life and the endless unclouded days we can look forward to!

The 5th Room!

Since Spring Break, back in March, we’ve been working toward our goal to renovate four rooms before we bring in the professionals: the living room, the dining room, the front bedroom, and the dog trot. This weekend we found our 5th room: the front bedroom closet! This one little closet has required so much time, effort, and detail work that we decided it deserved it’s own designation in this renovation. If you come to Casablanca to see what we’ve done in person, don’t be surprised if this closet is on the tour. This little 26″ x 62″ room has our blood, sweat and tears in it – maybe even our Earth, Wind & Fire!

And you know it’s been a full and productive weekend when your Mom emails on Monday morning to see if you’re ok. Thanks for making sure we’re still making it, Sammie Jo!

I can’t wait to show you these before and after shots of this closet. How ’bout these apples…

New light and pull – the little details are fun:

To the left:

To the right:

It’s just so pretty!

But that’s not all, folks – check out this floor!

Even though it felt like we were living in this closet over the weekend, Eric did find time to pull out the living room carpet so we could get our first peek at the 164-year-old heart-pine hardwoods underneath. SO excited about this!

Just a few closing pics of my hard-workin’ man…

… and the gorgeous butterfly who came to visit my fake solar light butterflies! The pic doesn’t do it justice – this one was as big as my hand!

Thank you for keeping up with us, Friends! More soon!

 

Flat Tires and Rock & Roll

Friends, as you know, our weekends are almost exclusively dedicated to Casablanca. Even when we’ve had other fun things going on, we’ll usually work at the house before and/or after. This past weekend, God knew we needed some fun, some rest and some rock & roll!

Eric got an invitation to go see Journey and Asia at Oak Mountain Amp. with Bryan. Fun!

While they were hanging with a few thousand of their closest friends, I got to go to Prattville and see the Harmony 2017 reunion concert! This was a total blast from the past. Going to hear Eddie Wohlford play was on my short list of fun things to do back in the day. Such a fun night with the Wohlford-Pass clan.

 

After our rock & roll Saturday night, Eric went out Sunday morning to head to church in our work truck and found something that looked like this: (not our real truck).

Turns out we needed TWO new tires. We decided the Lord was asking us to take a break Sunday afternoon. And a nap. Definitely a nap.

However, earlier on Saturday, we did actually do some work. In particular, we’ve started working on a closet in the front bedroom. This closet has always scared me. The pics don’t do it justice. It’s dark and scary. This cedar has died somewhere along the way. We are treating the walls and covering them. “After” pics to come!

Here’s Eric squeezing in to work the top part of the closet. Bless.

Hopefully, this weekend we will fully attack our fourth and final room. This one is going to be a booger, but at this point, we are completely undaunted by anything it can throw at us. Bring it, living room!

We’ve been debating colors for this room. I believe the one of the left has won out. It’s called Krypton. How fun is that??

Maybe we’ll have some more before-and-almost-after pics from this coming weekend! Keep us in your prayers! 🙂

The Fourths!

When Eric and I began our part of this renovation process, we wanted to get four rooms completed by the time school starts back for me in August. We just started working on the FOURTH room!! Of course, this won’t be the end to our work – truly, this is still just the beginning – but we are doing great on our schedule!

The fourth room is our living room. Eric and Ryan pulled down the sheet rock on the ceiling recently and exposed these amazing heart pine wood planks.

Each of these 15′ boards are one piece! And they are so dirty. Ugh. But Eric started sanding these recently and I think it’s going to turn out great. We hope to be able to stain these boards instead of painting them.

The other fourth is the one we get to celebrate in July! Coaling does a sweet job at fireworks and their show was Saturday night. Mother Nature, however, was not being helpful and our fireworks party got moved inside with all the saw dust.

We started out well – great help with decorations and grilling from Mavinee and Michael!

But then the bottom fell out. We threw everything inside and kept the party going. The dog trot, by the way, is a great place for a corn hole competition!

For the real 4th of July celebration, I got to be reminded – once again – that I have the best friends! Lynne and I spent the afternoon at Casablanca painting and chatting. Thankfully, Eric and I are never 100% left to our own devices – this thing is taking a village, and our village is full of the best people!