Working our Booties Off

Officially, no one in my family has a behind.  I have worked my family to a flat bottomed state. 

The guys finished the roof at 12:00 today (Sunday).  It was truly a 4 day hard working project.  And that includes the air pressure nail gun (or whatever you call it!).  They worked hard and it looks fantastic!  They even replaced a lot of trim and siding that had rotted out. 

Mom and Lisa were amazingly productive.  Mom stained all our deck furniture and finished the wine rack--which looks like a professional, commissioned piece of furniture.  Now the wine closet is finished.  It looks really good!

Lisa washed all the outside windows and finished the ring around the tree with our rocks from BlueMax Materials.  It looks really good--not too big of a wall, but definitely it sets that plant bed apart from the yard. 

Saturday was a rough day for Mom and Lisa.  They spent a good deal of time prepping the old master bedroom.  There were a lot of paint bubbles that needed to be scraped off.  And a few holes from pictures to be spackled.  And a huge crack under one window requiring massive amounts of spackle over several days.  But the real problem was the caulking around the baseboard.  Apparently, this room wasn't built with the same quality as the rest of the house, and there are some serious gaps between the wall and the baseboard.  To fix this, someone earlier had deposited a massive amount of caulking in these gaps.  The problem is that they then painted the caulking the same color as the room (layered from most recent to oldest:  spiced cider apple, then red, then pink, then sea foam) which when it cracked, made a huge line around the bottom of the baseboard. There's a problem with the top trim, too, but it's not nearly as bad.  We removed all the old caulking and sanded down to the original baseboard wood and are trying to figure out what to do next.  At this point, we're leaning toward painting the caulk the same color as the trim/baseboard so that when the gap occurs, it's a gap on white and not a gap on blue (the new room color). 

So what about my projects?  Was I a complete slack dog??  Well, I worked on finishing the trenching and spreading pine needles on Friday. I was feeling really, really pooped again on Friday night and spent Saturday as the gopher and working a bit on the room.  To be honest, things got a bit hairy Saturday night.  I started having a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions and some mild cramps.  We checked out the books and what I'm having would be more common for someone who has had several children and not her first.  This morning, I've found that if I'm up and about, the B-H's start again, and I'm still having mild cramps.  It's not as bad as it was last night, but it's worrisome. YES,  I did call the doctor.  It was amazing in that 3 minutes later the doctor on call returned my call, and said that it seemed like a good thing that the pains/contractions weren't progressing.  He said he thought it was related to the work/projects and to "back off" today and take it easy.  I've got my legs up and am using my lap top on my lap.  Since I've been typing this, cramps are coming and going, but absolutely no Braxton Hicks contractions.  And Bun is moving and kicking with vigor.  I'm also wondering if some of what I'm feeling as "cramps" is actually some round ligament pain from the weekend's work.  If I poke myself above my pubis symphysis, it is tender...which doesn't seem like a "cramp", right?  That should be more internal.  But what do I know?  It's my first time doing this. 

So now it's back to the real world, or at least back to school.  Dave is going to be POOPED this week!

And our advice for remodeling comes directly from Lisa:  Take your best estimate of how long you think the project is going to take and multiply it by pi.  It was certainly accurate for us!

2:46:07 PM