Home Improvement Blather, etc.

It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff we have around here that we can simply throw away when the urge hits us.

The other day my husband got a hankerin' to start overhauling our downstairs. Half of our downstairs used to be a garage, and was then converted into a family room. Once we moved here we discovered extensive problems with water getting into that room, so we ended up having to take out the carpet and most of the drywall, get an All-Dry system installed, seal up cracks in the floor, and so on. So now where we are at in the process is a partially-finished (or would that be partially-unfinished?) family room. We use it, it's just waiting for the drywall to be sanded and painted, and some other fun little details like that.

In the course of putting the place back together, my husband decided to make a quarter of the family room into a separate room for a "workshop." As is typical for us, small and rarely used rooms end up being a graveyard of junk that expands and multiplies until we can barely open or close the door. So, time to hoe it out!

He filled 2 super duper big lawn-and-leaf type garbage bags full of junk to throw away. We also decided to give away the old, charmless piano that I bought from somebody for $25 a few years ago, thinking that the children would like to learn to play. Instead it is the ugliest entertainment system ever, with the TV, VCR, DVD player, and a wide assortment of DVDs, CDROMs, videotapes, and PS2 games and cases strewn all over it. Nobody wanted to play piano, and all I can do is a few variations of Heart and Soul, which while impressive to my children and fun for me, isn't really a good enough reason to keep the monster piano around. Oh, I almost forgot. I can also play Chopsticks, Knuckles, and "I dropped my dolly in the dirt" which I learned from a friend when I was about 7 or so.

My husband started getting inspired about how we should do thus-and-so home improvement projects, since he could now see some more surfaces. You know how inspired we all get when we can see past the clutter, right? Well, I told him that I would love to do his projects, but that I thought we should finish up the projects we have started already and have the supplies for. Huh? Huh? What a strange idea. *Finish* something before you start some else? Weird.

:)

So we walked around saying things like "Well, what we need here is _______" and me saying things like, "My original vision for this room was ______." My favorite one of these was when my husband and I walked into our front closet and he said, "See, we aren't using the space in here wisely. We need some more shelves in here." And then I looked at what was on the shelves and counted 20 cans of paint! "Know what honey? If we finished our projects and got through with this paint, we'd gain a lot of storage space right there!" Amazing! I love it when I'm right.

So now that we were thoroughly inspired, he had to go work for 48 hours straight, and I started reading Outlander. So, no major improvements happening around here right now. 'Cept in my head.

Other than that, GetupGrrl of Chez Miscarriage is apparently off with her gestational surrogate having their baby today. I have been running to the update blog all day waiting for the outcome.....