Caution: Work Zone

We were really busy last weekend. We have to finish the basement in order to make room for our new arrival. My office is currently in the third bedroom, and I really don't want to have to change poopy diapers in the middle of my desk!

So, we started the process of turning our cold, ugly concrete-walled basement into a warm, cozy family room/office. We started with this:

Our basement is a "look out," so we do have the benefit of two big windows.


See? Lots of cold, ugly concrete. And lots of stuff. The basement wasn't all that cluttered before, but it became a huge, overwhelming mess when we started moving stuff away from the walls.

So, this is what we spent all day Saturday & Sunday last weekend doing:

(That's my dad. He's our "site supervisor." Matt & I have no idea what we're doing. Luckily, my dad has done lots of building projects, so he's teaching us how to handle all of this!)

Even Ty got into the act. Although he's still too small to use most of the tools, he helped us out by painting a mural on the concrete wall. Unfortunately, his beautiful artwork will be covered up by a wall and gas fireplace, but we documented the whole thing in pictures!

Look at the concentration! He's our little Van Gogh (except that Ty still has both of his ears!)

After two days of hard work, we had this:

We ended up framing out 5 complete walls (three external & 2 internal). We still have about 6 more walls to construct... and we'll probably get to working on those next weekend. This weekend we are drilling holes for wiring, installing outlet boxes, and rearranging some of the stuff so that we can get to the next couple of walls.

Oh, and this came yesterday:

I bought some yarn to dye. It will be gifted to some of my local knitterly friends. The green skein is one of two that will go to a dear friend who has an unfortunate wool allergy. Unfortunately, my doctor has prohibited me from using the acid dyes I have in the stash box... he is concerned about fumes and the baby. So, I'm limited to using KoolAid this time.

I bought about 30 packets of KoolAid yesterday afternoon. Since the weather people were predicting 3-4 inches of snow by this morning, the grocery store was packed. I thought I would be clever and avoid waiting in a long check out line by using the self-check. The glitch? The stupid thing doesn't let you put in quantities of identical items. You have to scan each individual item... and it won't let you scan one until the machine has detected that the one scanned before it has been placed in the bag. I had to scan 30 packets of KoolAid, a turkey baster and pack of rubber gloves... one at a time. At about 6 seconds for each individual item, I'm not sure I ended up saving any time at all.

Oh well, live and learn.