Coyotes, Couches and an Opossum

For Thanksgiving we visited the Brewer family who hospitably invited us to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. We had a fantastic time! In fact I was having such a great time I didn’t take very many photos for more photos from Thanksgiving go to the Brewer Farm Blog.

We saw some coyotes during breakfast and Benjamin took a shot at three of them.

He hit one of them because he saw it jump when he fired, but when we looked for the coyote we couldn’t find him.

It was a three and a half hour drive to our house the Brewer’s place.  It’s been 3 months since I have driven but I drove 80 miles of the way. The highway was so straight and flat it was very easy.  When we got home we saw that the supplies for the floor had already been delivered. Everything is ready for the installers arrival on Monday: tile, mortar, grout and sealant.

We have our work cut out for us this weekend. We have to get the living room, kitchen, hallway bathroom, laundry room/pantry and hallway completely empty. We also have to replace the sub floor in the bathroom.

Hallway Bathroom

 

The stove has been moved to the garage!

 

Moving the washer

 

We borrowed an appliance dolly which made it pretty easy to move the appliances

 

Noah filling in some holes in the wall with drywall mud

He wasn’t patching this hole!

Behind two of the showers

 

Moving the refrigerator was quite a task that required all 5 of us.

 

 

It wouldn’t fit through the front door without taking it off. It was a pretty tight fit and we had to be careful so that we didn’t scrape paint off of the refrigerator.

So after moving the stove, washer, dryer and the refrigerator all that we had left was the sleeper sofa.  Moving the couch was a breeze. Tomorrow we’ll have to move everything else that didn’t get moved last night which is mainly comprised of a lot of little things that we haven’t used in a long time and don’t know what to do with !  Some friends will be coming over to help us move the piano and the bookcases to our bedrooms.

Tonight Noah found an opossum in the barn and Benjamin shot it:

We’ve got a full day ahead of us tomorrow!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wow! What a week! It feels like we’re living in a disaster zone, but thankfully we all have our bedrooms to retreat to.

Ronda has been painting every day this week and put on a second coat tonight.  We’re going for a yellow/gold color since we’re going for a modern-Tuscan style for the living room and kitchen. It took a little while to nail down the color Mom wanted, but we finally got it and it’s been placed up on the walls in a hurry.

Benjamin has gone hunting a couple of days now, but hasn’t seen anything-rumor has it that he’ll be heading to southern Missouri to take part in the antlerless deer season they have down there.

Noah’s been working very hard and stripped off the paint in Benjamin’s bathroom (not really HIS bathroom, but since he has the master bedroom the bathroom adjoins that room.) He also tightened down a few squeaks in the plywood floor by driving in some screws.

Today he tackled the hallway bathroom and pulled out the toilet and sink. The plywood under the toilet was somewhat rotten from water damage, so we’ll have to replace it.

Noah busted out a hole in the floor and then cut out the edge near the joists with a reciprocating saw.

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The materials for the flooring (i.e. mortar, grout, concrete board) will be delivered here on Friday on a pallet. It can’t be frozen, but we don’t have any place they can put it where it’s heated so hopefully the temp will stay above 32 over the weekend. On Friday and Saturday we’ll be moving everything out of the living room and kitchen and we’ll also have to move out all of the appliances. Not sure how the next week will be without being able to cook anything…

The installers will be here Monday, but because they have to wait for the material to dry and setup, it’ll take them 6 business days. They’re going to be putting flooring all of the way down the hallway, so I guess Ben & I won’t be able to get to our rooms. Noah can in to his from the window.

New Blog Design

We’ve been meaning to create a new header for this blog for quite some time now and today it finally happened. We actually ended up making the website fresh with a different color scheme.

Back at Home

We had spent the night at a hotel in Centerville, TN. After going to church we started the 5 hour drive back home. There wasn’t any other incident and we arrived home safely at 9pm.

We’ve been in the middle of renovating the house since late September and the house was under going some changes while we had been gone.

Our friend and professional painter, Ronda, was painting while we were gone so the house looked way different when we got home.

My grandma and her husband had also worked hard while we were gone. They had ripped up all of the vinyl flooring and the underlayment in the kitchen. They’d also moved out the cabinets, disconnected the hallway washroom’s sink, patched a crack in the ceiling, finished drywalling the door downstairs and had also blown off and burned the leaves in the front yard. Knowing that all of this work wasn’t waiting for us made it a lot easier to leave the ocean .

The living room is absolutely full of bookcases, furniture and boxes-and it’s all in the middle of the room so Ronda can get to the walls.

The kitchen has a lot of stuff in it as well-the kitchen table is completely covered and the floor has been stripped down to the plywood.

The hallway bath was stripped of everything on the walls and the vinyl’s been pulled out. The toilet is still hooked up, but the sink doesn’t work.

The bathroom in Benjamin’s room was gutted by Ben and Noah before we left. So, we’re all sharing the shower and sink downstairs and we’ll have to rip out the toilet in the hallway bathroom as well.

It seems a little bit overwhelming to come home to, but it is good to see things getting accomplished.

Heading Home

Well today our faces will be headed North as we begin our first day of the drive to home.

Before noon we had the van and trailer loaded and had made sure none of our things had been left behind. Ben and Noah fed the seagulls our old bread:

I was holding Lydia while I was taking pictures and a seagull ran right into her!

Noah made friends with a neighbor just a few doors down…Miss Peggy.

On our way out of town we stopped by what we call, “The US’s smallest Post Office.”

Kate read from “Of Plymouth Plantation” in preparation for Thanksgiving. The road noise was pretty loud so I rigged up a headset that plugged into the van’s sound system.

The sun went down and we were driving on an Alabama highway at 70mph when the car behind of us started flashing their bright headlights. The trailer’s gate was on the ground! Mom pulled over unto the shoulder. We figured that the boxes on the back of the trailer had fallen out the back and our stuff was scattered all along the highway. However, when we checked everything was still there-the bungee cords were just a little bit old and had stretched out from the force of the wind on the gate. We secured the gate and slowly drove a few miles to an exit with a gas station where we could buy some fresh cords. Interestingly enough the town was called Good Hope.

We ate dinner in Columbia, Tennessee and then slept at a hotel in Centerville.

Our Last Day

Well, today is our last day in Florida and we will be leaving to go back home tomorrow. We did a family photo shoot while we watched the last Florida sunset we’ll see in a while.

 

My Mom and I played around in Photoshop with one of the skim boarding photos.

We drove to Pier Park to eat dinner and to do some shopping.

Before we left Florida Noah and Benjamin rode on a Ferris wheel for the first time.

We packed a few things up in preparation for the long drive we’ll have tomorrow.