Hair Cuts!

We all got hair cuts today and thought we'd share them with you. Granted, Lexi and I don't have our hair properly styled, so you can't really see what it's suppose to look like, but this is how short we went. I cut the boys hair and then took the girls to the salon. I'm not brave enough to cut girls' hair yet. The stylist thought it was funny that we all chose short cuts.

We also got fish today. We are hoping to grow them a bit bigger and then put them in our pond. We hope they will help clean it up a bit.

More updates

We had some slightly bad news a couple days ago. We found out that not only does the work we recieved the loan money for have to be finished before Aug. 5th, but so does ALL the other work we started. So we have a lot to accomplish before then, while Charlie plugs away at his first masters program class. Needless to say, we won't be having any kind of vacations until the all the work we've started is finished. So we hope there will be some time left in August to do some vacationing. Charlie has been working very hard though, so we can make our deadline and has made some more progress towards the end results. I thought I'd share them with you guys.

Charlie has set the cupboards and they are screwed to the walls. They are ready for countertops now. We've decided to go with the full slab granite countertops because they will save us time. So the following pictures are of the kitchen as it is and the two examples of the types of countertops we like. I know the pictures are hard to see, but I was wondering if any of you had any opinion about which one to choose. But you better hurry because we are going to order tomorrow.





The next pictures are of the opening that was between the dining room and the family room. Charlie has put in french doors there and walled in the rest of the opening because it was too big for the doors. Only one side of the door is up right now because Charlie is finalizing the door sill for it. He had to custome build it because the opening was just so odd. I think he did a great job. I really like the touch the doors add. I will lighten up the stain on them though when I get the chance. Lucky for us, Bishop Pangerl gave these doors to us. He had them sitting around and wanted to get rid of them. He also gave us a door for our front door. We just have to take it some where to have them hang it on a frame. It's a really pretty door and I can't wait to have it up.

Finally, I don't know if you remember what the upstairs bathroom looked like from my previous post, but if not, here it is again. Charlie put the floor in over the last two days and it's all ready to grout now. We're pretty excited about that because when the floor is finished we'll be able to put the toilet and sink in and make sure the plumbing works. When it works we can put the ceiling in the kitchen back together and finish putting up the cabinets on the walls. It's kind of a chain-reaction job.

Happy Birthday Jana

I wish I could do cute little pictures on this like the rest of you do, but words will have to do. Twenty Seven years ago today I gave birth to my smallest baby (6 pounds and 10 ounces). We called her Jana after a niece of LaRee's ( I always liked her name). When I went into labor with her in Ogden, Dad was in Twin Falls and had to drive the three hours to get there before she was born. Trish stayed with me until he got there. She stayed for the birth too, which freaked her out! She didn't like seeing that much blood. But everything went well and we were blessed with a cute little baby, just like she was a couple of weeks ago.

We enjoyed being with Jana's family last week, holding the baby and playing with Addie. Macie is a very good baby, just eats and sleeps, mostly. We are also grateful for the Northgraves, who ended up taking us all into their house since the Hair's power was out for 4 days. Here's a household hint; if your power goes out for a long time, clean out your frig before everything starts to smell!

House updates

I know I've been promising pictures for forever, so I thought I should actually post some. Here are the major things we've done so far. If I posted pictures of everything it would take too long.

This is the bathroom upstairs. I know the first picture actually looks nicer, but that is the before picture. We took out the window and have walled over it. Our contractor put in a tube light in the ceiling so we could still have natural light in that room. It is awesome. We are thinking about putting one in the hallway upstairs too because it just adds so much light. We weren't going to re-do the flooring. There were some tiles that Charlie had to take out in order to get the toilet out. Who ever did the floor tiled around the toilet instead of underneath it (like you are suppose to). We were just going to fix the tiling around the toilet, but Charlie found some mold. We were going to just take up the part of the floor that was molded, but the farther Charlie took it up, the more he found so he just took the whole floor up. He found that the floor had actually been built up from the original floor. We thought that was weird. So he now has to re-build it up and then re-tile. It became a way bigger project than we originally planned.

This is Jaxson's room. I know the before picture is hard to see. There was no electric when I took that picture. We took the ceiling and the walls down in this room and have re-drywalled. With the walls, the make-shift closet came down too. We will build a new closet. His room is almost done.

We put our room in the family room and have the family room in what was the master bedroom. Because of that, we had no door to our room. Charlie put that up on Saturday. We didn't have drywall to finish off the wall next to the door, thus the curtain. He plans to finish it up today. It will be nice to have a door that locks.

This is the kitchen. We gutted this room and just started over. I really like the way it's turning out. We don't have counter tops yet, and there is still a hole in the ceiling. We had some leaking issues from the tub in the upstairs bathroom and had to take down part of the ceiling in the kitchen to find the problem. We figured we should keep it down because the sink and toilet aren't back in the upstairs bathroom yet. We want to make sure those work O.K. before we put the kitchen ceiling back together. It's a work in progress, but at least all the parts function. I'm so thankful for a stove and dishwasher that work. We are pretty sure we know what counter top we want to go with, but that probably won't happen until the bathrooms are complete.

Long time no read...

I feel so out of the loop. I get busy for a week, can't get onto the blog and miss tons of postings. Sorry about my absence. I've been busy planning for Makayla's baptism and birthday party. They both went very well. The party went better than I expected and a lot of it had to do with all the help I recieved from my loving parents and Kurt and Heather. Thanks, again, you guys, for all the help you gave us yesterday. Things went so much more smoothly because of you!

Now since I haven't been on the blog for a while I thought I'd post some pictures of some things that have been going on.

This is Lexi's science fair project. Her hypothesis was that the longer the barrel of a marshmallow gun, the farther the marshmallow would fly. She actually found that her second longest barrel, not her longest, shot the marshmallow farthest.

This is Merrit at Ecology camp trying to start a fire using flint stones and natural fiber. It took a long time, but, with persistance, he finally got it. He was so excited! He had such a great time at ecology camp. This is one aspect of the kids' school I will miss when they start going to Flushing schools. This camp is just awesome!

These are some of the kids at the annual school fundraiser their school does. This year they put on a school carnival. They had parents or other relatives sponsor different games or booths. One family brought in the horses from their family farm for the pony rides and one sponsored the moon walks (these were Jaxson's favorite). It turned out to be a really fun night and the school raised about $2500 profit. That was pretty good for them and next year they will have all the games made up so they will make even more money without that upfront expense. I'll miss this part of their school too.

We put in a garden this year (even though we don't actually have anything in it yet) and we had to cut out the sod in order to do it. We rented a sod cutter from Home Depot (our home away from home) and Charlie cut up the sod. Then he rolled it up into these rolls. I thought they looked like giant snow balls and so challenged the kids to make a "sod" man. They took me up on it and this is what he looked like. I hope you can see the details in his face. It was hard work to make him. Those rolls are soooo heavy!

This is Makayla just before she was baptized. She actually invited several kids from her class at school and four of them came, although only two made it to her actual baptism. She was so excited to share it with them though. She is such a sweet spirit and good example of a missionary for me.

Makayla is really into Pokemon right now (go figure) and so she wanted to have a Pokemon themed party. This was the first activity we did. All the kids made Pikachu hats to disguise themselves as Pokemon so they could go and find Pokemon (cards) that were scattered throughout the room to capture. They seemed to enjoy it.

And now I'll toot my own horn and show you the blanket I made for Makayla for her baptism. I made one for Lexi and partially made one for Merrit too. It's become kind of a tradition for us that I hope I can continue better from now on. I still have a couple more squares to iron on to Merrits and then tie it to the back and then bind it and Makayla's and I'll be caught up (probably just in time for Chelsea's).

Sorry for the length of this post but I'm glad that I'm pretty much caught up now.

Here she is!

I'm sorry for those of you who don't like her name, but here are pictures of our precious little Macie! (Yes, after much discussion, we changed the spelling to Macie because Macy just looked too short and dismal with the last name Hair...unfortunately.)