Chuck vs. Halloween

 Keith surprised us this year when he decided to dress up for Halloween. I laughed and laughed. It is probably my favorite costume for him, EVER! I have a thing for Chuck Bertowski, because he's my kind of geek (ie. Keith). The only thing missing was his pocket protector--since I don't know where it is from the move. Yes, he has a pocket protector, but just one for special occasions.

If you've never seen Chuck (the television show), it is a lot of fun and is worth checking out. Chuck is a spy who works at the Buy More. The geeks at the Buy More are very reminiscent of guys Keith worked with at a computer store when we were first married and they really add to the authenticity of the Buy More for me and make me laugh. 

Needless to say, I enjoyed my very own Chuck vs. Halloween.

We Had Some Birthdays

Joe turned 4! He didn't want to, but now he's decided that 4 is his number. Thank goodness.

 We went to the cabin to celebrate. Joe was pretty excited about the cabin trip and his cake...

...until we sang "Happy Birthday" to him. I always seem to forget candles, so we improvised.

He sure loves his "Cabin Birthdays".

This has been a big year for Joe with a lot of changes that were a bit rough on him, including preschool. He is finally excited to go and enjoying himself.

Even though he is "Surrounded by girls!"

He has adjusted and is learning to put up with the girls-what a good thing he's learning. :)

Keifer turned 2!

We have all enjoyed watching Keifer grow this year. He almost looks like a little boy-but we still call him our baby. We love this little guy.

He keeps things interesting, for instance the Wheat thin packaging on the porch that I found one day. Then I found this happy little boy. THEN I saw him open the seat of his bike....

Ta DA! What a great storage place for crackers, until it rains, then its just GROSS! Especially if you add tomatoes on top of it. He's a funny little boy. The trick is to keep him from eating these things-which he does if someone doesn't catch him. I just have to say, what doesn't kill ya, makes ya stronger!

So, as Keifer got older and got a cold for his birthday, he learned how to do this:

Apparently it is really yummy--at least that is what he tells me.

Thankfully we distracted him with the cake-he's a pro at blowing out the candles.

This is much more appetizing than the previous picture. He loves his cake!  

Fall Foto Fun

 Heidi and I took our kids for a fun fall photo shoot. I was wanting pictures that captured my boys better than the school pictures do. The kids were more themselves than they usually are in front of a camera-Heidi has a way of making them forget about the camera, plus, my kids LOVE her and Cameron. When Keifer is around Heidi, I feel like the 2nd mom-he loves her that much. Then Cameron is like one of them, so they have great fun playing with him.

My favorite part is that I have a ton of pictures of my kids being my kids. That is a challenge to capture on camera.

This was too cute of Ellie and Keifer making faces.

Josh relaxing and having fun.

 

The whole crew goofing off.

He's certainly the baby-that face gets to me a lot-and he knows it.

I've seen this face before, pretty sure its hereditary :) I can hear him say, "Hmmm."

Trying to jump. 

Part of the Cameron fun.

We had a great time.

The Room Of Love (There really is an explanation-and its not what you think.)

Most of you know we've been redoing our bedroom for the last 6 months. We started by patching holes. Then we worked on fixing "little" inconsistencies in corners, which turned into wanting to change the texture of the ceiling and walls and Keith tried to fix the "seams" he could see in the sheetrock. Here is a picture gallery of the process:

Old Door (after I painted it)

Walls (after much patching)

Closet wall

Then there was the discovery of mold....

Lovely, huh? We're VERY grateful we found it.

This was the beginning of the demolition. If we had vent up anger, ripping out sheetrock surely helped ;)

There is a dark purple spot on the wall-that was paint choice #2. I love purple.

The closet wasn't very big, so we decided to make it larger. Which meant also moving the doorway.

So we lived like this for a while. (My new hallway closet is on the left and the new bedroom door meets up with the make-shift child block)

Ahhh, new sheetrock. We put anti-mold sheetrock on the bottom since there has been flooding in the basement. Thanks to Jeff for helping get the upper sheetrock up! I'm such a wimp. This was HOURS and HOURS of mudding and sanding-that led to the White Ghost (I can't repost the picture of that, or my marriage may be in jepardy ;) The kids liked helping, though (or pretending, anyway).

Here's my new closet. It has a larger opening and we added over 2 ft in length!!! Other than the door being moved, it didn't cut into the actual space of the room-how nice!

The dark purple was apparently a NO GO with the man of the house...so I taped up MANY options. And the winner is....

A faux brushed pearl finish in a color that I felt was a happy medium between purple and blue.

HAHAHA!

Keith really loved the look of the paint, but preferred the color you will soon see.

I spent a couple days getting the ceiling textured, which was pretty fun, priming and painting. Then Keith hung my new light.

It was starting to look REAL!! Then I added the base color.

And it was BLUE. It looked really cool, kind of like a really blue sky. I was scared-not quite what I was going for...the things you do for love ;)

Here's where the Room Of Love comes in. The brushed pearl finish starts with brushing the finish on in Xs and then you let it dry a little, use a plastic trowel to swirl the Xs into Os. I painted the Xs and Keith swirled the Os...Our room made with hugs and kisses! Yes, Keith thought it was very cheesy, too.

 

It looks way cool, I think and I was feeling a little better about the blue. After 2 coats of brushed pearl finish, which took approx. 5 hours to do (totally worth it, btw).

We put in all new outlets, covers and trim.

Keith also re-did the window seal, which was a bit nasty and uneven.

And then it was time to start on building the closet.

I'm now saving for carpet because everytime I turned around-Keith was cutting carpet (good thing we'd already planned on carpet replacement)

Almost there...

I could hardly wait to put clothes in. There was ROOM for them. I had so much fun later organizing my clothes into colors and etc. I even found a new outfit (not really new, but I was able to see some things that would go together!) Keith had no idea how much fun I'd have.  If you look hard you can see the cut carpet just to the left of the shelves. That is where the old closet was...not missing it.

I hung the curtains and blinds myself (I have to brag, because I used power tools and enjoyed it!)

Finished closet doors.

The furniture was my parents for years and I refinished them last year and I think they look GREAT in my new room.

AND we're DONE! Except for the wall decor-I had to see the room finished before I could move on to that. I'm loving the bedspread that Grandma Lila thought would look great in my room-it does!

It might not be purple, but its US and we LOVE it! Some people say remodeling is hard on a marriage, we actually found it fun to work together and enjoyed most of the process. Now on to the next room, YAY! Maybe we'll take a little breather first.