Before and After

Remember? This is what our basement room used to look like.

Dark, crappy, cold (but you wouldn't be able to tell by what the kids wear.)

This is where Jake first started tearing out the old gas fireplace.


Then.... 3 weeks of hard labor and little sleep turned into THIS!

Here's a closer view of the ceiling and lighting.

Now we have a warm, cozy, comfy place to hang out.

Today was my second day of work as a jeweler's apprentice. I like the idea of being an apprentice - I get paid to learn. My boss (master?) is very trusting in my abilities. I have 4 jobs that I am working on right now. One is to make a pair of heart earrings out of gold. I learned how to roll gold, through a big pasta machine type press, then I cut it with a saw frame, file it, and polish it. Today I worked on making an ingot of gold into a wire via lots and lots of rolling through the press. The press is powered by a large (manual) crank, so my crankin' arm may be a little sore tomorrow. The ingot started out about 2 inches long by 1/2 inch wide and 1/4 inch thick. The wire that I ended up with is about 5 feet long and about a 1mm thick square.
Tomorrow I get to melt gold and pour an ingot, pull the wire I made (which is currently square) into round wire, cut that wire into little rings and solder them together and onto my heart earrings, and probably lots more.
While I can't wait to get into work to see what I get to learn, it's really strange to be away from home for an entire day. I haven't not been at home for over 3 years, and never for 8 hours at a time. Luckily, I'm only working 3 days a week. I hope it becomes more comfortable, this is only the 2nd day.

Melissa,
These are the earrings that I have left, I think. I need to check to coffee shop to see if anything has been taken. This Friday there is a bazaar where I'm hoping to sell some. Let me know if you want any. I'll check to see if I have any others.
-Lil

The basement room is moving along pretty well. I'd post a picture, but I'm too embarrassed about the awful color of paint that I picked out. You see, our house was built in '66 and has certain aspects that reflect that period. So when you are redoing a basement room that previously had dark wood paneling and brown shag carpet and black-mortared brick with a useless gas log fireplace, you don't really need to go and paint it avocado green. In fact, I would say that that would be moving a step backwards. But it took me all day, after painting all of the walls to see if more avocado would be better than just a little, to decide that it was just too far in the wrong direction. Furthermore, the color I chose is just a few shades darker than the color that the concrete block under the paneling is painted. I think that it's a pretty clear sign that I should have chosen something different. So, tomorrow I am going to paint primer all over the green and go to Lowe's to find a new color.

We have started another home improvement project. Actually we have 3 that have sort of globbed together. First is the roof, then we are getting a wood stove for the basement (because we live in a split-level and it's always freezing in the basement), and since the stove is going into the family room downstairs, we're going to redo that as well.
As an aside: thankfully, I recently had my thyroid checked because I was constantly, unnecessarily tired. It tested low, my doctor prescribed low-does natural thyroid supplement, and I have crazy, wonderful amounts of energy! The kind I always thought that I should have! So, now I have been incredibly productive around the house, tackling numerous, massive projects -like these.
Right now the family room is covered in dark wood paneling with dropped ceilings. Ideally, we would totally re-drywall the entire thing, ceiling and all, but honestly, we plan on living in this house forever, so we can do that another day when we're retired/have more time/have more money for someone else to do it.
So our plan in this: We're going to tear down the ceiling, because there's no way around it. Parts of it are already falling down, you can't really spot repair it, it's ugly, and we need to move the lights. We're going to replace it with a similar method of covering, it will look like beadboard, but has the same acoustic benefits that the tile has. For the walls we are going to create a faux wainscot look by filling in the grooves of the existing paneling on the top 5 feet of the wall, leaving the grooves on the bottom, painting the top a saturated green, the bottom a glossy ivory, attaching a chair-rail and trim and ta da! We will have totally faked new walls! Hopefully it doesn't fail miserably and I have to pretend like this post never happened. The goal is to have to room set up and the stove here by Thanksgiving so that Jake and his dad can install it.
This is Jake's progress in tearing out the old brick wall.Here I am, filling the grooves in the sweet 70's paneling.

Ok, Ok

I've been informed (by an enviable blogger) that this is some kind of blog-posting month. Like, I'm supposed to post every day. Yeah, right. Considering that I've posted about three times in the last 5 months, I'm going to try to increase that slightly. I wouldn't want anyone to go through withdrawal when I forget to post for another couple of months.
So far this month has been eventful:
We realized, during one of the many torrential downpours, that we need a new roof, pronto.
(This is the front of the house before we did our re-landscaping. I'll have to put pictures of that next spring/summer, when things are blooming.)


Water was dripping from under a window frame that is 2 feet from the edge of the roof. While it did miraculously and curiously stop in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason, and with no other signs of water-entry, it's a bit disconcerting.
(It was dripping from one of the big windows in the back of the house.)



We've decided to get a metal roof, mostly because my husband has 2 cousins that used to put up metal buildings (like Morton) and assured us that it can be done in a couple of days. Right now we are picking out a color. We have it narrowed down to the safe choice: tudor brown, the daring choice: autumn red, and the middle-of-the-road choice: brandywine. I think we're going with the brandywine.
I could keep writing about the happenings of the recent past, or I could wait, and have something to write about next time (tomorrow? next week? January?)

Halloween

My 2 little ladybugs.
(Legit lady bugs, not Japanese beetles. Tough they are a bit pesty sometimes.)
This is a small portion of the candy that was actually amassed during the trick or treating experience. The kids sorted and divided the haul so that everyone got their favorites and everyone got close to the same amount.
These are all of the kids in our small group from church, which has basically morphed into a gourmet supper club and an excuse to share good beer.
Ben, on the far left, was the only one not fully participating in the sharing/sorting. I think he ended up with 1 1/2 times what the other kids did, but they didn't seem to care.