Strawberry Festival!

Another day off...after yesterday and it being SOOOO hot!  We took the day off from the house and went to the Strawberry Festival in Carlinville.  This is where I took my favorite pics of The Harmans last year.  We needed to go to Walmart too...so we could do this on the way home.  It ended up not being sooo horribly hot today (thank goodness, cause I was still done in from yesterday!)  Here are a few of my favorite pics from today!

Mike

Stacy

Marky (i LOVE this one!!)

Jeffie (i love this one too!)

 

And look at Johnny!  Singing one of my favorite songs!!

Country Poor, Country Proud!!

I just LOVE that song (and I think he knows it, lol!)

Johnny & Jeff

Jeffie playin' the bass

 

Jeffie's boots & bottom of the bass

Back to work tomorrow! (sigh)

NEW GARAGE DOOR!! Woo-hoo!!

Well, it was sure a hot one today!  My Dad and is friend Lyle worked on installing our new garage door.  Remember the old one??  YUCK!

I just can't figure out why everything on this house had to be a shade of skin!!

I wish I had a closeup of the door in its original state.  Peely, flaky, grossness!

Let the games begin!  (notice Dad's sweat band, I'm not going to lie though..it had to be helpful!)  That would be Dad on the right, Scott (my brother) behind Dad, Cathy behind Scott (Lyle's wife) and then Lyle on the left.  How many people does it actually take to put together a garage door?

Cathy really tried to get the guys to READ the directions...but where is the fun in that?

Lyle & Kade - look at them...are we sure they're not related??

I mean seriously...look at their shapes...tall & skinny, lol.

Dad is figuring out the garage door opener. 

Ah...Kade's got it now!

Look at that....sooooo much better!!

Lesson learned for the day...if all else fails...READ THE DIRECTIONS!!

Better yet...START OUT BY READING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE  :)

When it was all finally put together and functioning Kade just kept looking at it and thinking that SOMETHING just wasn't right.  Turns out the non-direction-reading Dad & Lyle put all of the hinges on BACKWARDS, lol!  They switched all of that back around and then we finally had a PROPERLY functioning garage door!  Doesn't it look great?

Bales are ready!

13 bales...that's what we got!  13 BIG bales!

We're still working on all of the little things....I keep forgetting to take pics (not like you could see a difference anyway!!)  We are going to install the new garage door tomorrow...I will for sure be taking pictures of that!  That's exciting...an actual VISUAL CHANGE!!  :)

REALLY??

Stinkin' raccoons!!  This time they pulled out flowers and tore into BRAND SPANKIN' NEW bags of soil!!  Ugh!  What a mess they are making!!  Guess I'm going to have to get the trap out and do some relocating of these little buggers!

Really...they poked little holes all around this NEW bag of soil.  ANNOYING!

Trap season begins tonight!

Oh...and on the house...still the same old stuff.  Electrical & Plumbing, lol.  Just about time to start doing insulation (at least in some spots where I know Kade is done!!)

Hay, hay, hay!

Yep!  HAY!  We've decided to have our 3.5 acres baled this year.  They came to mow today!  It already looks better  :)

Hopefully they'll come and bale it tomorrow!  We'll get a little money for this too...not bad!!

Gerrrrr!

Ok, so I'm not going to lie...I've been planting pots of flowers for our current house!  I just can't go without anything pretty growing around here.  Well one of my bff's is getting married in August and this weekend she's going to pick out her wedding dress.  All week I've been trying to figure out if i can get there or not...well...since Tuesday.  I really wanted to be there...but you see the house...yikes!  So this morning I finally decided that I thought I could go, packed my stuff...headed out the back door and ALL of the planting that I had done yesterday was RUINED!!  COMPLETELY RUINED!!!  Like a massacre!

Sooooo frustrating!!  So I had to go back and replant EVERYTHING!!  Not helping my day by any means!  UGH!!  That's an 8 hour drive ahead of me.  Well...Kade decided to surprise me at lunch...and then said he'd go with me this weekend but he had a meeting until probably 3....if I still wanted to go.  By this time I didn't know what I wanted to do.  I knew that I WANTED to be in Michigan...but how I was going to get there I just didn't know.  So...around 1:30 I decided that we were going.  We'd drive straight up...surprise her...get there about midnight...sleep, go shop for dresses and then turn around and come home.  That way we'd have all of Sunday to still work on the house.  Well...she found her dress, so I'm so glad that I went. (and it is GORGEOUS!!)  We left there at about 3:30 ish...got to Fort Wayne Indiana and said we could go say hi to Kade's oldest brother.  HOWEVER...if we stopped at one we had to stop at the other...because I don't want to be unfair.  We wanted to stop see Kade's friend Wally on Sunday because Monday is his birthday....also...my friend Allison...it's been awhile since we've seen her.  So ALL OR NONE...that was the choice.  If we drove straight home we'd be there at midnight.  So Kade decided he wanted to stop and surprise his oldest brother...got there around 8, left there a little after 9, he called his other brother and asked if we could sleep there...if we drove straight home from this point it would be 2 a.m. before we'd get home (we'd never make it!)  So we got to their house at about 10:30, found out my nephew had a soccer game in the morning.  Got up at 6:30 our time...went to his game...packed our stuff up and went to visit Allison...spent about an hour with her.  Made it over to see Wally at about 2:00 and visited for about another hour.  Had to make a Mendards stop in Springfield to pick up some lighting and then we FINALLY headed home...didn't get home until about 9:15....talk about an exhausting weekend.  Geee whiz....it was worse than if we had worked both days at the house!  We got a lot squeezed in to that 48 hours though, lol!

Congrats are in order!

I'd like to give a huge congratulations to Mo Pitney, a friend of our friends, The Harmans...he just signed a recording contract with Curb Records!!  Get ready for some great singing and song writing out of this guy!!  He's amazing!  Mo played at Harman Auction Center back in February.  He and his family are full of talent and put on a great show!

 

Mo Pitney @ Harman Auction Center - Bluegrass Show in Feb. 2012

More of the same...

Just lots of little stuff.  Where did all of this little, never ending stuff come from??  On the bright side...the faucet came for my special half bath sink.  Remember it?

I still love it!

Isn't it cool?  3 individual pieces...very "vintage" looking!

This is actually the second faucet that I've purchased, lol.  The first one didn't even come close to working!  Everything happens for a reason...because this one I actually LOVE...the first one was just...'eh...o.k.  Now Im really want to get this show on the road so I can see it IN PLACE!!  COME ON!!!  Why are we so slow??  (Maybe because there's only two of us + the occasional Dad working??)

Break time!

Well...today we worked on just misc. stuff.  Electrcal, Plumbling, etc.  We stopped a little early tonight to go with The Harmans to their show at Wild Pickins Winery in Chesterfield, IL!  It was such a nice evening...even COLD!!  I was shivering by the end of the night!

Great show, good company, and we needed the break!  It's really hard to work both days of the weekend and every night of the week!!  Who's idea was this renovation anyway??

Still...are you kidding me??

The stinkin' lighting is still not figured out, lol!  We just look at it, talk about it, look at it some more, read about it, and then NOT make a decision, lol!

Look...there's Kade...looking at the lighting  :)

Oh...I see that door...we've still got to move that over to the right about 2 ft!!

We're going to have to sleep on this lighting issue (again, and maybe for a few more days, lol)

Concrete Day!

FINALLY!!  We got the giant hole in the basement floor filled!  Man...it was hot today too....and so humid!  (of course it was, did we expect it to be nice, breezy and perfect for concrete pouring??) lol!

 

Kade ran the concrete mixer, Dad hauled in the wheelbarrows and Dad and I organized and worked on the finishing.  This is not a good job for a perfectionist!!

We were all ready...had it filled in with rock last night!  YES!

It will be so nice to no longer have to mind the big gaping hole in the floor!!

It only took a few loads before they had a good mix going!

EXCITING, lol!

Look at that!  NO HOLE!!!

Beautiful! (well, as beautiful as concrete can be!)

We were all done by lunch time!  I couldn't believe it!  So this afternoon we worked on finishing it and then I had a genius idea (or so I think!!)  I've still been searching for a vanity for the half bath...but not having any luck.  I'm just not a regular cabinet kind of girl  :)  So my wheels have been spinning.

 Remember when I bought the peg leg sink and forgot the peg leg at the store?

Well here's how I think I'm going to use it!

That would be the base to my Grandma Pape's old sewing table.  She apparently sat her plants on it and watered them!!  Needless to say...this is all that's left (well...this, and a few of the drawers which I intend to use at some point too!)  I can't believe they actually fit together so well!  Kade's not as much of a fan as I am....he's a little worried about it having enough support...so I might have to have someone weld me an extra support or something....I'll figure it out!!

I LOVE IT!!  That is SO MY STYLE!!

See...sometimes my brain can come up with some cool stuff!

More Shopping!

I swear...I shop EVERY SINGLE DAY now!!  Had to go to Lowes & Home Depot again and look at lighting and pick up a few more PEX pieces.  The light that I ordered for the half bath came...and I LOVE it with the mirror that I took off of the dresser that is the vanity for the hall bath!!  I can't wait to see it on the wall.  (Don't you just love that you can see me taking the picture in the mirror, lol..so sly!)

 

I decided that we really needed to paint the brick and get new siding too...so I'm thinking green brick and white siding...I just can't decide for sure though!

(ANOTHER FREAKIN' DECISION TO MAKE!) 

Here are the options with the sunset shining on directly on them...

Here are the same colors with no direct sunlight.  I just can't decide how green I want to go.  A mossy color for sure.  But should I just paint all of the brick green?  I don't have any idea, lol!

I think we've narrowed it down to these two light options for the front porch as well...

This one mimics the shape of the new post lights.

This one I really like too though...only I think the slightly bigger one.

Oh look...those peony's are just going CRAZY!!  Aren't they gorgeous??

I'm going to have to move them for sure!!

 They're so pretty!  They almost look fake...like they're made out of fancy paper!