What a week #6!

This week was probably the most frustrating of this entire process.  First, the house was still moving slowly because now that the drywaller is back it still takes time.  He did get the family room done on Friday and even did quite a bit of work upstairs.  One more week and he should be completely done. . . fingers crossed.

Tape and mud is going in!

After the family room was mudded and sanded our contractor headed back in and textured the wall.  I think he waited about 5 minutes between sanding and texturing.  He is just as ready to get this project done as we are!

Texture on the walls in the family room!

 And then being the ever patient people that we are waited for that to dry and began priming the walls immediately on Friday night.  We were really grateful for the light that our contractor left in the house because it is hard to see in a completely unlit room.  There are some windows, but it wasn't going to be enough to make sure we painted well.  There was still wet mud on the floor from the texture, so I chose to paint barefoot to preserve my shoes.  Barefoot is definitely the way to go!

Liz putting up the primer on the family room walls.

Primer is all up in the family room!

 We then, of course, waited until Saturday to do the painting!  Our goal was to get it painted this weekend, so that our contractor can start on the ceiling first thing Monday morning!

Pretty blonde walls!

Family painted . . . check!  

The boys were very excited to come and see the painted walls on Sunday.

We also stopped to look at the garden today and had fun looking at the plants.  Everything is growing very well, so the dirt must have some good stuff in it!  Some of the zucchini plants have randomly died but others look like 2 and 3 plants each, so it has more than balanced out.

The garden is thriving.  As long as we can keep out the deer it will continue to do so. 

 Now this may sound like a very normal week, but amid the painting and gardening our range decided to quit working.  We called our landlord, but he just didn't have time to deal with it this week, so we became very creative very fast.  We made pancakes on our griddle several times and even for dinner, ordered pizza another and grilled another night.  Then, on Thursday our grill decided to stop working and we knew we were in trouble.  So, on Friday I went and borrowed my visiting teacher's kitchen and made dinners for the weekend (including feeding the missionaries one night), bread and some extra black beans.  It is amazing to learn how much I depend on my range.  On Saturday we thought we would just take a peek and see how much it would cost us to replace the oven and found one on Craig's list for a very reasonable price that had appeared only minutes before, so amid our attempts to paint the family room we also drove up to Bettendorf to buy a gas range.  It is super old school but it works and we were very excited to be able to make scrambled eggs this morning with zucchini in them.  Yes, zucchini goes in everything!  :)  I did learn that there was no way I could use all of my zucchini if I couldn't cook it, so we shared with some friends.  It was a crazy weekend, but we did it!  The family room is painted and ready to go and we have a way to prepare food for these hungry boys again!

Hopefully we will get to do a little more painting next week but without running to different towns in between!