Frazzled Reflections

Once our walls were finally painted and dry and looking significantly better than when we moved in I finally put the pictures that had been sitting in our guest room for the past three years on our walls. The living room was finally started to feel like home. The next step was buying and putting up a new chandelier to replace this one: Besides the fact that this particular chandelier was not our style at all, it was clearly not someone else's style, evidenced by the $20 masking tape sticker that was stuck to the side. I have no problems with using and reusing items. I believe that some of the greatest treasures can be found in other people's trash. HOWEVER, there is a limit, and that chandelier was the limit for me. The very first time my husband and I attempted to put up a chandelier was when we first moved into our house in Indy. The dining area (because we didn't have a dining room) had a hideous fruit Tiffany style lamp hanging from the ceiling. It was one of the...

When you move into a house that is a disgusting mess on the inside, the outside kind of gets forgotten. After all, you need a place where you can safely live on the inside, right? At least that was our primary concern when we moved into our house. The first summer the outside was primarily ignored, except for my husband's proud purchase of a tractor mower which actually gets a significant amount of use. You see, we have a HUGE front and backyard. It was a selling point, and still is when we think about all the space our kids have for playing, except neither of us are great at yard work. But that is for another blog and another time. In addition to the interior of the house which has rather large things that bug me, the exterior has had several small things that bug me. While I was working diligently on the living room ( Part 1 and Part 2 ), I decided to tackle some of those smaller projects. First came the front door, which had a faded, poorly painted green color that did not ma...

Sometimes our flaws and good qualities are the same thing. For me, one of my simultaneous flaws/positives is that I can get very focused on a task and do not stop until I finish a task. That might be why several house projects have been at a standstill. During the school year I can't divert my attention from all my teaching responsibilities (lesson planning, grading, parent communication) to take time to work on something in the house while still maintaining important time for my family. Evidence of my ridiculous focus would be the time I put into working on our guest room when we first moved into the house. I stayed up late several nights in a row to get the room done. I needed to have at least one pretty room in the house, and I lost sleep making sure that happened. So it should be no surprise that I have worked tirelessly since Sunday to FINALLY finish our living room walls. These walls have been the bane of my existence for three years, and I decided that they needed to be d...

The first thing I noticed about our living room was the wood floors. When we saw the pictures online, I immediately noticed what looked like wood floors. Unfortunately, those wood floors are in terrible shape, and we were so distracted by everything else in the house that I didn't notice that the living room walls had wallpaper as well, until we returned for another look AFTER putting the offer on the house. Yep, more wallpaper. Paintable wallpaper. You know, the stuff with texture that people put up on walls and then paint whatever color they want. I have never thought that was a very good idea. It had to look tacky, and if we had kids, how were we going to keep those walls clean, no matter what kind of paint we used? But the previous owners decided at some point that this is how they wanted to cover their living room walls. I was disheartened to discover more wallpaper, but it couldn't be that bad, could it? When we moved into the house, this is what the first floor look...

I looked down at the Clearblue Easy digital pregnancy test. "You have got to be kidding me!" I couldn't help it. The words just came right out. I walked back into our bedroom, sat on the bed, and told my husband, "Well, I guess we're not going to Florida for Spring Break." "Huh?" He's never been very good about waking up right away. "I'm pregnant." "Seriously?" Yep, I was serious. I want to be perfectly clear: I LOVE my son. My sweet, loving, beautiful children are a daily reminder of just how much God has blessed me. However, this was not what we were expecting to happen, and at that very moment it couldn't appear to be worse timing. Maybe I should back up. Three years earlier we were shocked to discover that we were pregnant with our daughter for very different reasons. We struggled for two and a half years to get pregnant. We had finally met with a specialist and were on our third round of treatments...