Frazzled Reflections

There is no better way to describe the room that would become our guest room. It is difficult to decide where to start in describing the room. Pictures do it some justice, but not enough. The royal purple walls were spattered in several places with what we believe were beverages. Several places had pink, not white trim, and there is a second closet in the room with a door painted the same royal purple as the walls. The carpet was disgusting, smelly, and when it was pulled out of the room we discovered wood floors that were in much better shape than we could have hoped for. A previous resident believed him or herself enough of an artist that there were a couple pictures drawn around the room, the most noticeable of which is captured in one of the pictures below. In short, the room was a mess, but it became the first bedroom that we touched for a couple reasons.  1) It appeared that it would be the easiest of the rooms to complete, and we needed something that could be quickly c...

That seems to be the story of our weekend. While I did finish grout on the wall tile and got that much closer to having the bathroom done, we found a couple tasks to distract from getting the walls completely finished.  We have two very old garage door openers. Or at least, we HAD two very old garage door openers, but in the last week, one of them finally quit. We are determined to do things right  and as we have money, replacing things as they quit. That has happened with light fixtures and this weekend that happened with the garage door opener that quit. A Friday night trip to Sears as a family and Jeff was determined to spend Saturday cleaning the garage and putting up the new opener. We were exchanging our dead chain garage door opener for a much quieter belt garage door opener. I watched and played with the kids outside on the playset while Jeff worked all day in the garage. Our son did get to "help" for a little while, and was pretty filthy by the time he came in for a ...

Our carefully selected bathroom vanity met with near disaster in the spring of 2011. All of our bathroom items were purchased and safely stored in our garage. Or at least I believed they were safely stored in our garage. Then we had a particularly heavy rain. Heavy rains should never be a problem. Our driveway is sloped towards the house, but we have excellent drains that take care of the rain and it rarely causes huge puddles in front of the house and family room door. UNLESS those drains are plugs by yard debris. On this particular day, they were plugged by yard debris, and a lot of it. By the time I checked outside, we had a small lake in front of our garage doors and our family room door. (We have two front entrances. The main entrance goes up stairs to our living room and the second entrance is ground level leading to the family room, which, according to our best guess, was originally the garage before one of many additions to the house.) Increasingly pregnant, I was not the most ...

In 2008 my husband and I, along with the rest of our fellow Americans, watched with frustration as the big banks spiraled out of control, eventually being granted bailouts that kept them from failing, and then continued to be frustrated as those same banks appeared to be wasting taxpayer money to give the very same individuals who made the decisions that caused the banks to spiral out of control millions of dollars to supposedly "keep talent". We read the articles in the newspaper, magazines, and online, and yes, we faithfully stayed up later than we should have to watch Stewart and Colbert (I do not miss the irony in the fact that as a teacher who teaches rhetoric I prefer their take on the media mess). And then we watched as houses in our working middle class neighborhood went up for sale and then didn't sell. Our neighbors on one side had their house on the market in 2005 when we moved to Indianapolis just as the bubble started to burst. They had just built their dre...

I was useless with the wall tile surrounding the tub and shower, so when we were finally ready for the floor tile, I told Jeff that I could handle it, although I really don't think he was going to let me get out of doing the tile. Honestly, I felt I had to redeem myself in the home improvement arena. Finally one night this summer my husband decided that, with the walls all painted, it was time to tear up the floor to the floorboards to see what we could find underneath. The 60 years of flooring layers were interesting, disgusting, and we were glad to throw the flooring in trash bags and into our trash bin. The next step was figuring out how to fix the floor around the once leaking toilet and then laying down the cement backer for the tile. This included making circle cuts for the toilet and cuts for around the bathtub. My husband told me to measure around the toilet. I did. My husband made a beautiful circle cut with his rotozip circle cutter. We took the board upstairs. Still didn...

Until you start renovating a bathroom, you don't give much thought to toilets, that is unless you run into problems with the one you have and decide that it need to be replaced. At least, I had never given it much thought. You use toilets from the time you're potty trained until you get old, but when you are suddenly charged with the responsibility of picking a toilet for your own home, it can be surprisingly overwhelming. As of this writing, there are 1129 toilets available on homedepot.com and 1034 on lowes.com. And the toilet "technology" (for lack of a better word) is impressive and therefore daunting.  One can spend anywhere from less than $100 to well over $3000 on their bathroom comode. There is so much to consider for a piece of equipment that welcomes the wastes our bodies spit out. The discussion over what toilet to select has been going on for a year. We've talked to people, we've read about different varieties, we've looked at the toilet aisl...

There is a lot of reflection I could do on the walls in our bathroom, but that takes digging deep into my memory because the walls were a nearly 12 month project. It appear that drywalling, mudding, and installation of tile on the walls and ceiling have been the most difficult projects to complete in our bathroom. Not that we didn't have ANY idea what we were doing. We remodeled our kitchen in Indy with help from both of our dads, so we understood the mechanics of drywalling and mudding, but lack of experience with tiling, and the less than square walls in our 60 year old bathroom got intimidating. And when our son arrived and the mudding was still not complete, there was very little chance for the project to get done. So tile sat in the garage and then the utility room waiting to be installed. Paint sat in a closet waiting to be put on the walls. And the project never got going. Yes, we were busy. Our children constantly remind us how difficult it is for the two of us to work toge...

We bought our first house within two years of marriage, believing that it would benefit us to start making house payments as opposed to paying rent where we were living in Northwest Indiana. In retrospect, it was probably not one of our smarter financial moves, just breaking even when we decided to move to Indianpolis two years later, but we did love that house. Just like the one we live in now, it was quirky, and there were several elements of the house that I enjoyed. The bathroom was not one of them. There were several small things I didn't like about the bathroom, but the biggest problem I had with it was the window in the shower. The house had only one bathroom, so there was nowhere else to take a shower, and the situation was only made worse by the fact that the window was on the front of the house, facing the street. I never spoke about it, but I hated it. I hated the fact that the wood trim continued to warp and peel every time I took a shower. I hated the curtain that prev...

Apparently in the 1950s, Mamie Eisenhower became the authority on home decorating, at least for women from conservative, Ike loving households. She turned the White House pink, and women across the country followed suit. So begins the story of our main bathroom. As I have stated, every square inch of our new home either needs to be touched, or has already been touched by us or one of our fathers. We have three full baths, so when we moved into the house, our goal was to get all three bathrooms as functional as possible, and then decide which bathroom we would tackle first. I am hopeless DIY addict, and after watching enough bathroom remodels I started to believe that it couldn't be that hard and that we could do it for few dollars. After working overtime to finish several painting projects (more on that in later posts) Jeff asked which bathroom we should start ripping out. Our Master bath was out because I have grand plans for that one. The family room bathroom, while it looks te...

I started blogging two years too late, but I guess it is better to start at some point than to never start at all. For years I've needed a writing outlet that would just let me write and write and write, yet I was so busy being "super teacher" that I never took the time for myself. Now I know that I need to do this for me, even if I'm only writing while I catch up on the latest DVR'd HBO show. So why is this two years too late? Because I really NEEDED to start writing this blog two years ago when we moved from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne. Two years ago I hit the lowest point of my adult life. I had a husband and daughter who loved me, I was healthy, and I was finally starting grad school. However, I didn't want to move. I was happy with my life in Indy, I loved my job, our friends, our church, and I didn't want to relocate and start over. Emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and financially, I had hit a serious low point and had a difficult time seeing any...

Christmas break my senior year of college I finally told my parents that my post-student teaching plans in the fall included a December wedding. One of my mother's many arguments against my getting married included "you're too young" to which my father responded "they are the same age we were." Jeff and I have been happily married for over ten years, but those words from my mother took on new meaning this weekend when we watched my husband's cousin and new bride, who are the same age we were when we got married, exchange their vows and join their lives together. I watched the happy couple and their wedding party and one thought kept running in my mind: "They are too young." While I've had other younger cousins, sisters and siblings-in-law, and former students post pictures of their weddings and (gulp!) babies, this hit harder than those events. And maybe it's because I have known Jeff's cousin since he was 8 or 9. He's t...

I was in college learning how to be a high school English teacher when the tragic shootings occurred at Colombine High School. Suddenly, the world I would be teaching in changed. My students would never know a world without planned lock-down drills. And so many years have passed that my students now see these drills as tedious, pointless, believing that these drills have nothing to do with them and that they are not meant to save their lives in case of a similar event. My students also know nothing about those shootings. When I mention them in class now I get blank stares. These teenagers were toddlers when it happened. In a couple years, my students will not have even been alive when it happened. The names Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold mean nothing to them. But their actions are back in the news as the news pundits are now mistakingly making connections between two tragedies that just happened to take place in two different Denver suburbs twenty minutes away from each other. In 1999...

"The best-laid schemes of mice and men go often awry." Robert Burns Ok, so I'm no lover of British poetry, and the only reason why I know this quote is because it was the inspiration for the title of one of my favorite novellas, Of Mice and Men , the longest Steinbeck work I have finished reading. Don't judge me. No other Steinbeck novels have been assigned to me for a class and I don't know anyone who has read The Grapes of Wrath for fun. But all this is beside the point. I am frequently reminded of the truth of Burns' poetic statement. Take today for instance. My husband had to work in Indianapolis for the day, so since it is summer and we have the freedom to do so, the entire family joined him on the trip. I got to see former coworkers, one of my little sisters and my nephew (although it was only for a few minutes), and the kids and I got to visit with close friends for a chunk of the afternoon. The plan was to leave their house in time to pick up my h...

Here we are three weeks away from returning to school, at least I the teacher am three weeks away from returning to school. The mid-summer slump is strange to me. For years I found myself far less productive than I intended and eager to return after a month of vacation. Now that I have kids, the summer are all the more precious and disappear all the more quickly. I appreciate my summers. I work hard during the school year, often working late into the night, working on weekends, and forcing myself to remember that my kids and husband need my attention as much as my students and studies (since I am also working on my Master's in English). But then summer, sweet summer. Suddenly time to devote to cleaning, organizing ignored rooms, playing with my kids, and yes, planning for the next school year. But those days quickly disappear. I was going to read a book a week. In five weeks I've read three, so I guess I'm only a little off. I was going to work on school work every week, an...