Squirrel for Dinner?

Okay- before you think the Shuttlesworth's have gone completely "backwoods," let me just burst your bubble from the very beginning to say that I have not turned into some countrified Emeril Lagasse. We are not fricasseeing squirrel and never have we entertained the thought (but only because I heard they are greasy).

My aunt called wanting to take Braden to feed the ducks at White Rock Lake. We loaded up, made a stop at the store for a loaf of bread and off we went. Once we got to the lake, we drove around looking for the ducks when we came across a HUGE hawk trying to catch his dinner. It really was one of the coolest things to ever see, the battle between the hunter and the prey. Luckily I caught it all on tape (Disclaimer: I was filming it out of my car window and feel free to pause it if you start to get dizzy).

As you will hear, I am totally rooting for the hawk (and Braden is squealing for the bread). I personally feel that our squirrel population is out of control… and secretly I was seeking revenge on his cousins that set up camp in my attic for so long sounding like a heard of elephants at 6:00 in the morning!

So in the end some man ended up walking over and shooing the hawk away letting the squirrel live life for one more day... PETA loving fool (insert eye roll here).

Anyway, on to the ducks- all in all, we had a great time. Braden hasn’t quite grasped the concept of feeding the ducks since he was stuffing his own face with bread the whole time. Oh well.

Gotta go, National Geographic is calling...

Renovation Pictures... The Good, Bad and Ugly

Before I get started on what is two months worth of information, I wanted to share this site with all of the mothers out there. Scoop your kids up in your lap, sit back and let the “B List" celebrities read to you. This must be what they are up to in between promoting new club openings and filming Milk-of-Magnesia commercials. Braden just loves this site: http://www.storylineonline.net/index2.html Enjoy!

Second, I have vowed to end my now 19 month long exercising sabbatical and begin doing Pilates here at home. I’m hoping to sit down and work out an actual daily schedule to where I make it a priority. Back to being an earlier riser with a decent bedtime… Should this also be a prayer request? (My body is screaming- yes!) Now if only I can find my “Getting-in-Shape Girl” weights and Mary Lou Retton leotard.

I am still working part-time from home. I had to put in two weeks of full-time at the office the first two weeks in December (50 and 60 hr. weeks). They are wanting me to come back full-time permanently, but I told them that was not an option for my family. I am sticking to my guns on this one, but won’t be too surprised if I get the axe here in the near future. I have made it through another round of layoffs and was spared, so I am following my boss's advise to- “focus on the positive.”
We were about 30 days away from having no television. Why must the Urban Amish suffer so? We celebrate the fact that our converter box coupons were found after being lost for a few weeks. We now get channel 4 and 5! I swear people, it's like we have cable now!

Now on to our bitter sweet project. I have said over and over again that I will never renovate again. We couldn't be prouder of the work we have done, and John has done nothing but impress me the entire time. He is a plumber, an electrician, a contractor... the list is endless. Good thing that dowries are not the in thing here in the US- the two chickens and one flea infested dog my family could have afforded I'm afraid would have only been an insult. I've never denied that John is my hero!

Our New Home

We still have some landscaping to do as well as painting the outside and adding some shutters. All of this is on the to do list this summer when the weather warms.

Braden's Room Before

Braden's Room After

Master Bedroom Before

That door way is the closet and yes, that is a window in there. Don't you have a window in your closet?

Closet Before

Here is a picture of us knocking the closet wall down to make the bedroom bigger. Now I have to say, when we told people what we were doing, they commented about how brave we were. I'll admit that bravery was not exactly the correct word... it was more like stupid. I think mine and John's conversation about doing this went a little something like this:

L- "Hey babe, I think we should knock this wall out to make the bedroom bigger."

J- "I don't know about that, I'll have to give it some thought."

L- "I think all we have to do is take a hammer to it and then patch up the holes. Instead of using toothpaste for the holes like in college, we'll just use some actual wall patching stuff (said in a confident voice and insert a "it can't be that hard" smirk).

So here goes nothing!

Master Bedroom After (never mind the messy bed)

I have never had such big walls to fill. I am desperate for artwork! By the way, we did replace the closet. The master bathroom was actually two rooms- one was the bathroom part and the second was a powder room. The powder room we ripped the sink and cabinets out of and turned into a closet.

Office/Bar Room Before

Don't you just love the Cowgirl light fixture? It takes me back to my days as a hostess/server at Texas Land and Cattle Steakhouse (pause for a moment for me to reflect back on the long hours on my feet and the time spent making salads and convincing the Hispanic kitchen staff to sneak me a brownie or cheesecake from the back). Ahhh, the good ol' days!

The Office/No Bar After

Guest Bathroom Before

Remember the days when you had to put map wallpaper on your bathroom wall because you would spend so much time in there you would forget where you were? Do you also remember putting a bamboo stalk frame around your mirror because that was what naturally went with the map wallpaper? No?

Guest Bathroom After

Living Room Before

In case you are wondering, that is a pile of doorknobs on the fireplace. That's right, none of the doors had their knobs on when we bought the place.

Living Room During

Yes folks, we pulled the 1970's oh-so-fabulous dark wood panelling down to find that there was no drywall behind it. And I guess there used to be a serving window into the kitchen? Nothing is more like a kick in the head like discovering you don't really have any walls.

Living Room After

As you can see I still had some stuff to get up on the walls as we don't usually leave huge clocks on the coffee table. And might I add, I painted the living room three times with three different colors in a matter of two days before deciding to leave it this one.

Kitchen Before

I know you are admiring the faux wood counter tops and floral pulls! Don't get too attached.

I should also mention that everything in the house was pretty much one shade of pink or mauve. My Aunt Faye would have loved the place!

Kitchen After

We still have to work on the back splash, and will eventually have all black appliances.

Breakfast Area Before

I think the flower wall paper speaks for itself.

Breakfast Area After

This is the wrong angle, but the wallpaper is gone.

Formal Dining/Living Room Before

Did I mention that everything was a shade of pink or mauve? Nothing screams fine dining like Pepto pink walls.

Okay seriously... MY EYES, MY EYES!!!!

Formal Dining/Living Room After

Since the people that lived here before smoked, all the floors had to be replaced. John and I put in the wood floors ourselves! I am contract for hire (and by "I" I mean John).

Guest Bedroom Before

The wall looks weird because they textured over some plaid wallpaper. They did a SUPER job (insert eye roll here because you are NEVER supposed to texture over wall paper that is pealing away from the wall).

Guest Bedroom After

Second Guest Room Before

I don't know why I find this funny (except it went perfectly with the theme of the house, the theme being "It Can't Get Any Worse"), but the fan has three white fan blades and one wood colored one.

Second Guest Room After

The following two rooms are still a work in progress.

Master Bathroom Before

We have replaced the cabinets, counter and sink, toilet, tiled the floor, and painted. We still have to replace the shower.

Laundry Room Before

Once again, we don't know that we shouldn't really do this, but we are going to try and enclose part of the laundry room to make a walk-in pantry. We haven't really done it before, but you just nail up some studs and hang the drywall with a doorway, right?

Our Pile of Gutted House

To Be Continued...

A Series of Unfortunate Events (Complete with a Hit and Run)

Fridays are my favorite day of the week. You get to finish your work week, know that you have the next two days to be with your family and friends and not have to worry about who you are going to charge your time to or if you are being fully utilized or not (ahhh, the beauty of corporate America).

Two Fridays ago was nothing but a disaster.

We were told by the inspector that the washing machine that the previous owners left with the house was in working order. Since it was already hooked up, I decided that I would use it until we could switch them out. I went to run a load and quickly discovered that yes, it did work… that is if you consider leaking water all over the floor working.
That afternoon I was startled by an unexpected knock on the front door. The older lady that stood there kindly informed me that a school bus had hit my car and drove off without stopping. WHAT!?!? I seriously had to have her repeat herself as I played out in my mind a big yellow school bus turning the corner and sideswiping my car. I went out to assess the damage and I found several scratches down the back side of my car, yellow paint on my taillight, and a dent in the rear passenger side. I swear people- I can’t make this stuff up! I called the police since it was a hit and run, filed a report, called the school district, etc. I was told that they are obviously going to take care of it, but the driver of the bus denies hitting anything. I find this funny since the witness claims that after he hit my car he stopped, turned around to look and then went on. The county bus people are pulling the tape for confirmation. Thank goodness for responsible citizens!

As if that drama was not enough, one of my neighbors stopped by to ask if I had heard the shooting across the street the other night. Excuse me?!?!? Come to find out, the night before we actually moved our stuff into our asbestos free house, my neighbors were woken up to the sound of five bullets being shot into the front door of the house across the street. That’s right people, we have moved from one shooting event to another. I seriously don’t know what in my life I have done to deserve flying bullets near my residence twice in one year, but I have got some seriously bad Karma.

FYI- no one was hit by the gun fire (thank God). In the meantime I keep looking around for Ashton Kutcher to pop out from around the corner to claim that I have been Punk’d uncelebrity style. I can’t ever find him. Dick Clark, are you around???

Asbestos 101

Yes, it has been about three months since my last post. And yes, we are still working on our house. While I will spare you all the boring details about what all we have fixed, updated, installed, knocked out and enclosed, I am going to share my wealth of knowledge that I have gained on the subject of Asbestos.

Our house was built in 1975. After our inspection and closing on our new/old house, John and I started on the mile long list of renovations. From the looks on the inside, the house hadn’t seen any updates since it was originally built. While I am sure some people like the dark brown paneling and popcorn ceilings of the 70’s, it doesn’t really suit my fancy. We figured we would start from the top down, so scraping the ceilings was at the top of our list. John researched how to do it (because paying for labor was not in the budget). First thing that had to be done was to scrape a sample of the popcorn ceiling and send it to a lab to be tested for asbestos. Two days later we got the call that it was “hot.” In layman’s terms… we had asbestos in the ceiling in over half the house- 5% to be exact, which we were told is a medium to high amount for a residence.

What do you do about that? Well, you call your friend that is an asbestos expert. Everyone has one right? But seriously, I do. Nate H. came to our rescue- and while I can’t name my first born child after him, we definitely owe him some warmed up cow on a plate. Nate told us how to safely remove it from the ceilings- seal off the doorways and vents, cover everything in plastic, open all windows and doors to the outside, and most importantly wet the popcorn and scrape it off and keep it wet. The objective is to keep the dust from it from stirring up into the air. So that is exactly what John did while wearing his coveralls and respirator (a kind of homemade hazmat suit).

After a couple of weeks of ridding our house of the asbestos, we called Nate to come in and test our air to make sure that we got every bit of it out, also to make sure that what we had been breathing the past couple of weeks wasn’t going to give us cancer. Now, just to put into perspective our test results, schools have the strictest standards and are allowed a score of 70 per so many units of air. So as long as we scored a 70 or lower, we were okay to move in. Our score- 437.

Six times higher than what they allow in schools! I was never in more need of a padded room than when I heard that news. I thought I was going to have a mental/emotional/physical breakdown (and basically did on every level to a certain extent).

The explanation- We speculate that the source was not the ceilings (as we removed it the exact way we were supposed to) but a wall in our master bedroom that we knocked down. We assume that asbestos was in the joint compound in the wall, and since we didn’t know to test the wall, the dust from it got in the air and spread throughout the house.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, John, his parents, and I spent several days cleaning the house, switching filters, dusting, vacuuming, and mopping in hopes to collect all the asbestos dust that settled. Nate also brought over an air filtration system that filtered the air in the house which we ran non-stop for about a week. After days of cleaning and what I know was a little divine intervention, Nate came to test a second time and we got a score of zero on our results. We got EVERY BIT of it out!

As for our health… I don’t think we have asbestos (or Mesothelioma, the cancer you get from asbestos), because we only had limited exposure to it. Evidently those people who do get or have it, are those people who worked in the factories or in construction that were around it all day everyday for many years. It takes about 30 yrs for it to show up, so I’ll let you know in 2038.

Under Construction

After two weeks of being totally and 100% debt free, our family is comfortably back in the red as we became proud homeowners yet again. We bought the house in Richardson (described below) because of the great area and GREAT schools. Due to all the remodeling work we are having to do to the property, we are still living at my mother's house until the dust settles at the new place (we are thinking about another two weeks…which might be wishful thinking).

Our plan is to have the painting, flooring (carpet and hardwood), and ceilings done before we start taking our belongings over. And yes, we are doing everything ourselves (except for the carpet).

I promise to post before and after pictures once we get over there and start on everything. I sent out an email with the new address, but if for some reason you didn't get it, let me know and I'll email it to you.
Side note: If you are a blog stalker and I don't know who you are, feel free to send your Christmas wishes via the comments section of this blog. No home address will be given out to you.
Anyway… My sanity level has taken a nose dive within the past week. Those who know me well will attest to the fact that I don’t handle change very well. Living with my mom has been quite an experience (and that's all I'll say as she is a faithful reader). It has been a little difficult being back at "home" where we are all cramped and I am not surrounded by my own familiar things. All three of our wardrobes are in one closet and Braden’s food is in a cardboard box in our room.

Needless to say Braden has needed some time to adjust to his new surroundings as well. To make matters worse, we have to ship him off to the Shuttlesworth Funny Farm (John's parent's house) this next week so that John and I can work on the house 24/7 without interruption. It will only be for a couple of days, but it still makes me miss him already. I just can't simply have him over there with us in the dust and paint fumes (not to mention the people used to smoke, so we have to deal with that issue as well). While I did paint three rooms and two hallways in our old house when I was pregnant with Braden (and he escaped from having webbed fingers and feet when he was born), I think exposing him to all the work we will be doing this time will only guarantee him a permanent seat in the Special Ed class for the rest of his academic career.

I'll be glad when this is all said and done… As I told my friend Jami- I am one issue away from having a mental breakdown where I get in the car and just start driving until I run out of gas... of course that will only get me to Mesquite, and from there I would have to head East to Forney on foot where the soles of my shoes would melt to the pavement and I would then be forced to head into the woods where I live out the rest of my life as a hermit that scares little children living in the local trailer park... (insert deep calming breath here).


On a lighter note, my mom does have cable where we have been watching ALL of the DIY and HGTV shows on how to do things yourself. I have also enjoyed the following shows: "Talk Soup," "Girls Next Door," and anything on the E! channel.

Who’s McGruff?

Apologies for the unannounced blogging sabbatical. If I am not working, I’m packing; if I’m not packing, I’m taking care of Braden; and if he is taken care of, I’m packing… and you know the never ending cycle. So those of you that haven’t written me off totally, here is what’s been going on: Braden had his First Birthday! After a lot of time planning and a slight dent in the budget, we had family over for hamburgers, cake and ice cream. It was a success and we had a ton of fun.

Recently we also had One Year pictures and family pictures taken. Not only did I get to put in my work hours, rush to get ready, drive 30-45 minutes to Plano to the photographer, but I also had the delight of dealing with a 12 month old that didn't sleep hardly at all the night before. Man... great day!

This one is my favorite. He is wearing John's hat. We are going to have his picture taken in it every year until he grows into it.

This one we had printed in Black and white and it is PRECIOUS!!! Apologies fo rthe lack of cropping on some of these... I am of course pressed for time.

Our beautiful family (if I do say so myself!). God has blessed us richly!

In other news- we have sold our house and close on Tuesday, July 29. We have to be out by Wednesday where we are moving in with my mother (prayer requests please) for two weeks until we can close on the house that we are buying. Yes, contract #3 was the charm, but we are still hoping for a smooth ending to this process.

The house that we are look at to buy is in Richardson (my old stomping grounds). We were told about the house before it even went on the market so we didn’t have a lot of pressure with putting down a contract trying to beat others to the punch, etc. This was nice because we got to meet with our lender to iron out the financial details before we got in over our heads (trying to be smart about everything). I refrained from bringing along my laptop to show the lender my financial spreadsheet that our family goes by monthly (I figured he was out of gold stars anyway). I do have to say that it feels good to actually have a grasp on what we are doing and where every penny is going. There really is power in that (and no, I don’t go kissing my Dave Ramsey poster every night).

So about this house in Richardson- Luckily it is in a great neighborhood and is selling for $30-$40K less that the others due to repair/update work that needs to be done to it. John and I are up for the task of remodeling as long as Braden is in a good neighborhood with a good school. We are actually looking forward to making some of the changes that we have discussed (putting up drywall, building a new fence, painting, flooring…the list is forever long). We seem to think that we can do it ourselves (again- prayer requests please). What we really like about it is that it is a lot more space than what we have now (of course after packing things up, that kinda seems like a bad thing: more space = more junk). It is a four bedroom house, two living areas, two dining areas, a separate office, laundry room, two covered patio areas, and a fireplace (which we don’t have now). Yes, my child will actually get to hang his stocking this year on a mantel without me having to come up with some lame excuse about Santa coming in through the back door that takes the strength of Hercules to open.

Now about my title up above- This past weekend I had the honor of being McGruff the Crime Dog’s assistant. Now had this been 25 years ago, I would have been in Heaven getting to help the ever so famous crime fighting detective dog “take a bite out of crime.” However, I am 30 years old and standing outside one of Garland’s ghetto Walmarts in the 103 degree heat from 2:00 to 4:00 on a Saturday was not my idea of a dream come true. Regardless, one of my lieutenant friends asked me to help out and of course, the word “no” never enters my mind. So there I was this past Saturday passing out police badge stickers and helping kids get their picture taken with McGruff. Very quickly I came to the realization that McGruff has been out of the lime light a little too long because not only did MOST of the kids not have a clue as to who McGruff was, but even some of the parents were saying, “Look! It’s Smokey the Bear!”
WHAT!!!! Are you people idiots?!?! Smokey the Bear doesn’t have big floppy ears. Smokey the Bear doesn’t wear a big trench coat. SMOKEY THE BEAR DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A DOG! Good grief!

Now I do have to keep in mind that we were at a GHETTO Walmart, where I am sure most of the clientele tends to avoided all police dogs (real and animated).