Back to Homework Time

It has been busy around here lately as we adopted a retired greyhound whom we needed to help nurse back to health and then getting into the groove of a new school year. The new school year and the increased work load that has come along with it has been keeping me very busy. I have a very active, some say hyper active, 6 year old so finding ways to help him learn all his sight words and spelling words has been challenging to say the least. Flash cards have always worked out to some extent but aren't really something he wants to do so I embarked on a mission to find some better ways to learn all these words, especially all those spelling words.

I found an idea for a game called Bang! which uses jumbo popsicle sticks with one word on each stick and while my son enjoyed this game he really loves to win so I eventually took out the Bang sticks and just left the word sticks but to get him to try all the words we allow him to steal our sticks if he can say the word on our stick. This is a pretty big hit but he gets tired of it quickly so it wasn't the only solution necessary, especially since I still need to worry about spelling.

Enter Scrabble Junior and a vis-a-vis marker to write the words on the board. He was not so fond of this but a friends son is enjoying this game.

On to hangman, this is the real winner in our house especially since we have a travel hangman from Melissa & Doug so we can practice spelling words in the car when we travel. Of course I don't drive while I play this with him in the car. I write the number of blanks down on the white board area and tell him the word and he has to spell it. Every wrong guess I turn over a piece of the man and I do this for all 10 spelling words (without resetting the man between words) to see if he can get all 10 words before I can hang him. This has really speeded up the process of learning to spell our words.

Of course come Thursday we do still have to do a paper and pencil practice test to make sure he can do well on his test in class. Leading up to that paper and pencil practice test I do allow him to trace the words using a dry erase marker at least once everyday to get used to writing the words, no my son does not have the neatest handwriting and this helps a lot. I either use the dry erase envelopes or nice glossy page protectors to slide a sheet with the words written out in the teacher specified font on lined paper (I finally found a font for my computer so now I can print the list out in grey for him to trace over instead of me having to write it out by hand myself, no my writing isn't the greatest... it's good but not as good as a teacher).

All of that being said since he is so active and we have a lot of homework I am going to try to find more active ways to do our studying. I'll try to keep you posted on how that goes as I just began making a list of ideas that I can try for spelling, sight words and even math. 

Our new shoe cabinet

Here is a picture of our new shoe cabinet. It is so nice to have a place for the little one to put his shoes so they aren't literally all over the house, it was always like a scavenger hunt when he needed to find his shoes and we were always tripping over them. This beauty holds a minimum of 12 pairs of shoes and has a drawer at the top that we are using to store all of our sunglasses, yes we have tons of sunglasses living by the beach. All I have left to do with this little corner of the house is to add pictures to the picture frames. It's nice to have the entry way basically done. I also still need to paint the doors on the closet and the decorative cement walls, but that is it for this room.






Here you can see the wall all taped off to see how it would fit in the entry way. This picture was taken before I painted the wall and put the light switch plate back on the wall. 

Our new kitchen island, stools still to come

Here is the kitchen before we added the new island. You can see I used painters tape to mark off where the island would go. I did this to get a feel for if the island would disrupt the traffic flow or make it too difficult to access the stove, dishwasher or refrigerator. I also played with where the tape was a bit to work out a good placement for the island, probably not entirely necessary as we were only adding a freestanding island and therefore could move it later if necessary. Of course once you get your stuff on the island it is more difficult to move and I wanted to make sure everyone was going to be ok with the addition of a kitchen island. 

Here you can see the storage area where I am storing my baking pans and sheets and carriers and all of that good stuff, freeing up space for other things.

Below, you can see the back side of the island where the stools go. I ordered a pair of metal stools, slightly industrial and modern yet still look a bit like they belong in a farm house, they should be here next week.

The house is really starting to take shape and feel like a home already. 

Our new house, a work in progress. The playroom/kids guest room.

This is the playroom/kids guest room in our new house. This room took a lot of coats of primer and a lot of patching of walls and even the door to the room. This room had writing on the wall and everything, right down to bright orange walls and bright yellow trim. What a project this room was. Oh lets not forget the disgusting dark blue carpet, thankfully that was covering up a terrazzo floor. The terrazzo does need some serious work but as it is currently just being used as a playroom I figured that can wait a bit.

Our "little man" also picked out the color for his playroom, ok he really picked out 2 colors for his bedroom so I decided to put one color in each room. This room is Valspar Summer Breeze and we loved this color so much we painted our bedroom the same color. I know the room looks pretty good in this picture, but the terrazzo still has more adhesive to be removed and it has pits in areas of it and it has a rough area where it meets up with the tile in the hallway so there is still a ways to go, but it has definitely come a long ways already. I am really happy with how far this room has come in the short time we have owned this house, oh the joys of a fixer upper. I should say for those of you who are debating buying a fixer upper please really think about what you are getting yourself into and what level of time and skill you have. Also realize it will cost more and take more time than you expect, but that being said if you are confident this is a good path for you to go down remember that in the end you will have a house that really suits you.

Here is the glorious before picture. I will admit this room kind of scared me as far as just how much work needed to be done to it, but it is now in such a better place that I don't cringe when I go in the room because I know how much work needs to be done. Now I cringe for a whole other reason, the mess all over the room.  :-) I guess that is all "kids" rooms though, you just never know what kind of mess you will find in their rooms when you enter that door. In his defense though as you can see there really is nothing for him to store or put most of his toys away in so I totally understand the problem in this current situation but we do need to work it out soon as we are getting a dog in just over a week and everything is fair game to a dog, at least in the dogs mind.

 

Our new house, a work in progress. The "little man's" bedroom

This is our "little man's" bedroom. This is the first room I finished, well I use that term lightly as we still aren't fully unpacked. That actually includes putting all the clothes away as I haven't even found all the clothes or even all the hangers, yes I am currently taking all the hangers stores give me with my clothing purchases. Oh the joys of moving. 

Anyhow, this is the before picture of his room. It had decent looking roman shades although they were broken. It also wasn't quite as bright or dark of a color as several other rooms were and therefore didn't require as many coats of primer. 

The "little man" picked out the paint color for his new room, Valspar sweet mint. We actually liked it enough that we painted our bathroom the same shade and now I am really loving the name of the color because we just picked out our new dog yesterday who's name is Minted, how appropriate and funny that I just realized that his room is sweet mint and he picked a dog named Minted. 

I picked up the new bedding for his room at Target as he wanted a pirate/beach room. I loved the octopus pirate pillows so that was a bit of a splurge for his new room but given the quilts from his old room worked with the new bedding it wasn't that big of a deal. The sheets from his old room will be used in his play room/kids guest room when I finally get beds in there. 

As for the blinds we took all the window treatments in the house down and ordered new natural shades with black out liners from Lowes. The black out liners will not only provide privacy and allow the rooms to be dark for sleeping in and such but should also help cut down on the need for AC which is pretty high in Florida. I will post pictures of the blinds when they come in. I will say I loved how we could borrow the window blind book to check the colors at our house, we changed our color to a slightly lighter and brighter shade when we saw them in our house with our paint colors and all.

Removing popcorn from ceilings

Well we closed on our new house last Monday, so last Monday a lot of hard labor began for me. First on the list was taking the popcorn off the ceilings so they can be repaired and textured, yes they needed repair so I figured as long as we have to have them repaired we may as well take down the fabulous glitter popcorn and bring the house into the 21st century. Besides you can always tell where a popcorn ceiling was fixed no matter how good a job they do.

I won't lie to you, removing all that popcorn was not really an easy task but I kept telling myself I'll have some awesome looking arms when I finish will all of this work. It took me 10 days to get all the popcorn off all of the ceilings in the house. I will admit I did not actually work on the ceilings everyday of those 10 days either, probably about half of the days. My method of removal did evolve over the course of my project so I thought I would share some of the highlights and low points so you can learn from my adventure.

The first day I had a spray bottle and a putty knife. I sprayed the water using a spray bottle and scraped it off with a putty knife. It was very slow and the spray bottle kind of hurt my hand after a while, however if you are really tight on cash and not so tight on time this may be the best way for you to go as you can probably find all your supplies at the dollar store.

After that first day I ran out and picked up a garden sprayer and a wider blade on a longer handle so I wouldn't have to climb up and down the ladder all day and could spray more ceiling area faster. I used more of a floor squeegee as this is what I saw at the small hardware store right by the house and didn't have time to run to a bigger store that morning, it took a bit of elbow grease to get it to scrape as well as the metal blade on my putty knife. The garden sprayer definitely made life a whole lot easier and for about $20 was very well worth the money. The squeegee was definitely better, but when I had almost finished my project I discovered something truly awesome when I was wondering around at Lowe's (I'm sure other stores carry this too and wish I knew of it's existence sooner).

What did I discover? It was a blade for scraping popcorn off the ceiling that had a frame around the scraper that you attach a bag to so you catch all the popcorn in a bag instead of all over the floor and yourself. It was about $20 and you could attach it to a screw on handle to lengthen it so you don't need to climb up and down a ladder all day which trust me is a good thing unless you really want to feel the burn in your legs.

Also worth mentioning is to run into your local dollar store first and see what supplies they have. I got gloves and masks and plastic tarps and spray bottles and mops and putty knives and all kinds of great supplies so I wouldn't have to worry about cleaning all those little things when I am done. Yes I know that it isn't very green to dispose of things but sometimes it is greener in it's own way and to me this is one of those times. Trust me you don't want to try to clean that popcorn off of anything you don't really need to, it is a really tedious prospect and uses a lot of water and still often doesn't really come clean. Also, that popcorn is hard on some of these things. My putty knives rusted quickly even while working on a room, that wet popcorn just sticks to things and rusted my putty knives quickly. Plastic tarps that are catching a big mess like this are definitely something better off thrown out, I just rolled the edges into the center and threw the whole mess in the trash.

This is a picture of the last room I scraped popcorn from. Yes that project is marked off my to do list.

You may want to know what you need, in case you plan to do this yourself. Well, you definitely need some water (you can use a hand spray bottle like I bought at the dollar store or you can use a garden sprayer like I opted for in the end) and a scraper (you can use a putty style knife like I bought at the dollar store or you can opt for a wider blade or maybe even go with the one that you attach a bag to to catch all the popcorn and you may want to get a longer handle so you don't need to stand on a ladder or chair).

Some things you should definitely consider are goggles, masks to cover your nose and mouth, gloves (I found some for gardening that had a really nice grip on the underside at the dollar store) tarps to protect your floors (especially carpet or wood, I wasn't as careful on the tile floors) and a mop to clean up the floors when you are done. If you get it on the walls you will want a microfiber towel or something to get it off the walls. I used a dollar store water bottle with mostly water and a little white vinegar added to it to really dissolve the mess off the walls and floors.