Basement Pictures, mid-March

Top of the stairs:

At the bottom of the stairs, looking towards the bedrooms:

Boys' bedroom:

From the boys' door, looking towards the stairs:

Past the Breaking Point

Life has been pretty stressful around here for the last several weeks, for the following reasons:

1 - My BYU class that I was finishing up had a deadline of April 5th.  With all the home projecting going on, my class got put on the back burner.  It was a huge relief when I turned in my last paper and saw that final grade.  (As a side note:  I turned in a brilliant final paper, but didn't bother doing proper citations.  I turned in 100% work on the writing and figured the teach wouldn't dock me too badly for the crappy references.  I was right!  I got a 92% on it, which roughly correlates to my final grade in the class.  I'm so proud of myself for accurately estimating my grade on the paper, and hence spending the perfect amount of time on it!  An extra few hours of my time was totally worth 8%.)

2 - Taxes due.  I'm self-employed, which is a whole different animal.  Before deducting all my business expenses, we owed a substantial amount of money.  The problem was that I didn't realize at the start of this that I needed to keep track of all those expenses!  So I spent the last few weeks getting that all in order, including adding up 3,005 miles worth of mileage (luckily my invoices each have an address on them, and I have a crazy-detailed spreadsheet that I'm kinda OCD about).  In the end, we paid the Feds $9.  Score!  (Also, happiness:  Ohio has a new Small Business Owner deduction, and heck, I'm a small business owner, I'll take that deduction!  The end result is that we only paid Ohio $12.)  ...  This also means that we've accurately estimated how much taxes to deduct throughout the year from Rob's paycheck.  Which feels awesome.

3 - California trip.  So, this one is a really long story.  I'll give you the sum-up:  We were planning to go to California for the entire summer, but things have changed and now we're not going.  I'm not super sad about not going, in the end, but the transition from Excitement About a Trip to Acceptance of a Major Change was a hard one.  I spent a week feeling like the world was spinning underneath me and I couldn't get my bearings.  Now I feel pretty good about it, and I can even see how this could be a really good thing.

Note:  Miciah will still be going.  She reminded us in about 3 seconds flat that it was "her turn" to spend the summer with Grandma and Grandpa, since Elijah spent the summer with them last year.  I had forgotten about that.  She'll do Girls Camp out there with her cousin, and they're both really excited about that.  Girls Camp is on this GORGEOUS mountain property, so they'll love it.  Plus, they'll be together, and that's always the highlight of their year.

4 - Work.  Freelance work is funny, because I can have weeks where I work just a handful of jobs, and then weeks where they need someone almost full-time.  I'm free to say no, of course, but accepting more work is sometimes nice for a variety of reasons.  So for about 3 weeks I worked almost full-time and it was rough.  The paycheck will be nice, but it was stressful.  ...  I decided, through that experience, that full-time work wouldn't always feel that stressful - mostly it was the sudden difference that was so hard - but I still am not overly anxious to try it out on a regular basis.

5 - The Basement.  My emotional decline linked to this seemingly never-ending project has been interesting to me.  (I think things are interesting, as a general rule.)  I was excited, then I was a little anxious plus excited, then all excitement faded and there was just the anxiety, and then, past that, there was hostility.  A lot of hostility.  Not towards any person, but towards the house.  The dang house that is never finished, that takes over all my weekends and free time, that's cluttered and cramped because everything is shoved into a tiny space, that costs too much and gives too little, etc., etc.  I just lost it.  There were breakdowns, though not tears, as I struggled to cope with it all.


As a result of all this, my brain has only managed to deal with what was immediately necessary to think about.  I have future plans that have needed some attention, but I just couldn't handle thinking about them.  Heck, I could barely manage getting through the day without yelling, cussing, and/or beating myself in the head.

It occurs to me that most people are probably stronger than I am.  :)  I am okay with this.

Basement pictures to come!  It's SO almost done, guys.  I'm finally excited again because I'm starting to get my house back.  WHAT WHAT?!!!  It's amazing.  And the space really does look great, now that I can look at it without wanting to punch people.

Basement Diagrams

Miciah said that she drew a diagram of our basement for Collin, since he was having a hard time putting together the pieces that the pictures were representing.  So I decided to post a diagram that I put together.  I did two: The old basement layout, and the new layout.  

Please note:  Absolutely no effort was made to make sure my measurements were accurate or to scale.  I opened a document, added lines and a few shapes, labeled some, and called it good.  It's just to give you a working idea of what the space is like.

Dark lines along walls are doors.  Darker lines along the outside walls are windows.

Old layout:

So you can see, there was a lot of unused space.  Why devote nearly half of your basement space to your laundry room?  It's like someone went down there and just was like, "Umm, I'm going to put a room here today," and then repeated that thought a few years later.  On top of that, the middle wall was almost 2 feet thick, for whatever reason.

New layout:

So hopefully the pictures make more sense now.  We love the new space and are excited to have it finished and usable soon.  We painted this weekend, which feels like the beginning of the end.  We're in the home stretch!

Music!

After years of prodding, Rob and his siblings FINALLY went and did a professional recording session and got some pretty great tracks out of it.  This makes me so so happy for two reasons.

Reason #1 - We get to share the music with all of you!  They've set up a website where they will be releasing the songs one at a time for dramatic effect.  So set the webpage as a bookmark or something else easy to keep track of, and go back every week to see what else has been posted.

Reason #2 - This is a treasure for my family.  My children will be able to have this music for forever.  Or at least until technology changes to the point where MP3s are no longer readable, or the sun does one of those super flares that destroys all electronic data and we're set back hundreds of years and killing each other with bows and arrows like in that TV show.

Hurray for great music!

Basement Update

First off, a very short note about Teancom and gymnastics:  He did it!  WOO HOO!  Mission accomplished.

Now on to the thing that is consuming our lives (in a good way?).

The Basement

In order to count the two rooms in the basement as bedrooms (and to give our children an escape in case of fire - all that safety stuff), we had new windows put in.  One of the windows was already a window, just a tiny one.  The second one was just cinder block wall.  Now they are both egress windows.  The process:

Front half of the cinder block cut out

A hole

From the inside

From the outside

The bathroom with most of the drywall put up:

There is also a window in this room.  It's a teeny tiny window, but it wouldn't matter how big it is, it wouldn't let in much light because it's under the deck.  In the above picture, it still has the old window (that let in no light because it's old and nasty dirty).  All the drywall in this room is green because it's moisture-resistant.  Then there is cement board in the shower, where the tile will be.

Drywall coming up:

All the drywall is up, as of today, so these pictures are outdated.  But it's fun to see the progress!  We're thrilled with how it's all going and it's hard to imagine, now, what it used to look like.

Teancom Joins Gymnastics?

Last year Elijah did gymnastics for a few months before summer.  Then it got warm and there was traveling, so we told him he could pick it back up during the colder months.  Well, we finally got around to it this last week:  March is our month for gymnastics!  Elijah has been so excited and he's talked his brother into being really excited, too.  

We drove up and the boys were all a-chatter while I parked the car.  I had to keep them from running too fast to the building ("We have to be careful, guys.  There's ice!).  They barged into the building ready to go.  I told the guy at the front desk that I had 2 boys for gymnastics, and he told them to go ahead and take off their coats and shoes and join the group while I filled out the paperwork.  I watched them put their stuff on a chair and move towards the group before I turned to write their names on a form.  

And then I heard a scared little Teancom voice say, "Mom.  I don't feel good."

I turned and looked at him.  He hadn't made it further than 5 feet from me.  He looked like he was going to puke at any moment.  I recognized this Teancom.  He's the one who wouldn't join the Halloween party.  The one who was terrified to go to Kindergarten.  The one who wouldn't get out of my arms for the first 4 years of his life.  He's now a 7-year-old boy with deep anxiety about doing new things.

I tried to reason with him, encourage him, and hug him into joining the group, but I knew it was useless.  He was paralyzed with fear.  The first line out of my mouth, an overly optimistic, "But Teancom, you've been so excited about this," prompted him to tear up.  There's no reasoning with anxiety like that.

I turned back to the man at the front desk and said said, "I guess I'm only signing up one boy."  He said we could give Tank a week to get used to it, and he could join next week.  Teancom objected to this, but I thought it sounded reasonable.  I also knew that if Teancom refused to participate, we could probably talk them into transferring the money to Elijah's "account."  I'm a rational optimist.

Teancom and I sat on a chair, watching Elijah while he warmed up and then started doing the drills.  Elijah, for his part, was adorable.  He ran over to us twice to make sure Teancom was okay, and to ask if Tank would come out and play.  I assured him that Teancom was fine, and that he would join next week.  Then I spent an hour with a teary-eyed little boy, trying to convince him that he really did want to join next week.  

I thought Teancom's comments about the kids participating were interesting.  A representative sampling:

"That girl is really good.  I can't do what she's doing."

"That girl just fell down.  I don't want to fall down."

"What are they doing now?  What will they do with that equipment over there?"

Later when Rob asked why Teancom didn't participate, I said, "Because he's scared of people, new things, and, most of all, failure."  Teancom is a perfectionist.  He HATES to fail.  I tried to give Tank my best, kindest pep talks about how failing makes us better people, about how if we never do new things, we'll never know if we like those things.  

I wanted him to know that I wouldn't force him to do something he didn't want to do.  I wasn't trying to get him to participate just to make him uncomfortable.  I just knew that he really did want to do this.  I said, "Teancom, what if gymnastics is the most fun thing you've ever done in your life?  I mean, maybe it won't be.  Maybe you'll hate it.  I don't know.  But what IF?  What if it's the most fun you've ever had?  And what if you missed it because you weren't brave enough to try?"  

So, through a combination of pep talks, bribery (he'll get ice cream if he participates each week), guilt ("I've already paid for 3 weeks for you"), and becoming more comfortable with the newness, he calmed down and agreed to try it out.  He told Rob on the phone that night, "I didn't do gymnastics today because I was scared.  But I'm going to do it for the next 3 weeks."  

Crossing my fingers and saying a little prayer that he really will do it.

Going back to the moment when I heard that scared little voice and saw that terrified face.  I instantly thought, "Tamra, you should have seen this coming."  He's come a long way, Teancom has, but he still battles that anxiety demon.  I wonder if he always will.

Of note

Our basement is coming along, but the changes aren't things that show up well in pictures.  For instance, light switches and outlets and water lines and duct work.  Unless you really, really, really care about those things, they're not worth a close-up shot, and they're not discernibly different from day to day.  When the walls start going up, then it'll be ready for another picture.

Picture-worthy or not, the changes are AWESOME.  For instance, the duct work.  The guy who lived here before us was a tinkerer, and he knew just enough to mess stuff up.  We've known the duct work was a mess for years, since we replaced the furnace.  They told us back then that they could re-work it all for about double the cost of the furnace.  We said no thanks.  But now we need new stuff installed anyway, since we are creating 4 new rooms in the basement.

So why am I reporting this?  Because our house feels a TON warmer now.  I didn't realize how unevenly our house was heating until it was suddenly evened-out.  This is most noticeable in our bedroom, which was previously an icebox, and from the basement into the kitchen, where leaving the door open was the best way to let in a huge draft of cold air.  I assumed those things were just part of owning an older home.  Nope!  Fixed.  It's blissful.

While all this work in the basement is being done, the kids have been living in one room.  It's working out better than I thought it would, and for the most part the kids are taking things in stride.  Check it out:

Looking in from the door

Looking from the edge of Micah's bed

The kids are champs.  Though I do have to say, we're all looking forward to having our space back (and then some).  The basement is so close that I can taste it.  We're ready to start utilizing our increased space, instead of being stuck managing the decreased space.