Chainsaw and paint

On Saturday night I got a call from the nurse at Camp Susque. Not exactly who I was really wanting to hear from. She said Nadia had a slight fever (100.2) and was complaining of a sore throat. She gave her some Tylenol and had her sleep in the infirmary that night. She must have been doing better since then because I haven't heard from anyone at Camp Susque since then, and I did see Nadia in pictures they posted that they took of the girls at camp on Sunday - some from chapel on Sunday morning, some from a picnic dinner, and some from a hymn sing on Sunday night. The first 4 photos are from the

camp's FB page. The theme this week is Wild West - hence the red bandanas. The boys have the same bug, which for them also includes a cough. They were both rather crabby today. I was going to take them to a VBS tonight that I saw advertised in our grocery store a few days ago, but I ended up letting them have a little VeggieTale marathon this evening at home instead while Paul and I were working on the deck outside. We stayed home almost all day today. We made one quick trip to the hardware store in our town for a second gallon of porch and floor

paint and also the parking lot of the grocery store to sell two toys to someone (that's another $30 toward my next camera lens).

I got plenty of exercise today. I did use the elliptical, but that's not what I'm referring to. I was painting the basement floor (took almost two gallons as it's a big surface area) and also lugging parts of our deck to Paul's dad's truck after Paul sawed off a section. He removed all of the railing except for the big posts and about 1/5 of the flooring of the deck. The chainsaw started to get dull, the

truck was pretty full of wood, and it was the boys' bedtime so we stopped at that point. Yesterday when I went out to mow the lawn as I walked down the steps of the deck half of a board flew up and two nails flew toward me. That was the final straw. We knew when we bought the house in 2008 that the deck wasn't in great shape, and we had been talking this year about doing something in the near future. We're thinking probably we'll put in concrete steps and some pavers instead of another deck. Two of our neighbors built decks this summer. Our next door neighbor

replaced a wooden deck with a composite deck, and another neighbor built a wood deck (their house didn't come with a deck). I'm not sure when Paul will be able to work on putting in steps and pavers so after we finish removing this wood deck we'll probably just be going out the garage or front door for awhile until we at least have steps from the sliding glass door in the kitchen down to the ground. The only table we had on the deck was a small picnic table for kids. I was planning to bring that in this week anyhow as we'll be using it for the smallest kids when my sister's family is here. If money was no object, I'd choose to have a composite deck, but considering we don't use the deck that much at all, it's really not a priority to me at all in terms of our finances.

I painted the wooden steps going down to the basement. They look a million times better. I should have done that years ago. I feel the same way about the basement floor. I've never painted a concrete floor before, but it looks SO much better. I also painted the two poles down there which had been a dark orange (rust) color. They look so much nicer light green! I tried painting one block of cinderblock with white paint and quickly decided I would rather not paint all the cinderblock walls. I am going to try to use white curtains instead to hide at least some of the walls, electric panel, hot water heater, etc. I am excited to see how the basement will look when I'm done! I should have taken a "before" pic. I'll share an "after" pic when I'm done. Today was a day I was really missing my mom. Home improvement projects really make me think of her so much. She had such great ideas, and I would love her input and also to show her what I had done. Thankfully the boys gave me a lot of positive feedback. They love the new look! Paint is not expensive (much cheaper than flooring), but what a difference it can make! I also did a little bit of painting of the walls in the garage and the stairway going down to the basement. I'd like to do a bit more in those areas later this week. We have plenty of white paint in the basement so I don't need to spend any money to spruce those walls up a bit. Prior to this week I hadn't done any painting in the basement or garage.