The next Big House Project

We will be tackling another bathroom here at the new scatterville. I got sick of the yucky peed on carpet that was remaining in there and ripped it out during Thanksgiving break. Yes most people head to the mall... I start demo work. :) So this is the before. I always forget to post before pictures. Notice the lovely vinyl tiles,
the wallpaper (I hate wallpaper), and the ducks!

Begining to look like the holidays

My little Ikea santa gnomes look great strung on some wooden bead garland in my kitchen window. They make me happy.

Letterboxing in November

It was so nice in November that we decided to head to a local park to
Here are the kids and I with a discovered box.

Stamping our books
A lone crane we found on a pond there.

Our Halloween pictures a bit late

K in her beautiful Fairy Princess costume. She picked out all the fabrics and where to put them. It turned out magical.

T dressed as Zorcon the conquerer. Not sure who that is but it made him happy. Made mom happy because it was basically the same costume as W's with modifications.


W the bad dude. Yup, he said, I'm a bad guy!


And here is the whole family right before he headed out for Trick or Treating, we made a killing in chocolate that night and am sad to report that we have since run out. Thankfully my friend Sue came down from our old scatterville to visit one night in Nov and brought Harry and David Truffles. Yummy!!!

Talk like a Pirate Day..... Arrrrrrrrr

We celebrated in style this year! Our homeschool group had talk like a pirate day at the park and we all got dressed up and even had a treasure hunt to look for hidden booty! We all had a blast and to our suprise there were several school classes at the park when we arrived. The kids were all taken back by the swords and hooks and eye patches we wore, especially seeing moms with them on. They were all very curious and wanted to play with us.

Letterboxing

We went letterboxing with our homeschool group last month, it's almost time for our next adventure. Here are the pictures someone took, looks like K was hiding during most of them, actually she was up at the front of the group with a few other girls.

Here we are at the parking lots listening to the instructions to find our first clue. I believe T is sharing all of his wisdom with us here.

The path in the park had some very narrow areas that led down to Fossil Creek. Someday it would be much fun to wade down in our crocs and see if we could find some fossils of our own.




We found the letterbox and the book. We each got to stamp our letterbox books with the Fossil Creek stamp. We are quite excited to go again, and this time we will have our own stamp.


T heading back out onto the trail. He enjoyed the hunting.

Trip to Dallas World Aquarium

W sitting in a tank well... he climbed up and said take my picture!


I am so in love with my new camera. Not only will it stop motion on waterfalls (forgot to load that picture) but it takes great pictures of jelly fish!



This is our very patient family waiting for W and I to get our move on. We are usually the ones holding up the movement. Well W is I am just usually with him waiting....... always waiting.....

At this point R and K have moved on and only W and I are on one side of the tank... T on the other, making faces at me to hurry up. I love this one, he's holding his breath like he is actually in the tank. Always funny that one.


Are they not the cutest three kids? We love going to these kind of places and we take our time and explore them all. We are not the family rushing from one exhibit to another, we are the ones that stand in the way of everyone else taking in every fish, stingray, turtle, or broccoli. They fed the saltwater fish broccoli while we were there. This tickled K cause broccoli is her favorite veggie.



This was by far the coolest tank. I only wish the manatees would have come closer so we could have gotten a picture of them. They were so beautiful and gracefull. We enjoyed the giant turtles and catfish.

This mornings pictures...

I have been admiring all the pictures on other blogs and have decided to use my beautiful camera to post my own family, yard and house. So here are some shots from this morning.



First I had to take a picture of my "solar clothes dryer". I think it's quite funny that these are now a thing to take pictures of. I have had one at each of my houses, installed by me mostly. I have always loved the smell of fresh dried laundry, but on the down side hate stiff towels, and the lint and dog hair that never seems to come off. But now this is the only clothes dryer we have. It works great, and luckily we are now in a hot climate in the shade so the clothes don't fade as much. The down side is it is humid in Texas and sometimes it takes all day to dry out our clothes.



K and W went out lizard hunting this morning. They didn't find any like we did yesterday on the trees. K hope I catch another toad tonight around the pool so they can put it in the tank with our new anole lizard we caught last week.






W caught our cat Sokka who had been high in the trees chases dragonflies we believe.




We then spied this amazing spider web right at the edge of the creek.




And who could resist the creek? It's a bedrock lined creek, so pretty and water fairly clear for a city drainage way.

Some of the kitchen remodel

If you know me at all you know that I could never leave anything alone. This house had some serious ugly going on in the dining room and family room. Well here is part of the fix.




this is what this wall looked like before. Notice the very ugly plastic chandeler is gone


maybe later today I'll actually clean the tools off of the kitchen table so you can see how the whole room looks!

Creek

Poor W... he is desperate. Really wants to wade down the creek in the back yard to retrieve these yellow things...

I however did not want to wade in the sometimes a bit smelly creek to help him and he was afraid to do it himself. Maybe today he'll get brave or I'll get my feet stinky and wet.

bunny love

K got a new leash for her bunny Lucy and has been spending much time walking her around the yard. This morning she had me grab the camera so I could take their picture and W jumped in to love Lucy too.

what we've been doing

We've been very busy. We took out all the carpet from the kitchen and family room and replaced it with laminate.

It's about time I posted moving day pictures

Leaving South Dakota



K and T


Suki and Marsh E Mellow.



W, the bunny Lucy and K.

So funny

Moving day

Well we are taking the slow and long approach to moving. The truck got here on Friday. It sat until later Saturday after our garage sale and then we started loading it. Finally Tuesday afternoon we got it full and pack up. We actually used 1 foot less then what we said we would use. The company is coming to pick up the trailer this afternoon. We stayed in a hotel last night, the thought of a nice cool room with tv and a bed sounded so good compared to our hot house, with no beds, and tiny tv. Well the room was hot but cooled off quickly, the kids wanted to swim, which we did for a while before I declared exhausted was not good for being a life guard.

The bed would have been good but in my Queen I had W, K, the dog and everyone had to have their feet touching me, including the dog! So I did not have much room and woke every hour on the hour.

The roofers did get started on the roof here, and we lucked out that the two layers of cedar roofing under the bad asphalt was in perfect condition and could be reused with the shingles right over it saving us from having to pay for sheeting, or even tar paper. That should save us several thousand dollars and many days work also. They are shingling the back already and should have the house done by closing on Friday. That leaves the gutter guy to put on the gutters.

We are leaving tomorrow, Thursday and heading for the "old scatterville" we were planning on working on it but we are so totally exhausted I don't believe we will be doing anything but resting until Sunday when we drive for Texas and our "new" scatterville. We close on it on Monday morning.

I'll try to update some more once we get there, and unpacked a bit. Keeping my same email address so drop me a line anytime.

Old Scatterville Update

I have pictures of first Scatterville home being updated. We have two finished bedrooms, two finished bathrooms, mostly finished living area and kitchen.


This is half of the living room. The green color is lovely, the floors still need refinished but the trim and paint is mostly done. The clutter is mostly gone being moved to another house.


This is half of the master bedroom, almost done, just the window left to be painted and the floors again.

This is the other side of the masterbedroom looking out into the living room.



This is the second bedroom all but done except for a little touch up of paint and of coarse the wood floors refinished.

This is another view of the second bedroom, with the lighting that is throughout the house. We chose to keep the walls 8 feet high only so that the heater located in the floor in the middle of the house could be blown through all the rooms with a commercial grade ceiling fan. It works like a charm.

W's birthday (late)

W had his 5th birthday on the 6th. We woke up early and headed to the Omaha Zoo. We spent the entire day there and by 5pm we were all thoroughly exhausted, and very hot. It was 100 degrees that day. These birthday cake pictures were taken at 9pm that night after our two hour drive home.

Wow... life keeps going

This is our new kitchen. We are really excited about the metal cabinets and being able to have someone come in and paint them. They are in perfect order. The carpet is gonna go first thing! We are debating between some Ikea wood floor, laminate or having someone come in and refinish the concrete floor.

Next up is the Master bedroom... notice the bathroom off of it... with a shower. No more going in the basement to shower. Then again there is no basement.
Our backyard is a nice size with a creek running along the back. Notice the nice studio for me. It has electricity and an air conditioner.
Our living room, is very nice. Love the vintage aluminum windows in front. Our Family room, and two of the bedrooms have the exact same windows. I don't have a picture of the family room for some reason. It is right off the dining room and is a whopping 23 x 18. Great size for all our toys, computers, TV and fun stuff. It also has the laundry room right off of it and there beside the dining room is a huge half bath. We love the big opening and have plans right away to replace the sliding doors with something super cool. The plastic chandelier is hilarious



Our moving truck arrived today. We are using ABF upack. We will pack the truck and they drive it. We close on our new house on Monday 23rd, and plan on stopping at the old Scatterville before that since it is almost half way.