Getting ready for grandkids

Only those who have lived in a house being remodeled know how absolutely filthy dirty things get in the process. I actually spent the entire day cleaning in order to have it clean enough for Ethan, Audrey, and Isaac to crawl around on the floor, eat at the table, and generally avoid picking up any toxins while at Nana’s house. I had, I think it was, 28 jobs to do. The way I do a big cleaning like this is to take my pad of paper around and write down everything that needs doing. Then I number them in the order that I want to do them. I space out things I don’t care for, like cleaning the different parts of the bathroom, and, of course, leave the vacuuming and scrubbing for the tail end. I also cleaned all the dust off of and packed all the Christmas decorations except the tree. We have been living amid heaps of empty boxes to use for gradually packing, so just getting them out of the way made the house seem so much bigger.

All of this while Don worked on making the stairs safer. As you can see, the railing at the top is higher and is also more secure, despite the fact that it can be removed in order to move large pieces up the stairs. And, believe it or not, we finally have a hand rail for the kids (and us) to hold onto when they go up and down the stairs. And notice the carpeting and freshly painted walls. We are getting there…:)

We removed the sheetrock from along the  stairs, because we couldn’t get new paint to stick without chipping off. We haven’t mudded and painted it, yet, but we put the handrail on anyway.

This is kind of blurry, but you should be able to see that we put a 2×4 box about 6″ high under the railing to raise it to a safer height. Then Dad put a pipe down from the underside of the top of the railing through holes in the floor, which holds it very secure!

This shows the color upstairs. It really doesn’t look quite that much like mustard, but almost. I think it is a very nice color, but you may not agree. At any rate, the walls are clean and covered with paint. The trim along the floor is just leaning there. It still has to be affixed to the walls.