As of Tuesday, we have moved back into our 99% completed home.  The girls were thrilled to be in their rooms.  Pictures coming tomorrow because the rooms turned out so cute.  Both are unique and creative and I’m way impressed with their ideas and my designer’s paint choices.  Charlie loves his room but is very nervous about sleeping in it.  The last two nights he has started out in his bed but finds us at some point during the night.  I am fine with this – I just want him to have a secluded space to go to sleep.  Whether he stays there all night is irrelevant.

So, we are back but the house was a disaster zone.  I had cleaned the basement before we “moved out”, but the kids would get stuff out every time we went over to work on the weekends.  So my formerly pristine family room looked like a junk room.  Plus the Christmas Tree is still standing.  Not to mention that all the furniture on thh main level was still stuffed into one room and all the kitchen stuff was still in the basement.  Ugh.  I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning making this house back into a home.  I accomplished a lot, but not enough.  I figured out what many of the drawers and cabinets would hold.  I ran about 20 bazzillion loads of dishes since they were all covered in dust and rubble.  I put the dishes in their designate cabinet.  Sometimes I just stood there, staring at cabinets and trying to figure out what made sense.  I only moved the essentials – a lot of stuff is still in the basement.  I think I’ll move it up as needed, effectively weeding out the paraphernalia that has accumulated over the years.  Oh – and I cleaned the refrigerator.  It was gross.  It is going in the basement and a new one is being delivered on Monday, but I’m glad I took the time now to get it clean.

Yesterday I cleaned more, moved more of the kids stuff around, moved more kitchen items and, after dinner, started putting the furniture back into the living room.  The new color in there looks amazing – I’m so pleased with it.  Thanks awesome designer!

I don’t even want to think about all the work involved with picking up the basement (including taking down the Christmas Tree – hey, we weren’t living there, remember?) and the girls’ old room (they are future hoarders, I swear.)  I’m tackling that today.  Woo Hoo.

They aren’t done – but we don’t care anymore.  My parents went to Florida right after Christmas for a month and we moved int0 their house.  Their clean, roomy house.

Sweet relief.

You know that feeling towards the end of your pregnancy when the newness and excitement of it all has worn off and you just want to be done?  That feeling that hits you about two weeks before you deliver the baby?  That is right where I am with the construction project.  Right.  There.

The dirt.  It is overwhelming.  Dusting is pointless.  Vacuuming helps.  Two nights ago I spent a couple hours vacuuming up all the dust, rubble and wood shavings that had fallen down into my storage closet in the basement.  Once they took the floor off the kitchen, only the subfloor was left, which consisted of 1″x4″ boards with big gaps in between each board – big enough to let just about anything fall into portions of the basement that weren’t finished (like my storage closet and laundry room.)  The kids’ toys were covered with it.  Our pockets of the clothes hanging in there were filled with it.  It was disgusting.  In fact, it had been like that for a couple weeks, but I just didn’t have the energy to tackle it because the rest of the basement needs constant vacuuming just to save the carpeting from complete ruin.  And the bedroom floors – lordy!  They are a mess all the time.

The invasion.  It is stressful.  Every day there are guys in our house pounding away.  Their stuff is everywhere and they leave coffee cups and soda cups all over the place.  Every night all five of us are jammed into three rooms – our only options are the two bedrooms  or the basement family room which also sports a card table for eating at.  Eating down there all the time has wreaked havoc on the carpeting.  Add the fact that it is December and a particularly cold one at that, and you have a lot of fighting, whining and screaming going around at the Heartfull household.  Joy!

The good news is we are on the home stretch.  The upstairs walls are painted, trim is installed and ceiling fixtures are up.  The trim needs to be caulked and painted and the bathroom vanity and other fixtures need installation.  The carpeting can go in as soon as they say it is in.  The stairs are done except for the railing.  The kitchen cabinets have been in for a couple weeks and the counter tops go in on Monday.  They should finish the trim in the kitchen soon, I would think next week.  Then we can paint the first floor and stain the wood floors.  I would say two weeks from now – though Christmas will throw a wrench in the timing.

Yeah – its going to be a great when we finally get it done.  But at this point, I’m a couple weeks from the “due date” and I’m just over it.

I asked Chip for a bite of his free-from-the-grocery-store cookie.  Usually that results in a crumb being handed my way.  This time, he gave me a pretty good-sized chunk.  Enough to even taste the cookie.

Me:  Wow, that was a big piece of cookie, Chip.  Thanks!

Chip:  A big piece for a big person!

Me:  Ha, yeah, well, thanks.  Yep, mom is bigger than you and I do need big bites of your cookie…

Chip:  (with a very sly grin) Apparently a little bigger than Emmy, too.

And I laughed and laughed.  Emmy, the 20-something nanny who wears a size extra-small and sports a bikini at the pool is, apparently, so much smaller that even my 4 year old notices.   Luckily I’m not terribly sensative.  How can you be with a four year old around to keep your head out of the sand?

Chip likes to tell me that he likes me best.  He says this when I’m trying to get him to stay with Grandma while I run an errand, or let daddy take him out of the car, or sometimes, even when we are just at home and snuggling.

The other day he even started telling me all the reasons why:  I’m nice, I’m fun, I smell good.  I told John this and he wondered what the heck he smelled like.  I just thought, well, like “dad”.

Sometimes being “mom” is a lot of work.  But this makes it worth it.

Nothing to slow down a project like the discovery of termites.  Well, past termites as they are actually long gone.  But the damage they did is incredible.  The two rows of  two-by-fours (including a supporting beam) are totally gone.  As in, the plaster in the girls’ room is holding up the roof.  Oh yeah – and the new addition because lucky!for!us! the addition rests on that point.

The good news is they are fixing it.  Since the damage goes behind a st0ne wall, they have to take out the girls’ bedroom wall since they can’t see how far down the little buggers went.  Hopefully not to the subfloor.  Because then they also have to tear into my finished basement’s ceiling.

Sigh.

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Better news is that they have three of the kitchen cabinets up and they look lovely.  I’m very, very pleased.

John and I had a great time in Tennessee.  We went to a Vols game on Saturday and to the Smokey Mountains on Sunday.  Friday night and Monday morning we spent driving.

We met our friends Mark and Julia at the game and had a great time.  It didn’t seem like it had been 13 years since we last saw them.  And the Vols won.  And the the food at the Mellow Mushroom was fantastic.

I have to say, though, I had forgotten how incredibly uncomfortable it is to sit on bleachers for 3 hours.  I think I pinched a nerve – my lower back and lower legs ached all day Sunday and Monday and the backs of my thighs still feel like I ran another half marathon.

The Smokey Mountains were still beautiful – even in rainy, cold weather.  Tourists still drove drove incredibly slow (5 mph, people???) through Cades Cove.  The Little River Road is still very twisty turny.  Gatlinburg is still very gouche.  We had a great time though and started plannin a family trip over spring break.

It is always nice to get back to your home and kids.  Of course Chip was napping when we got home Monday afternoon and yelled “Go Away” and “I want Emmy” when he woke up and saw us.  John was stunned.  I told him it was par for the course and Em has told me in the past that he does the same thing to her when he wakes and expects to see me.  Small consolation, but I’ll take it.

Mare’s welcome home hug at school pick up more than made up for it.  And even though I had to force the extended hug, Bird was obviously pleased as well.

Last night I started tackeling the wallpaper in the powder room.  The wood floors are going in at some point (they are delivered and waiting) and I’m having the guy install them in the powder room as well, even though that room isn’t officially a room to be rehabbed by the contractor.  The crew tore out the toilet and vanity and I paid the plumber to get the pipes ready for the pedestal sink.

My brother took a hammer drill to the floor yesterday and removed the two layers of tile that were in there. So at that point, technically, the floors could be installed.  But when I got home yesterday I saw that he didn’t take the tile off the wall (there was only one row at the base of the wall.)  So yesterday afternoon I took a tool I found in the crew’s arsenal and chipped off the tile.  Which, of course, took off chunks of plaster.  So I needed to fix that before the guy installed the floors, but before I could plaster the walls I needed to remove the wall paper.  And before I did that, I needed to remove the switch plates.  Enter Chip.

I was searching for a screwdriver when John got home from work.  I told Chip to go ask daddy to find me a flat head screwdriver.  John sent him back with one of those multi-tip doohickeys and Chip was upset that it wasn’t the right kind.  I showed him how it worked, though, and then you would have thought I showed him his first piece of sliced bread.

I asked him if he wanted to help me remove the the switchplate and he started jumping up and down frantically.  He was so excited.  Then I lifted him up and he exclaimed
“This is going to be sooooo cool!”.  And then I let him turn the screw all by himself and he was thrilled.  Amazingly thrilled.  The kid loves this stuff.

John and I are headed to Tennessee for a weekend of Volunteers football and solitude.  My parents have a vacation home in Crossville, Tennessee which is in between Nashville and Knoxville.  I may or may not have mentioned that John and I lived in Knoxville for three years befor having kids.  I worked and John finished up his undergraduate degree at UT.  We haven’t been back since and have some friends there that we would like to see.  This would be only the second time we have left the kids for a weekend together.  The first was our trip to New York City when I was on the cover of Women’s World.  We had a blast that time.  I don’t expect this trip to be quite as exciting, but I’m still looking forward to it.

Of course, before I can leave I must get the kids and their grandparents ready for my absense.  I have to pack suitcases and give my mom an iternerary of where to take them and ideas on what to do.   I’m a little worried about my parents going crazy – dad has a short fuze these days when it comes to little kids and mom gets tired.  Hopefully the girls can keep the bickering to a minimum – we’ll have a talk before I leave.  Other than that, they are pretty self-sufficient.  Chip – well, he is four and very, very busy.  Nothing I can do about that.  I predict much TV in my kids’ future.  They will be thrilled.  My brother is going to take them to a family-oriented party on Saturday night, so that will be a nice break for the grandparents.

Anyways, Go Vols!

Here is a link to the segment they were on.

Isn’t Chip a ham?

Yay!