The turning-on-the-heat-debate

We haven't turned our furnace on yet.  It's November 5th.  The last several days have been at least partially overcast, which has meant that the indoor temperature has only gotten to 71 F at the highest. This morning the inside temperature was 63 F.  Right now it is 29 F outside.  It's chilly enough that we're eating warm foods for breakfast.  I think we would have turned on the heat, except that we can see the sky clearing above the snow-covered earth.  Highs today are expected to be 39 F.  It will be interesting to see how warm the house gets.  Prior to this weeks overcast skies, the house was getting up near 80 F by late afternoon if I didn't shut the curtains.

Overall we're pretty happy with the passive solar thing.

It may be time to set the furnace to come on for a little bit in the morning though.

Gym

We've been debating where to put our treadmill.  Squeeze it into our bedroom? Purposely only finish half the closet and really squeeze it in there?  The family room?  All these options weren't ones we were too happy about.  Then we went camping with a huge group of friends, and one friend gave all the kids some boxing lessons.  J loved it.  So much that we decided to get him a big ol' punching bag for his birthday.  We originally thought we'd hang it in his room, but that would crowd things and if we ever wanted to use it, it wouldn't be very convenient.  I'm not sure who came up with the idea, but we decided to turn the small storage room (the one I called our "Zombie apocalypse room" and had thought about mounting a bookcase to disguise the door) into our very own home gym.

I'm not going to go back to find the photo, but last time you saw it, it was a square cement room that Kyle and I had painted white.  It had two ventilation windows and one light and that was it.  Kyle added some outlets to plug the treadmill and an iPod or something into).  He made a pull up bar, and hung our bikes on the wall so we can ride the bike trainer in the winter.

Shelves and outlets.

Flooring started.

Wall mounted bikes, with bike trainer moved out of the way, and J's punching bag.  The flooring fit perfectly.

Punching bag and pull up bar.

Treadmill.

Finally, if you didn't already see it, here's a video of J trying out his new punching bag, with the whole family (plus friends) cheering him on.

Shelves in the closet. Happy thought indeed.

Ten points if you can name the movie this post title comes from.  We've been getting organized around here, then we've been bringing more boxes over from my parents and start all over with the being unorganized.  It's coming along though.  

We bought a spice rack and Kyle installed it in the cabinet. 

It was nice to get that cabinet organized.  Somehow I had collected multiples of several different spices and they were all open.  Now everything is combined and refilled with the extras downstairs in the "Family Store" as the kids are calling it.

Awhile back we bought some shelves from Ikea for this really deep cabinet that wasn't really great for storing anything we wanted to access.  We also found some side panels in the as-is section which made the whole project much easier than it would have been if Kyle had had to create the side panels himself.  I think he's going to write up a post about the whole process but short story is that we went from this:

To this:  (It still needs a couple of shelves in the middle skinny area- it will be perfect for cereal and bags of chips.

Kyle cut one of the original shelves from the previous cupboard down to fit in this one- and created a "mug" shelf.  

I also thought of something to corral all the sandwich wraps that end up everywhere.  

Kyle has been doing a lot of work in our closet too.  He put in a slide out scarf rack.

Several pants holders

And slide out baskets in some of the cubbies.

We also got our bedroom cleaned up.  It feels so much nicer in here now.  We also have room for the kids laundry baskets so we can put clothes in the right basket as we're folding (well as Kyle is folding).

We hung a clock and my jewelry holder in the bathroom.

We hung stuff on the walls in the living room (the watercolor with the gold frame is waiting for our next trip to Ikea to get a bigger matted black frame so it will match some of the other artwork we have in the room- the bigger frame will balance things better too.  The trick with this wall was the awkward position of the thermostat.  

My friends got me this print as a housewarming gift.  

I put the shelves in the bathroom closet and started filling them with my supplies.

I put together these shelves (though we need a few more shelves to finish it up) for our "family store".

Kyle assembled this one.

We put shelves in the closet under the stairs for holding games.

We have a TV downstairs, and are debating whether it is a terrible idea to put the wii down there.

Kyle got the projector almost all the way installed.  He needs a longer cord to finish.

More

Kyle got the doors painted and installed.

Then he was able to clear out the garage so I can park in it.

We found some curtain hardware to hold the curtains open and got them installed on the dining and living room windows.

Kyle and I hung our wall hanging that we bought on one of the floating islands of lake Titicaca in Peru.

Kyle hung this cabinet that he built many years ago.  

I installed all the doorknobs (well, Kyle did a few).

Kyle swapped out the switch for a sensor for the lights on the stair treads.  Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any sort of ambient light sensor so the stair lights go on ALL THE TIME, even during the day.  We're going to have to fix that because it drives me a more nutty than it probably should.  :)

See- lights on in the day- every time anyone or anydog walks by.

The kids found their old toothbrush holder in the bath toy basket (they also found the bath toy basket).  Luckily my nearly 12-year-old son doesn't mind the jungle animal theme in their bathroom.  

We hung some shelves in J and A's rooms, above their beds so they'd have somewhere to put their clocks and lamps and Magic the Gathering cards.

Today my bathroom mirror came.  I love it.  I'm really glad we went with a custom mirror instead of just buying the biggest mirror we could find.  Especially since the plugs would have made that option difficult.

Home Making

Kyle painted the doors and we bought doorknobs (23 of them), so tomorrow we should be able to install doors.  

He also did a few little jobs to make me happy.  My old dry-erase calendar was too big for the space we had, but we found this one, and the blank dry erase board below it.  

We had a shower extender from our last house where we had used it to raise a shower head.  Kyle put in in my side of the shower to lower the head.  The different color metals makes it look really great, I know, I'm thinking about how well a spray paint would stick to something in a wet area.  

While Kyle had the shower head off, he found these inside it.  There were actually more, but he dumped some down the drain before showing these to me.  Gross.  I think my shower head has better water pressure now though.

We hung the magnet board and a book shelf in E's room. Notice the poor baby in his bed.  He's sick.  Even sick, he likes having a big bed.  

Close up.  We used to have these on our fridge, but magnets don't stick to the new fridge.

Kyle adjusted the length on the chandeliers so that they are level now, and I put the candles in.  We also got the curtains hung.  

We still don't have blinds in any of the other windows, but I did cut a piece of cardboard to put in the small window in our bedroom.  It's classy.  

Odds and Ends and Moving

Kyle fixed this pipe conduit that was broken.  He had to chisel out the stone around it, so the stone guy will have to come back to fix this part.

J and his friend N and A and CP spent an afternoon moving the bulk of the toys over.

Then they had a popsicle break on the back porch.

The contractor sent a guy over to put some finish trim around the exterior doors.

Kyle put up some mirrors and towel bars.

The kids bathroom has hooks instead of towel bars.

 I've been washing dishes and putting them away.

Hall bathroom.

Thanks to all the great friends who came and helped move all the heavy stuff.  

Everything piled in.

Starting to put things away.

We moved the kids beds over, and this is what we found under the bunk beds.  They weren't too happy about having to clean that up.  Clearly they have too much stuff.

We went to Ikea again last night to see if they had more barstools, and they did, but we also decided to get a table.  Kyle was going to build one, but we liked this one, it extends quite a bit and fits really well in our space.  We also got a couple of rugs and a bench.  Ikea didn't have the chairs we wanted so we'll have to go back again for those.