Where to start...

Phoebe was baptized this week. It was awesome! It was simple and sweet and casual and the spirit was strong. I wish more family could have made it, but it was so last minute that it just was what it was.

Both sets of grandparents made it, as well as Aunt Laura, Aunt Megan and Mia, and Aunt Alysa and her kids. Phoebe's best friend also came with her sisters and dad. It was small and perfect.

The next day we slept in and then went to the house and finished the rest of the drywall on the ceiling. You would have thought that it wouldn't have taken all day, but it did. We finished just before 10pm. The ceiling that was left to be done was all of the more intricate cuts. It took forever. Now though, we can say the ceiling is 100% finished upstairs.

And did I mention that the insulation is in??? Oh yes. The upstairs walls are insulated, my friends!!

Now let's see if I can find photos of all of this...

Drywalling Nightmares

It's 4am.

I just woke up having slept for 3.5 hours.

It's because my sleep has been a restless one...

Full of nightmares about drywalling...

And one weird dream about blowing the house up.

I just want to sleep a deep, dreamless sleep,

And I'd like to write my dad a letter:

Dear Dad,
You are my hero. There's nothing you can't do. You are amazing. How can you go at the pace you do, as old as you are? I'd like to spend a month with you just tinkering around with you and gleaning knowledge off of you. I love you so much, dad. You are so kind hearted and loving. You have a way of making me feel like no one is as special as me. You have been a great support to Trevor and me as we have built this house. You stick with us when you could and maybe should have just thrown up your hands and walked away. It's been frustrating and irritating and dumb at times, but you always seem to be able to put a positive spin on things. How will we ever repay you and mom for all the ways you have served and helped us? I'm feeling overwhelmed with the burden of it.
I love you, Dad! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

You guys, the house has ceiling!

this next picture is from tonight after we got home from working all day. It doesn't show it very well, but I'm covered in insulation and drywall dust. 

Soooooooooo...

we passed the electrical inspection...

now on to insulation and drywall

Second Time's the Charm

Hello, faithful readers, whoever you may be.

We have had a full week.

I'll start with my eye update. It's still healing. It's been swollen and goopy every day, but also less and less of those things every day. I guess eyes take a bit to heal.

My vision in that eye seems to be a bit blurry, but I attribute it to the extra goop in there. The rocks in my eye feeling is also less and less every day.

Today at the house we finished wiring every single fixture possible. We hooked up all the grounds and neutrals in every plug, light, fire alarm, switch and whatever else we could hook up. My fingers are killing me. Electricians have strong fingers my friends. It's all ready though. We are passing the inspection this time.

Today, we started having a problem with the van. It's a pretty significant one, where I start the van, no problem, and then as soon as I push on the gas to move, it dies. Every time. The blessing is that we can still drive it by gunning it, and it may have happened at a good time. Trevor may have time to fix it, depending on when we can schedule the insulation to go in.

And lastly, I want to show you my kids' Halloween costumes. They were so proud of themselves. We went ultra cheap this year and used what we had and a little bit of DI and other thrift stores and did a lot of remaking. It was so much fun this year!

Failing

I'm sure you can all guess what this post is about, given the title.

We failed the electrical inspection.

Actually, it sounds worse than it is.

We didn't fail anything that we had done, but we failed because we hadn't grounded any of the wires.

We didn't know we were supposed to do that. I mean, don't you do that when you hook up the fixtures?

So there's that.

Trevor has half the grounds run in the panel already. He did that last night while I was writhing in pain in my bed.

The good news, and the blessing part of all of this is that we don't need to fix any wires or staples or anything like that. That could have gotten very expensive. I'm very grateful it's just grounds.

So even though it's not exactly how we wanted it to go, our prayers were answered and we didn't have to shell out any more dough.

The end.

But not really.

The end will come next week, hopefully.

To be continued...