Kitchen refinish

After five years of high traffic, the kitchen floors needed to be refinished.  Judi left town with the girls and left Nick in charge of getting it done (and cleaning up all the dust for days afterwards)

With the second coat still wet

Cut

 

Another part of the process

Power Tools!

 

Remember when Nick and Tia put up the shelves for Coale?  Here's Tia with power tools!

House--mostly wood.

oooooh boy!

It's busy around here!

My online class has started.
A new project has kicked into high gear.
I'm trying to get in another Zumba class each week.
I have 3 classrooms to volunteer in each week!

It's all good. I choose to do all these crazy, but wonderful things.

Here's the other (crazy) thing we're going to do, soon.


That's ~1300 square feet of new wood for the floor on the first level of the house. (Mazda 5 included to show size.)

Goodbye ugly carpet! Hello Sydney blue wood!

Laboring

Yesterday, we were tossing and organizing... I got the girls to clean off a shelf that had been piled high with their school stuff. I'm not sure if them moving it to the floor is what I intended, but they sorted the stuff into a pile per girl. Now I have to figure out what to do with each pile. Re: my desk, it's almost clear! The bookshelf is organized, too! We're almost ready for the school year.

Did I tell you that we're getting ready to take out the carpet downstairs and put in wood floor? The wood arrives on Wednesday (according to the company where we ordered it). Demolition and installation should start 9/24. Stay tuned!

situated learning

Learning...Here, Natalie is learning about fractions and calculating "the middle" of the drawer to place the drawer handle pulls in the right place. Natalie is learning in a very authentic, rich, meaningful context with the help of her father scaffolding the process so she can understand.

Nick and Natalie discussed the process of determining the center of the drawer. Nick broke the task down so that Natalie could understand all the steps. She learned about what information was needed, e.g., the length of the drawer, and the length of the handle, and then what to do with the information. He explained subtracting the length of the handle from the length of the drawer so that they could divide the remaining length into equal parts so the handle would be in the center of the drawer.

She was very engaged and focused because Nick allowed her to help drill the holes. It was definitely a real world task and it involved power tools. Learning can be fun!





(Yes, we have art by little girls EVERYWHERE in our house!)

A nice view

A view from our roof (taken back in 2006).

Last Saturday (11/22/08)

Nick put the girls to work chopping down the pine trees that we didn't like (on the side of our house). Here, they are with their pile of wood. Good job girls!

New Couch

Meet our new couch. It should arrive soon. It's more burgundy than it looks in that picture. (In the picture, it just looks brown to me. It also, definitely looks like a couch!) Shopping for it with 3 little girls was, um, interesting. Not horrible, but they were noisy!

Tip of the day, take a portable DVD player shopping with you! It helps.

More on the kitchen...

Here's the prototype for our new table.... Hee! We decided cardboard wouldn't work very well.

Click to see more pictures of our kitchen.

The table Daddy built

Yippee! We have a new table in the kitchen. Here's where we'll eat most of our meals. When it was installed, the girls started calling it, "The table Daddy built." It's true! Nick designed and engineered the table. It had to be strong to hold the corian and plywood. The base is securely fastened to the floor (bolted), and there is silicon caulk around the base so our crumb generators can't get stuff under the table.

The table is the same corian as the rest of the kitchen counters. Our kitchen is done! There's a notch cut out of the table so it is also braced by the cabinet. I'm so excited. The new table is so easy to clean, and we don't have to use (or clean) placemats!

Next up, new kitchen chairs.

Home Improvement

Nick installed two whole-house fans on Sunday. We don't have a/c. We don't really need it here. Just for a frame of reference, it was 77 degrees outside at 4:20 pm on a late-July afternoon. At 11:54 pm the same evening it is 61 degrees outside. It only gets really hot here about 15-20 days a year. Even when it gets hot during the day, it usually cools off to below 70 at night. It doesn't seem necessary to have a/c. It seems like it would be a little "un-green" of us to have it.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Nick in the attic, the fan, and duct. Please ignore the mess by the fan and duct. The pictures were taken in the attic storage area. That area is supposed to be messy!

The whole-house fan (theoretically) exchanges all the air in the house with cooler outside air in a very short amount of time. (Maybe 1/2 hour? I can't remember. I'll have to check with my technical advisor about that.) (I checked with the technical advisor and he said each fan is supposed to 1500 cubic feet of air per minute.) At the end of the day, it will make the house cool off a lot faster. So far, it is nice to have. Last night, I was actually cold with the window open. Yay!



















































But wait, there's more...

The pictures below show where the fans are in the attic (they just blow the air up in the attic and then it gets forced outside through the attic vents). This helps cool the attic too.

You can see a picture of one of the vents for the fan. Nick installed it up there... probably 15 feet off the ground inside of the house. I am very thankful I wasn't home to watch him balance precariously on a ladder and cut the wall. The second vent is installed in a very dimly lit corner of our room and didn't photograph well.



























































Yay Nick! We'll return to our regularly scheduled blog of little girl photos tomorrow!