Floor Update

They finished sanding Mom & Dad's floor on Tuesday. They had to rent a special hardwood sander that's designed for houses that have the old hot water radiators. It's designed to be able to get underneath the radiators while sanding. They needed this to be able to get up close to the edges because of the logs.







Here's a shot of the floor I took tonight (w/o a flash). I believe they've put two coats of finish on the floor. I think they're going to put a top coat on tomorrow and then it will be done. Wow does it ever stink in there. I was in for a few minutes and my eyes were burning. We'll try to air the place out this weekend before mom and dad get home.

Our little boy's getting bigger

Today was Brennan's first day of preschool. He's going to preschool at the old Honeyville School, now Eden Worship Center. He has class on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 8:30 to 11:00. Today I picked up Brennan and his buddy Noah after class and they were both eager to tell me about how much fun they had. The highlight appears to be finger painting with chocolate pudding and then getting to eat the pudding. Throughout the day Brennan kept mentioning how much fun he had at preschool. Here are a few shots of Brennan getting ready for his big day. Sawyer filled his diaper right before Monica was ready to take pictures of Brennan so the photo-op got cut short.

At the neighbors

Mom and Dad are in Phoenix for this week visiting Melissa, Maury, and Isaiah. While they're gone, they are having their hardwood floors sanded down and refinished. Here's a few "before" pictures and a few shots of the sanding that was done today. The before pictures don't really do justice to the need to have the floors redone.

Demolition

A few Saturdays ago, I set out to remove the closet in our "mud room" to make way for the entrance to the new laundry room. Here's a shot of the closet before I got the sawzall involved. Brennan was on hand most of the time to help me out. I started by taking the closet doors off and taking all the trim off.













Once I got to the point of actually ripping the walls out, it got pretty dusty in there. Fortunately Monica and the boys were gone during this part.















Here's the current state of the area.

















Jon Swartz came out a few days later and helped me rip this hole into the garage for our entrance into the laundry room. I'm pretty confident I could've taken at least 2 or 3 times longer than Jon did to frame the opening and created a much bigger mess. The opening is covered by a sheet of blue styrofoam right not to try to avoid all of our cold air escaping into the garage.











Over the next few weeks I need to get the electrical work done and hang the drywall. The guy who is going to be doing the mudding can't get to it until a week or two into September so that buys me a little time, which at my current pace I'll need.

On the adoption front, we're starting to tick away at our to-do lists. We both got our autobiographies done this week. That's a pretty big accomplishment. Hopefully we can get far enough along to get our home study interviews scheduled soon.

Brennan and Isaiah

One day during Isaiah's last week in Indiana, Brennan and Isaiah were watching the movie The Incredibles and they decided they wanted to pretend to be superheros. Brennan decided to be Dash and Isaiah went with THE FLASH. Isaiah went for the mug shot photo shoot.

Under Contract

Last week we received our signed contracts and our Adoption Planner from AGCI which included our dossier information. Between that and the home study, we've mostly been stuck in the "wow, we've got a lot of stuff to do" mode. We have a call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon with our case manager from AGCI to review the dossier and get our questions answered. After that it will be time to buckle down and start picking things off of the list.

Some of you may already know, but in case you don't, some of our best friends, JB & Carla Hochstetler, are joining us on the adoption journey. They're also planning to adopt from Ethiopia through AGCI. We're looking forward to going through the process together. Since our home study agency is from Louisville, KY and we have to pay travel costs, we're going to coordinate with JB & Carla so that they can get our interviews in at the same time. Because JB is so busy with Bible Memory camps for a few more weeks, I've been using that to justify some of my procrastination. Thanks guys! I better build a little cushion though because Carla doesn't usually mess around.

I'll get a laundry room update posted later this week. (Sneak peek - It may involve some demolition).

Laundry Room & Adoption Update

I was able to make another dent in the laundry room project today. I started off my morning (ok, forenoon) by getting the dirty work out of the way and made a trip into the attic.

I had to crawl into this part of the attic to run a new electrical wire to the light in the laundry room. Previously this light was switched with the garage lights. I was pretty sure Monica wouldn't think it was very cool to need to go to the garage to turn on the laundry room light. It might take away some of the convenience of the main level laundry. Being in the attic brought back some good memories of working on JB & Carla's house.













Brennan wanted to get in the attic with me. I decided I didn't need any holes in our ceiling so I just let him peek in.













After I got back out of the attic, I spent some time framing up a soffit. The main purpose of this soffit is to hide the heat pump lines running between the unit in the bonus room and the outdoor unit.













My next big challenge is to re-frame this wall to allow for the opening into the house. Because it's a bearing wall, that makes it a little more interesting. Also, you can see that it's not just one big wall. Nope, there's a 6' wall and then another 3' wall sitting on top of it. I'm thinking of calling in a pro for this task (paging Jon Swartz, paging Jon Swartz, would Jon Swartz please report to Beachyville?).

















Tentatively the plumber is supposed to be out on Wednesday to rough in the water and drain lines for the washer and the laundry tub. The cabinet man was out last Monday to get our cabinet layout going. This week I want to start tearing out the closet in the mud room so that's done when we're ready to cut through this wall.

Adoption Update

We should get the word on Monday or Tuesday that we're official clients of AGCI. We sent in all our contracts and a chunk of cash last Monday, they arrived in Portland on Wednesday, and they take 3 business days to process them. After that we'll be assigned our case manager and sent our dossier packet to start working on.

We got our information from the home study agency this past week. Oh yeah, it was an 86 page pdf document. When I opened it and saw the number of pages, I felt a little overwhelmed. Fortunately a big chunk at the end is just educational stuff, but there is still plenty of things to do to get everything they need. The biggest stuff for Monica and I is that we each need to write an autobiography addressing the following main topics: Childhood, Family, Education, Military Service (that should be brief), Criminal History (we won't discuss the length of this section:), Courtship & Marriage, Career, Self Evaluation, Physical & Emotional, and Child (adoption and parenting stuff). They are "interested in your impressions and feelings, not a list of events." Good times! That's right up an accountant's ally.

Alright, enough for now.