It's Never A Good Thing When I Run Out Of Patience Before I Run Out Of Day

It's been a LONG week.  All of us are a bit out of sorts between the school schedule being odd for three days (this related to parent-teacher conferences) and the ongoing construction in the house.

As of Sunday night, my dining room looked like this (cleaned out for construction):



The doors to the porch looked OK from the inside, but the outside posts were rotting and letting water in.  I have a weird thing about wanting my house to be watertight (I know, I'm so demanding), so we had to get rid of those doors.  We decided to put in a window, since we didn't use the doors anyway and they were basically a pointless leaking security risk.

Not a huge deal--this is a one-day job.  However, when your life is governed by Murphy's Law, nothing is ever a one-day job.  We called in our favorite contractor, who gave us a quote for the project.  While talking to him, we mentioned that eventually we wanted to put in a hardwood floor (to replace the old shabby carpet), wainscot the walls, and replace the trim to make it a nice formal dining room.  Suddenly, we were doing the whole job at once, because it made sense from a construction perspective.  And because it wasn't a big enough job even with that (ha!) we decided to extend the flooring into the adjacent living room as well and replace the trim in there too while we were at it.

The first day, I was nervous.  It was a really big hole in the house.

 

They did get the new window in quickly, though.  The dog was unamused, but I thought it looked pretty good.

  
And by Tuesday morning the outside was actually finished and watertight, and I was pretty happy about that.  Especially since it rained all day Wednesday.



Since they got the window finished, they've been working on the floor.  Right now, my dining room looks like this:

The floor is done (cherry-finished oak) and looks beautiful, at least the part of it you can see.  Everything that would normally be in the living room and dining room is currently stacked in the dining room, which makes it kind of hard to tell WHAT the floor looks like.  Not much of it is currently visible.  

My living room is next...they start there on Monday.  It's ugly, bare and echoing right now!

Sincerely hoping that these two rooms will look a lot better (if not be finished) by the end of next week.  The dog has absolutely had it with the racket from the nail gun and compressor and saws, and I'm ready to be done with the constant noise and mess and people in my house too!  

Yesterday was one of the days with an odd school schedule.  The kids came home early and were crabby and at loose ends.  After they finished their homework, I piled them all into the car and took them to the orchard...they love picking apples, and it got them out of the craziness at the house.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the heart to tell them when we had enough apples since they were having so much fun, so we ended up with a few more than I expected.  About 50 lbs total, to be precise!  That'll be the last time I tell them that they can pick as many as they can carry...the boys are getting strong.

Fortunately, I know how to make applesauce: that was one of my projects for today.  I cooked the apples this afternoon, Thing One helped me run them through the food mill after tonight's soccer practice, and I did the actual canning right after they went to bed.  I now have a total of 11 quarts, which should hold us for a week or two.  It really does taste a lot better than the commercial stuff, and what the hell else am I going to do with 50 pounds of apples??  Nothing freezer-based, in this benighted land of frequent power outages...at least the home-canned stuff can just sit on a shelf.  Note that the bags behind those 7 quarts are still full of apples and there's a third bag behind them!

Himself left town at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning (thereby missing that night's parent-teacher conferences and not endearing himself to his wife.)  He won't be back till sometime Sunday.  Right now there are three out-of-sorts kids and one mother who is not known for her patience at the best of times living in a construction zone with a very unhappy dog and no other adult.  Recipe for fun, no???

My patience didn't make it through bedtime, sad to say.  WHY must that be the time of day when everyone decides to act up?  I was so close, but no cigar.  However, since the worst thing I did was yell about the dirty clothes on the floor and the gobs of toothpaste in the sink, I'm claiming a moral victory over this frigging week!

I forgot to mention the final straw: we have a Board of Ed meeting on Tuesday night, and the Friday before a meeting we are able to pick up the materials we need to review prior to the meeting.  This is the stack I was handed today.

Guess what I'm going to be doing all weekend??

Crap.