Day 4 February 18

I didn't really realize it until I had the day to myself today to clean but things can sure turn into a dump when you’re in the process of home improvements. The kitchen area was an obvious war zone, but it had managed to spread its wrath into the front of the house and continued into the family room. Shit everywhere! Man did it feel good to snap my fingers and order put into place. HA! That will be the day. But really it wasn't all that difficult, just put papers in their place and put all the items for the kitchen in one designated spot instead of every corner in the house. Before I knew it we had our clean family room back and a solid walking path upstairs, downstairs and to both entries. I love a clean space :o)

I scheduled an appointment for an HVCA guy to come out to check out some of our ducting. As it is now, we only have centralized air and heat into the newest addition of the family room. The rest of our house is heated by base boards, and no AC to those areas during the summer, with the exception of our room upstairs which we use a window unit. David figured with a lot of the ceiling being open and exposed during this renovation, what better time to extend the duct work to the rest of the house. Before taking on that task, he wanted a second opinion as to his idea and if it is realistic and feasible in the end.

David swung by Home Depot on his way home from work and came back with bags full of goodies. David took the night to plan out the placement of the wall dividing the mudroom from the kitchen. Most of the night was designated to planning but we did manage to nail in one of the base boards. David was a little hesitant at first to nail into the cement. The tool he was using to attach the board required actual small bullets and since neither of us had ever used it before we weren't sure what to expect. All in all with a good whack of the hammer and some ear plugs it was secure in no time. Funny side note, some school math actually came into play tonight! To get a 90 degree angle for a straight wall you measure 3 ft down, 4 feet across, and 5 feet along the diagonal... Pythagorean Theory! Who would have thunk.

On a side/random note, when minimizing to one utensil for each of us since we are hand washing our dishes in our utility sink in the basement, I realized the awesomeness of the crock pot today. This sounds really stupid but I seriously thought this while eating dinner tonight. I cooked chicken in the crock pot and as I was using my one utensil, the fork, to easily cut it into pieces I thought, “this is great that I can cut up my chicken with my fork because then I don’t need a knife which is another utensil I will need to clean”. Oh how the little things in life bring me such joy :o) This was another one of those little things I received in the afternoon from David (side note, David had been feeling a little under the weather the whole last week):