Fall Conference & Upstairs Reno

We had a wonderful conference weekend.  Darrell and Stacie, Lois and Jeff and families came for the weekend.  We were all nice a cozy in the family room!


During the break on Saturday we walked to the park and shot off bottle rockets.  It was really fun!


Jessica turned 12 the day before so we had another little party for her.


Love my niece!


Blake made this for me during conference.  So sweet!


Some of the aftermath of conference, after some clean-up already.  Saturday night while the guys were at the Priesthood Session Stacie, Lois, Katie and I watched a chick flick and we had a yummy dessert. 


Sunday we watched conference, ate candy, went on a walk, had dinner and sadly everyone had to go home.  It was great having them all here!

I love it when Cal does tiny detailed artwork like this snowman.  I have no idea what he made it out of...I'll have to ask him.


Something big that happened this fall was getting our upstairs floors redone!  Funny because when you look at the pictures the floors don't look so bad.  Well, they were bad!  Trust me. We had to take practically everything out of the two bedrooms up stairs.  I finally finished painting our bedroom too...I stayed up till 4am the Saturday of conference doing just that.  We cut it close, but got everything out of there Monday morning before the floor guy came.


Ahhh...so fresh and clean! 


I should have snapped more pictures of our family room while the upstairs floors were being redone.  We had mattresses, bed frames, dressers and STUFF all over.  And for over two weeks.  We were slow on getting things moving on this project, but eventually put everything away.


Good bye honey, hello dark chocolate!  Love how the floors and white trim look!  When I talked to the floor guy about the baseboards he asked if I wanted shoe mold and I said no.  I have no idea about shoe mold. 


After looking at the rooms with the baseboards, I saw lots of gaps.  Yep, we needed shoe mold.  Plus I do love shoe mold, but thought I would just keep things easy and simple.  By that point it was kind of too late to have the floor guy also do the shoe mold without it costing quite a bit more (he did the baseboards). 


So Lee bought a miter saw and some shoe mold, borrowed an airgun nailer, and we went to work.  I painted the molding and Lee installed it. 


Little break from the reno....Clark did a science project where he tested batches of cookies and their baking time vs. oven temperature. Love that he can make some awesome chocolate chip cookies.  He's spread his horizons to grilling up fish and chicken...we'll have to work on some other menu items now.


YAY!  The shoe mold fixed the problem, and does look so much better.  I finished off the project with more caulking and painting.  Who ever invented caulking, you ROCK!


Random time:  Clark sporting some interesting play glasses at church.


My work tools while finishing up the trim.


Lee switched out all the ugly brown outlets with fresh, new white ones!  Insert emoticon with the heart eyes!


A friend sent me this super cute and thoughtful card.  So sweet.


Lastly, Christmas talk started.  I admit to initiating it.  With a goal to have all shopping done before December 1st, I wanted some ideas from the kids.  Love Elden's list.  The China bit cracks me up.  Maybe you'll serve your mission there Elden!


New matching Christmas PJs arrived too!


One night we came home from teaching Financial Peace, or from a date, and all the kids were supposed to be in bed asleep or pretending to be asleep.  I totally thought Shanna was awake when I first saw her, and started getting after her.  Then I realized she was asleep!  Too funny.


Lee enjoyed lots of bike rides this fall.  Wow, we had such a gorgeous fall with lots of sun and warm weather.  I LOVED IT!  He found a mud puddle to play in!


Someday I'll take a picture off all the stacks of copies together, but this is about 1/2 of the copies I run each week. 


I'll do a full "reveal" of the bedrooms, but here are some sneak peaks.




And the beauties of fall arrived!