Day 18:

This week has been one for HUGE projects.  So much sanding, painting, unscrewing, rescrewing, and thinking grumpy "why the heck won't this darn bolt come off" thoughts.  I have patched up walls that had experienced a little too much teenage boy angst, and all the mudding, taping, sanding, breathing in of dust, texturing and painting that project entails.  I have painted our kitchen island, and then ruined it with clumping polyurethene.  I have changed out our kitchen faucet for one that doesn't spew water.  I have painted the loft in our kids' room with a little hand brush because I didn't want to change back out of my painting clothes to buy a roller when I realized too late that we no longer owned one.  Then, I painted a mural of a tree, with tons of "fairy sparkles" all around the walls (different colored glitter glue circles).  What does this mean?  It means that the rest of my house blew up, friends.  I'm a day behind on dishes, and my sick teenager hasn't been able to do her very necessary chores for the last few days.  Tonight, we're eating leftovers and oatmeal (technically, from food storage), and that's as gourmet as we're getting.  I'm just happy everyone is still alive. 

Check out that stack of dishes, guys!  Although it's hard to tell, it's actually organized over there.  I hate, HATE having dirty dishes in the sink, so I have three bins for dirty dishes; one for plates/ lids, one for cups/ bowls, and one for silverware.  The space in front of the bins is for large bowls/ pitchers/ jars that are too big for the bins.  I will never go back!

This is me, soaking wet under the sink because I can't tell the difference between "lefty loosey" and "righty tighty".

The tree!  Eventually, I will probably paint pink flowers all over it, but I needed to get the tree painted so I could put a mattress in there ASAP.  When you have 5 kids (at home) in a 3 bedroom house, you learn to get super creative with living spaces.  To make this loft, we punched a hole through the bedroom wall and built a living space over our lower staircase.  If you jump on it to push it down, you can squeeze a twin mattress in here.  Seeing as how our now-adult son used to have this "room", this was where the majority of the wall-patching happened.  This will be our 7 year old's new room, and we just moved the 5 year old into the 16 year old's closet.  A space for everyone!

I'll try for more creative food storage ideas tomorrow, guys!