Home Sweet Home Days 3-9

 Progress on the house goes slow on the weekdays, but we were able to get a lot done over the weekend. After many long hours/days we've finished all the wallpaper paste scraping at last! The living and dining rooms are also finished except for a few final touches. We're now trying to tackle some upstairs projects like carpet removal before we get our new carpet in on Thursday. We were waiting for it to cool off before moving anything in, but it looks like that just will not happen. Luckily we had a cool day (87) today and moved a few things in.

Carpet

Carpet-Be-Gone

Before

After!

Record Heat

Today's heat index was 113, a new record for Lehigh Valley. Our attic was 120, a new record for me.

Happy Birthday Justin

Happy Birthday to the sweetest, silliest, smartest guy I know.

Home Sweet Home Day 2

Progress seems like it has slowed significantly since ripping the wallpaper off the walls. Removing paste is a tedious process. Today we did some priming and some paste scraping.

Justin's future office

Just for you Mom

Home Sweet Home Day 1

Today we had the closing for our first home! The settlement was so fast and easy! I was expecting it to take hours and to find out that we were missing documents or have some other misfortune happen. Nope! It was silky smooth. We don't have to move out of our apartment until the end of July so we are trying to get some painting done before then. We were welcomed into our new home by 99 degree heat! During our final walk-through our realtor turned on our heat to make sure it still worked, and not one of us remembered to turn it off!!! We spent most of the day just trying to cool the house down. Ooooof. At least we know that our house can get nice and toasty!

Day one's agenda included being pleasantly surprised at how easy and fun it was to remove our wallpaper. Then being unpleasantly surprised at how long it takes to remove the wallpaper paste. And finally, deciding to keep up the rest of the wallpaper and just paint over it (we're bad, I know). In my head we were going to also prime all three bedrooms. No no no, silly Laura. We only haphazardly almost finished one before we were too exhausted and giddy from paint fumes to go on. But on the bright side we found a nice hardwood floor under the carpet in one room which was a nice surprise!  

Sneaky bug eyes. You need to enlarge this picture for the full effect.

Before

After

 You may think the after picture looks much worse. I agree! But just wait until it's all clean and painted! If we ever get the wallpaper paste off!

Wallpaper from the dining room

Hardwood. What a nice surprise!

Snickerpoodles

Before

After. They grew quite a bit more than expected!

Snickerpoodle doodle

Target Deal Steals!

This week at Target you can get pillows for 50 cents and free sharpie markers! They have cheapie pillows for 2.50 and you can pair that with a 2 dollar off target coupon. Sharpie two packs are on sale for one dollar and you can print a dollar off target coupon to get them for free! This is perfect for all the arts and crafts I have planned! My target also has jeans on clearance and with a 3 dollar off jeans target coupon they were only 2 bucks.  There is also a 2 dollar off kids denim so I bought some clearance kids pants for 50 cents each. Score! I might have to go back for some more kids pants. A very successful trip to target!!

4 dollars well spent!

Sleeping on my shorts

Anna Banana

I can't believe that Anna is 2 already, or that my year is almost up. She's grown so much!!! Our bond has grown especially close these past few months. It's going to be so hard to say goodbye in just 6 short weeks.  But building bonds with children and then having to say goodbye is about to become the norm in my life when Justin and I start foster care. I hope that we can be strong enough.
It's really just starting to hit me that soon I won't be seeing Anna anymore. She is the sweetest little girl and I absolutely adore her! I'm going to miss her sooo much. And I'm so worried about how she will handle me leaving after already having had people come and go in her little life.  I don't want her to be sad. I'm grateful that she has such a wonderful, loving family and that I won't have to worry about her which I will probably not be able to say when we have to separate from foster kids.

Look at that cute face!! So sweet! I just saw her today, but I miss her already!

Time to go Shopping

You may think that I fell off the couponing bandwagon, but you are mistaken. Last month is the first time I've had to buy ANY toiletries in the past 6 months or so (we finally ran out of tp). We're probably still stocked up on most toiletries for another good 4-6 months or so, and I have about the same amount to donate. It's amazing how far so little money can go!  If you're curious how I get so many good deals check out these great websites.
http://moneysavingmom.com/
http://thekrazycouponlady.com/

Another way to get great deals is using Swagbucks.com. It's a search engine and you randomly earn "swagbucks" for searching the internet. You can then redeem them for prizes (I always get amazon.com giftcards). I was recently able to save up $20 worth of gift cards to get 2 new Bumgenius cloth diapers for a significantly reduced price! I'm sooo excited about that deal!!! I could have gotten them for free if I would have waited longer, but I have ants in my pants and couldn't wait! There are also so many great kids books that I can't wait to order on amazon.com. It takes a while to build up enough swagbucks to earn prizes (and the search engine is not as good as google), but to me it's worth it! The link above is a referral link and if you sign up I will earn a swagbuck for every swagbuck you earn. (You know you want to!)