Second floor wrap-up...for now.

Hey guys!

So the second floor is pretty much done...except for painting and refinishing the floors...and gutting a bathroom and then adding another bathroom....but almost, right? :)

So I thought I would give a recap.

• We closed up the bathroom door out that connected the current bathroom and master.
• We tore down one of the closets in the master, put in a door to what will be a new master closet, and added a door that will lead to the new master bath.
• Closed the door to the hallway leading into the bedroom next to the master, which will be the new master bath/closet combo.
• Taped and skimmed all of the walls upstairs to repair holes and seal in the stubborn wallpaper that refused to budge.

These are some before pics of the master:

And after:

There is no door to the old bathroom and the second closet is gone and two doors have been added. Also, the three windows on the left have been repaired, have chain instead of rope, and have been painted. We will start the final two windows probably after the inspection.

Here are some pictures of one of the bedrooms with black paint over wallpaper before taping the seams and mudding the ENTIRE thing:

After:

We just added a $4 light fixture for the time being and to get the fan out. It doesn't look like it in the picture because of the time of day, but it is so much brighter!

Here is a before of the stairwell:

And after:

Depending on the person, this may not look like much. I probably wouldn't have thought it was. Before. How many buckets of mud do you think all of the work took?

Six buckets. And about 3 rolls of tape at about 250 feet each. This is not the first time, nor the last time, I will say this but I am so lucky to have a Dad that can do all of this. And that is also willing, that's important too :)

We have also finished the patio, but I will post about that in a couple of days, once we do some last minute details. Right now we are looking forward to the inspection that will start the process for the permanent loan...and then hopefully we can get into the big job of reworking the kitchen and bathroom downstairs! I can not wait to get my hands on a sledge hammer and demo. But carefully, and without the sawzall :)

-Katie

teacher realities

A post on Teacher Thought Bubble was recently brought to my attention by my friend (and fellow teacher) Caitlin. I can't get it out of my head, probably because it reflects exactly how I've been feeling lately.  It goes like this:

THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE (TEACHER) YEAR

September:

February:

May:

I love it. I still remember listening to "Vivir Mi Vida" by Marc Anthony every morning on the way to school those first couple of months, super pumped about everything. That September .gif describes me to a T. But it also perpetuates the "roses and daisies" view of life that social media tends to perpetuate. So then we arrive to February. Or in my case, November.

This particular section of the original post doesn't apply to me. I was never bored. I was always being challenged by my students and myself to be better, to do better. As my students would say, #thestruggleisreal. This would pretty much sum me up, starting in November.

Sometimes I felt like I was constantly trying and getting a running start, and then something would knock me down and I'd have to start over and pick myself back up. Probably daily! Most days feel like a constant struggle, especially being a traveling teacher. I left those copies here, my computer there, quizzes in that classroom, and my brain at home in my bed because the 3-4 hours of sleep it received the night before was not sufficient.

Then we get to May. Almost six months later with that gif happening daily.

Everything hurts and I'm dying. Seriously. It does. And it is starting to show, I know it is. Since December I have gotten engaged, bought a house (and a project), and taken 6 hours of grad classes, one of which involved putting together an entire health fair for Hispanics in Bowling Green. All while teaching and being responsible for 150 students aged 12-17.

For those of you who don't know, I am very passionate about my job. It is not something I leave at 3:30. And still most days it is not enough. I want to be it all--- a good lesson planner, a good implementer, a good grader, an encouraging colleague, a role model, and just plain on top of all the extra duties given to a teacher 100% of the time while also being organized, a good graduate student, fiancé, daughter, and friend. Who is renovating a house. I want it all!! Does such a teacher or person exist? To quote Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, "I never saw such a woman. She would certainly be a fearsome thing to behold." Okay, maybe Hermione. But she had a time turner.

I found myself asking a friend the other day, could I just have the hours that people waste laying on the couch, playing video games, and all around not really living life? Because I want to live life and I want it to be full. But I'm finding sometimes there just isn't enough hours in the day.  And I have to let myself be okay with that sometimes. I have to be okay with my bed not being made like I want it to be. I have to be okay with the fact that I left those copies at the other school and now I have 2 minutes to modify the lesson. I have to be okay with the fact that I did not respond to that student in the calm and completely mature way that I had meant to when he asked for the directions that I already explained twice. I have to be okay with the fact that I'm human and I'm not perfect.

But that doesn't mean I have given up. I will never give up trying to become that teacher and that person. Maybe one day I will cause someone to think "What a fearsome woman to behold!" (Side note-I really wish people still talked like this...)

Coming back to the original purpose of this blog, I have to discover apricity in everything I do. I may feel like everything hurts and I'm dying. But would I change any of that for the experiences I have had this year? No, not for a second. Through the craziness, I have loved it all. I have met beautiful and amazing people and lived beautiful and amazing experiences. Are there 10 million things I think I could have done better and should have done better as an educator and as a person? Definitely. Did I have a learning experience from every single one of those 10 million things?  Yes.

I recently went through something where I had to make an important decision. If you know me very well, I'm not great at making decisions. It's just getting worse with age. I want to make sure I have weighed every positive and negative, beat it with a hammer, and then beat it with a hammer again to make sure it's dead and there's no possibility I should have taken the other path. As it turns out, not everyone appreciates this thoroughness. And I get it...in the real world everything has a timetable. Right or wrong, it's reality.

So I ended up not getting what I had decided on. But you know what? I have given it over to God, like I should have done in the first place. I actually think he was leading me back to the path He originally wanted me to take. Even if it's not exactly what I thought I wanted, He knows me better than I know myself.

"'For I know the plans I have for you', declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" 

-Jeremiah 29:11

-Katie

#fail

When it first happened, I thought "There is NO way I'm writing about this on my blog. In fact, no one needs to know at all." It took me a little while to get over my bruised pride and decide that I needed to keep good on the promise to myself to write about the good AND the bad of home renovation. And Sunday afternoon was the bad.

It started out great. I had been working on school work at home. I decided that I needed a break, so I headed over to the house where my Dad was working on the back deck. We are stripping the current deck and adding about 4 feet so that we can safely put a grill on it, as well as add some seating. Here is the picture before:

We are extending it out, switching the stairs to the front, and making them inset (built into the deck) so that they don't stick out and take up precious yard space. I admit it...an advantage of city living is not the huge yard space.

Anyway, we had to demo part of the existing deck. Which means rip everything out except for the framing and joists. The railing and posts were not in the best of shape, which I know you can't see in this picture. They built it really well--they screwed the railing in place and they screwed the screws quite deeply into the wood. And then our battery-powered drill died. So my Dad brought out the Sawzall (kind of like an electric saw), and I just started sawing the railing off in sections. It was going great. It really was. I was quite proud of myself for being a petite girl using a power tool and for not being afraid of it. And then God must have thought, "She needs to be humbled a little bit." And I surely was.

I was about to go home but I decided to get the stair railing off before I left. Easy. I have this.

Except I didn't. Some of you may see where this is going as soon as I start.

I had my hair in a bun. Key word here being had. I might lose some guys here but I have never quite mastered the seemingly simple art of the bun. My hair is long, so there is a lot, but it is also thin. I have a hard time getting it to stay in a bun that doesn't flop and eventually fall out. Today was one of those days. It kept flopping and falling out. It probably had something to do with the tiny hair thingy I grabbed on my way out of the door. So I took it down and put it half up, thinking "At least it will hold my front hair out of my face." If I could just go back and tell myself that no, this was not good enough. But I can't.

Like I said I was working on the stairs. I had gone down a couple of stairs so I could see the saw better and where I was cutting. This means that the saw was closer to my face than it had been previously. Really not that close to my face-actually it was closer to my long, long hair.

On the back of Sawzalls, and many other things, is an "air intake grill". Air intake. Any guesses as to what happened? Sucking air and long hair? Nothing pretty.

It sucked my hair. Into the motor. My head and the Sawzall became like two perfectly opposite north/south magnets. Within a second my head was jerked towards the Sawzall and within another second my dad had the Sawzall unplugged. I was screaming and crying quite dramatically. Imagine Katniss in Catching Fire during the Jabber Jay scene. I'm telling you, dramatic.

The pain in my neck was immediate and my scalp was tingling from being yanked. I mistook the tingling for blood, though I soon realized there was none.

Once I got past the pain in my neck and the reality that I wasn't bleeding, I continued to cry pretty dramatically. My hair had been eaten by a motor. That doesn't usually bode well for hair. Within the next few seconds my dad warned me he was cutting my hair out of the Sawzall. My thoughts went from one thing to the next. Would my hairdresser be willing to come in to fix this, not on just any Sunday, but the Sunday that also happens to be Mother's Day? Would I look decent with short hair? Oh God, it doesn't matter because I have engagement photos in less than 6 months and a wedding in a little over a year. My next thought was how much was I willing to spend on extensions? All of these things ran through my head in literally less than 15 seconds. Vain, I know.

My Dad convinced me to stand up and try to move my neck, though I was quite past worrying about my neck. While my dad was worrying about my health, I could still only think about my hair. I hadn't even touched it. I was scared to. I told him why I'm still crying and he actually started laughing. I was not amused.

Apparently that signaled to my Dad I was not seriously injured like my crying was leading him to believe. Instead, I was being vain. I slowly walked to the mirror. I still had hair. I still had a lot of hair, actually. I couldn't even find the missing hair. I walked back out onto the deck searching for my hair. This is what I found.

I personally think it looks like more than it is. I eventually found the two inches of hair left on my head from what he cut off. It is on the right side, towards the middle. Really, it happened in the best place possible. I tried to show it to someone today and it took quite a while to find it. I got pretty lucky in the grand scheme of things and with more than just my hair.

My neck hurt pretty bad at first. I couldn't really look to the left when it first happened. Now I can if I do so slowly. If I turn it quickly, it almost physically jerks back more than hurts. That afternoon I had a slight headache and felt pretty fatigued and out of it. Monday morning I felt a little out of it again, but not as bad and things have been improving ever since. I am taking ibuprofen and trying to practice moving it rather than keeping it still. It will just take a while! It could have been so much worse.

Anyway, that is my first home renovation fail. I'm sure there are more to come, but I hope (and I'm knocking on wood!) that was the worst. 

And here is the deck mid project. Hoping to have new flooring and the rails up by the end of the weekend! Those are the new posts and the supports are there to help keep them straight while the concrete dries.

This is a given and one of those things you know and are just like, "It will never happen to me, it'll be fine."  I'm telling you now, girls put your hair up in a bun when around any type of power tool! On the top of your head. As high as you can get it--Mulan style. 

Or learn the lesson the hard way :)

-Katie