A Fifth "Four Eyes"

Well, the fifth member of ClanMcCarter now wears glasses.
Owen chose a stylish pair of blue-rimmed specs with greenish yellow sides.
He said that he feels like he fits into our family because he felt left out before.
If he only knew how lucky he was... but at least he can see everything now.

The Boy Who Smiled Wolf

Owen received his Cub Scout Wolf badge on May 7, 2008. He also received a gold arrow and two silver arrows for achievements. I haven't attached it to his shirt yet and it is still pinned on upside down because he has not completed his "good turn" to complete the Wolf process.

This year, they face-painted the kids with the two stripes and colors signifying different things. It made the ceremony special.

The Final Interior Tour

This video was shot on April 25th, 2008. It's the last tour of the inside of the house. There is one major thing to do and that is our back stair installation. Oh, and painting, painting and oh, did I mention painting? We are very pleased with the end result and it was worth the inconvenience and glitches along the way.

I love our new old house and both Craig and I are looking forward to three years of NO home projects! Then we'll come home and start another one! o-: We already have a wish list started again, but nothing anywhere near as major as this. Now we just need to get our smoke detectors hardwired to meet rental inspection (another Baltimore County rip-off, but that's a whole other story) and we should be ready to go.

Week 6 & 7

I have no video from Week 5 which was tile and trim week. There was a lot of equipment everywhere and not much room for us in there. These videos are from March 16th.

We went to Arizona to visit Craig's family for Easter/Spring Break. While we were there, we visited the campus of ASU, went to Jerome, AZ - it's an artist's colony, saw Tuzigoot National Monument - home of a tribe of Sinagua Indians - and drove through Sedona, AZ. We were one minute too late to get into Slide Rock Park south of Sedona which bummed us out, but it was a little too cold to be sliding down wet rocks anyway.

During our trip to AZ, the floors were sanded and the radiators re-installed. Here is some video shot of April 1st (no April fooling LOL), the end of Week 7.

Happy Earth Day!

Hello all of you tree huggers out there. I was looking for a good tree hugger picture and found many uh "interesting" photos of people hugging trees in various states of (un)dress, but the one above was the best by far in my opinion.

We had an absolutely gorgeous Earth Day. It was warmer outside than inside our house for some odd reason, so I spent alot of the day gardening. Some of the plants in the backyard took a beating from the construction, but we did not have to yank up the beautiful azalea that I love. It's a bit smaller, but alive. I love the spring in MD. We had torrential rain on Sunday and yesterday. Luckily, we had just finished seeding the lawn and laying a grass mat cover over the bare spots.

Back to the project. The fourth week's recap:

Drywall (2/27)

and SUBFLOOR (2/28)!!!

I can't EVEN tell you how happy I was to have some type of flooring down. So much dust, chunks of plaster and drywall and everything else fell through the floor into the back portion of the basement. I was vacuuming every day. I am surprised we aren't all asthmatics.

No Longer in a Dark, Cold Place - Week 3

It's February 19th and 21st respectively and we get lights and insulation - things are heating up!

We are Topless and Cold - Week 2

Well, sort of topless. Here's video from February 11th and the back of the house has no roof and it's freezing. Even my voice sounds cold. Also I was VERY unhappy about the pipe misplacement, especially since neither of us were consulted once a change was needed. My famous line, "Whose house IS this?" Beware the wrath of Kris.

Luckily, we had a day without rain and the guys worked very hard to get a roof over our heads. They knew they needed some brownie points. It's February 13th, luckily NOT a Friday.