The Basement: Week 4- The End of the Brute Force Era

In the past week, we've made a lot of progress getting rid of the old slab.  Let's take a look, shall we?

Here's where we were last week:

And here is where we are currently (no visible progress has been made yet this week).

The Basement: Week 3- Unearthing the Chamber of Secrets

Sorry I'm  a little late on my weekly update.  "Day late and a dollar short" seems to be my MO lately.  I blame my basement...

I left you with a  bit of a teaser last time, so let's start there.

In the large room of our basement was a floor drain that was perpetually backing up.  The concrete we were removing in that area was very very soft--almost like clumpy sand-- because it was so wet.  As we uncovered the pipe leading away from the drain, we found our issue.

The Basement: Week 2- Breaking Up and Moving Out

Hi everybody!  I'm sure you've been waiting all day to hear about progress on our basement, so let's not waste anymore time.

Last week, we got A LOT of stuff out of the basement.  Most of it went into the garage.  A lot of it also ended up in the trash.

LAST WEEK:

THIS WEEK

The Basement: Week 1- Home Theater to Sandbox

Once upon a time, these two crazy kids fell in love and got married.

Remember that?  It was fantastic.

While we were in Michigan celebrating with them, a funny thing happened.  Back home, we got 13 inches of rain in 24 hours.  This conveniently happened after Jynx had (once again) decided to remove the downspout extentions from the house.  The result:

Not fantastic.

Major water in the basement.  Mass chaos and pandemonium.

Real Life with the Taylors: The Fence and Fence Fairies

We are about to begin a major home project (The Basement) which I am hoping to update you about weekly.  Sometimes we see what people post on social media and extrapolate that to the rest of their lives.  For example, when they share about a project that they are doing, we think "Wow... they're so productive!  They have such gumption, such energy, such creativity!  I don't understand how people can get stuff done, because I have had projects sitting around for years waiting to be done/finished..."

Not that I think my weekly posting will induce such thoughts of comparison and inadequacy, but as a preventative measure, I attempt to give you...

PERSPECTIVE

This, my friends, is another episode of Real Life with the Taylors.  In today's episode, we will revisit and incident that happened long ago--- a year and a half ago, to be exact.

Remember that time we went to Honduras right after Christmas?  And we had about 24 hours between when we got home from Michigan and when we left the country? And how in that time we had discovered someone had driven through our fence?  And how we patched it up to get us through until we could replace it?  Yeah...about that.

Johnson Lake 2014

I don't know about you, but I had a fantastic weekend.

Tim and I took a long weekend to head to Nebraska and meet up with my fam at Johnson Lake.  Dad's cousin, Rick, has a lake house big enough for our crew, and kindly lent it to us for the weekend.

a look-back

I'm about to attempt something I've been avoiding for awhile-- try to put into words how I feel about our time in England. To try answer that excellent, but difficult question, "So how was it?"  It's hard to try to confine such a big experience to words on a screen, and even if I chose the right words, I know that I will mostly not be understood.  Being misunderstood is hard for me, so this takes some courage.  I know that God gave me this experience so that I can share it, though, so it is worth the risk of being misunderstood in order to try to share this experience with you all.  I love you all, and thanks for reading.

5 months ago... 

First I was like...