School Room Reno: Install part 1

Well the weekend I have been waiting for finally came! Our friend got here on Friday afternoon, and after a brief planning session the men took off to the store to buy the supplies. Here's what we were looking at the night before we started building:

My spirits were SUPER high at this point…I could not wait for the boys to get started. It really was too late to start anything tho…and they were hoping to go see a movie together. So this was as far as we got on Friday night.

The next morning they were up and at 'em by 8 am though!

First thing they had to do was set up the tools and get all of the smaller cuts done. They had the guys at Home Depot cut a lot of the boards down for them so they could fit in our van, but there was still quite a bit of cutting to do

While our friend worked on getting the first cuts done, hubby set to the task of taking off the base board and getting the carpet pulled back. We are *eventually* going to replace the flooring in the entire downstairs, and we knew we didn't want a chunk of carpet sitting under these cabinets. so straight down to the slab we went!

Here they are getting the tacking strip up and vacuuming all of the concrete dust. Our friend had worked on getting part of the bases for the cabinets built while hubby was still working on the base boards. 

They made the bases to the cabinets in 2 pieces….the two large cabinets and the window seat was one big piece and then the cabinet on the right side had it's base contracted separately for ease in fitting together.

The first cabinet they attached was the small one for the window seat.

The they worked on attaching the two cabinets on the left of the window seat.

Once that was done, we flipped them over and they worked on getting the right cabinet fitted and then attaching them all to the wall.

At this point it was early evening and they needed to make another run for supplies that we had forgotten. With plans to head out and come back with a little time to hopefully finish constructing the window seat and get the counters on, they left. But the shopping trip that was only supposed to take an hour ended up taking three…partly because of traffic, and partly because my husband's ADD kicked in. They didn't make it back to the house until 10:30, and no more work was getting accomplished on Saturday. So that was where the day ended…and this is what my living room look like at the end of the night:

Awesome right? I love construction zones with little kids!

I'l be honest…I was starting to freak out a little bit. At this point in the project we had hoped to have the bulk of the construction done with the cabinets, possibly even start working on prepping the walls for the shelves if we were doing really good. Our friend only had a limited amount of hours to work on Sunday and then he had to head home…and that window seat was laughing at me, I could hear it.

My husband had warned me last week that he felt if they got the cabinets finished by the end of the weekend, then he would call the weekend a success. Which, sure…I get that. Projects like these always come with little surprises that make the timeline stretch out. But I'm a realist…I knew whatever they didn't get done on this weekend, I would be doing myself. And I preferred not to be putting those shelves up.

I didn't get as many pictures taken on Sunday in-between taking care of the kids and going to church. Here is a picture of hubby working on the window seat:

And here's what it looked like when our friend left to travel home again. It looks great huh?? I mean…I seriously love that window seat, and they did put in a full weekend of work. And we were SO grateful for our friend to take time away from his family and come up and help us.

But yeah…we still have a bit of work ahead of us. We'll get there though…this is a good learning experience for us!

School start is quickly approaching!! Are you ready? I'm not nervous at all…hehehe!

happy homeschooling!

Reading, reading, reading….

Goodness, this week flew! Do you ever have those weeks that just kinda get out of control and you are always one step behind? Yeah…that was me this week! I missed one of Middle's OT appointments because I slept in past my alarm, I TOTALLY forgot about Scouts on Tuesday…

You can tell I haven't been using my planner again. It's terrible…I know I function better if I write things down and yet…weeks go by where I don't touch my planner. It's a problem…

School prep was on the slow side this week. Just a bit of printing and laminating while I twiddle my thumbs waiting for the room to be finished. T-minus ONE WEEK people! Woot woot!

I've become obsessed with the site Teachers Pay Teachers. There are a lot of really cool things on there! It's true, the bulk of it is geared towards public school teachers, but you can find some homeschooling gems on there as well. They also had a Back To School Sale this week, and you can bet I took advantage of that! So here's what I got:

I got both of these for Middle to help with our reading programs. My heart would call for a strict phonics program with all of my children, but Heavenly Father keeps whispering to me that I need to be creative with Middle. Lots of repetition and not so many rules right now. So we're going to tackle reading with sight words and word 'chunks'. I hope that these will brighten our classroom and help Middle be enthusiastic about reading. Click on the pictures to pick them up yourself!

I also got this for Oldest:

It's slightly above grade level for her, but there were several parts of the packet I thought were valuable, so we'll do what we can and save the rest for when we cover the American Revolution in middle school again.

So that was me for school this week. I have to admit that I am getting *slightly* nervous about school starting. I actually think I'm feeling the pressure of public school starting and my children not going! I scheduled us to officially start school almost two weeks later than public school does…I want to spend the next three weeks getting into a routine of sorts. Start turning off the TV earlier, start expecting more consistency with chores, and start trying to do some structured activities with Baby running around like a crazy person.

We've had reading time instituted all summer, but some days are definitely better than others. Oldest has a love/hate relationship with reading right now. She wants to read big chapter books, I think to prove that she can read and so she doesn't need to practice, but she just really can't handle the text at this point. She barely has enough fluency to read those beginning readers. So I've started to structure our reading time differently over the last week or so. Twice a day ( mid-day and bed time) we sit down in my chair together and she reads a chapter out of a book I choose for her, and then I read a chapter to her out of a book we are reading together ( This week we're reading Amelia Bedelia and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, and she pretends not to like them, but then she can't help giggling at the crazy shenanigans of these great characters!).

Like I said before…her fluency is terrible, and she gets stuck on very easy words that she should know by heart like "she" and "there", which makes me really worried. BUT, I have noticed that her comprehension is already improving a TON! Which is another thing I was getting concerned about. She would read something and I would ask her questions and she would not know a single thing about what she just read. But I think that reading aloud more frequently to her is helping her to retain the stories. On top of all the reading together, we also try to have quiet reading time once a day where she can pick the book and she has to read for 15 minutes to herself. Even Middle and Baby are starting to get in on the joy of reading! Middle and I are tackling The Complete Tales of Winnie The Pooh, which he amazingly sits for, and Baby and I read a few of her favorites several times a day, but we are also working through Michael Hague's Read-to-Me Book of Fairy Tales, which I am totally loving! I spent more hours reading aloud to children in my lap this week then I thought possible! The truth is, house work keeps. But my chance to make joyful lifetime readers out of my children is fleeting, and I need to make the best of my time now while I have it!

Alright…I've rambled enough for today! I hope you have a productive week!

happy homeschooling!

Hello all!

I have nothing to report on the school room reno this week. Now that the painting is done, we're pretty much just waiting for our family friends to come visit and help us build the built ins!

I can't believe how close it is getting to school starting. My lead therapist for Middle just emailed me his fall schedule, it's crazy to think that public school starts up again in about 3 weeks! And that we'll official start homeschool in about 4 weeks! This summer seriously has flown for me…

This is what part of my days have looked like recently…

Yes, I like to be comfortable when I am planning school! Sometimes I work at the table if Middle and Oldest are running around like banshees.

I've got us planned up to January at this point. I may go farther since I'm really just sitting around twiddling my thumbs and I can't decorate and organize our school room yet…although I did get these done this week…

I'm pretty sure there might just be an organizing heart suppressed somewhere in side of me, because these labels were probably the most satisfying thing I did all week! This is a free printable label I got from here.  I wanted something simple but fun…this is going to be a child-focussed area. And these labels made me smile, so they felt perfect. I can also change them out when I get bored, so no worries.

Now that the walls are painted I have TONS of ideas going through my head of how I am going to decorate this room up…there will be a circle time station with a calendar and weather chart, and alphabet cards. Addition and subtraction posters, and a poster on how to tell time. There will be a sight word caterpillar, and a beehive for when we memorize our Article's of Faith, and then our daily schedule…

Can you tell I'm getting really anxious? Ha!

Anyway…so that was what I worked on for school this week. Hope you are enjoying the 'lazy' days of summer, because they are almost gone!

happy homeschooling!