This Week

Cute River :)

This week I've been finishing up my smaller woodworking projects and cleaning the house.  At this point I've finished all my building and have put all the power tools away. Not to say I won't do any more building, just that I won't be doing any for awhile :)

I need to paint or stain the projects still, but getting them built is the harder part. I have to do it during River's nap time or try to build while he's playing in the yard, getting in my way, or leaving my line of sight. Painting and staining can be problematic as well (the mess is a toddler magnet), but smaller projects can at least be finished inside the house after bedtime if needed.  Add in a newborn with a completely different schedule and I won't be getting any building done for awhile, hence the push to finish projects before the little guy makes his appearance.

Three of my projects need to be finished outside: one I stained today (pics tomorrow), but the other two still need to be painted (they're on tomorrow's to do list). Having the flexibility to finish projects in the house is nice since it means I don't have to squeeze everything into the afternoon hours that River is asleep.

Because of all the projects I've been working on this spring and summer I never got around to doing any sort of spring cleaning. Not that I usually do (cleaning is not my favorite thing to do), but I at least manage to keep the house cleaner than it has been lately. Cleaning has definitely not been high on my list of things to do, especially after spending hours outside in the heat and humidity, building things. I've just been too tired for both building and cleaning.

With my building winding down I've been noticing how much I needed to get the house cleaned up. That pre-birth nesting instinct has definitely taken hold. The bathrooms needed some deep cleaning and the dust bunnies have taken over the house. Wool rugs on wood floors breed dust bunnies faster than real bunnies procreate. The bathrooms all got a deep clean and scrub and they look so much better for it. A good vacuuming and sweeping from the basement to the bedrooms has the floors looking a lot better, but I need to recruit Sunshine to dust the baseboards- that's way too much bending over for me right now.

Sunshine has been using the powder room sink to wash out her paint brushes, but then hasn't cleaned out the sink very well. Some diligent scrubbing on my part finally got it looking almost as good as new again, which is so much easier to look at than the grubby, yucky mess it was before.

We have a well and our water leaves deposits of some sort around our sink drains and in the toilets and they don't come off easily. Simple scrubbing isn't enough. Some time ago I read about using a pumice stone to scrub deposits off the inside of toilets, and even went so far as to buy one from the dollar store. That was as far as I went until yesterday.  I scrubbed the drain areas of a couple sinks and the insides of four toilets and they all look like new. It's really quite impressive what the pumice stone and a little elbow grease were able to accomplish. The stone didn't scratch anything, but I was careful to keep the stone and the surface I was scrubbing wet, which I vaguely remember reading was the proper way to do this.

Today is one week from my due date, which of course doesn't really mean anything. The little guy could come tonight, next week, or two weeks from now. I'm hoping I've got two weeks still, which will give me time to finish staining and painting my wood projects and get some sewing projects taken care of. It's a good thing he didn't come before this, since I only packed my hospital bag last night after finally digging out the newborn things from the storage bins I'd stashed them in.

With the building projects done, the house clean, and my bag packed, we're almost ready for the little guy. We just need him to hang in a few more days until Mr M's mom arrives to help out with Sunshine and River. That and I'd really like to finish up more of my half-finished projects :)