Sneak Peak at Mari's Halloween Costume

I've been in the mood to decorate for fall. I haven't been in the mood to get the decorations out of the depths of the super hot and stuffy attic. So, I've been doing other things to prepare for autumn until Daniel has a few minutes to go into the attic, like making caramel apples, spice cookies, and Mari's Halloween costume.
There is a very good chance that I will be in the hospital on Halloween, being the day before my due date. Regardless, I would really like Mari to go trick or treating at the park this year. She seems a bit young to take door to door trick or treating, but I really like that people from different community organizations are going to be at the new park near our house handing out candy in the afternoon. Whomever is watching her will have to take her if I can't!
Choosing a costume took a lot of thought. Pinterest has so many amazing ideas. I especially like the gumball machine costume and little red riding hood. However, I was limited, because I didn't want to spend any money on supplies. I'm not sure why we even thought of a strawberry. Our first choice was a little park ranger, because of a super cute park ranger uniform we saw at Rocky Mountain National Park last month. The toddler size was $45, so we didn't buy it, but it really was the cutest thing, even coming with mini aviator sunglasses and binoculars. She and her daddy could have matched, because Daniel still has his park ranger uniforms! Trying to sew a khaki shirt and dark green pants would have been too time consuming for me, and I would have had to buy fabric and a pattern. Anyway, we already had lots of felt in all different colors, and Mari has a red shirt and tights. So, the only thing I bought was some red tulle from Joann's for $3.

This will get sewed or glued to one of Mari's green headbands

Strawberry flower pin is made out of felt. I may add some red ribbon and glitter to her tutu.

Mari is pretty happy with her tutu. She wore it all evening over top of her fleece pj's. I tied the tulle around 1" elastic, but if I ever make another tutu, I will tie it to a long piece of ribbon, so it can tie around her waist.
I cut out a bunch of dark drown felt seeds to glue to her red shirt.
The strawberry cap headband is just made out of felt that is hot glued together, as is the strawberry flower.
We'll have to see how she looks, but if I find a pair of cheap fairy wings, she could be a strawberry fairy...

At the thrift store yesterday, I found several costume patterns for the wizard of oz, prairie girls, and pirates for 50 cents. I'd really like to make Mari a prairie dress and bonnet and the Dorothy dress in the future.

More on the boat bed and our weekend

Daniel spent a good portion of Saturday making a wall with portholes in it for the boat bed. Because of the way bunk bed posts stick out, without some kind of wall, there was a sizable gap between the mattress and the wall. Instead of putting another railing on that side, we thought something with portholes would be cool.

Daniel is happy with how the portholes turned out!

He used a big hole cutter and the router to make awesome wooden frames for the portals. I need to stain and varnish them before we permanently attach them to the white paneling. Right now they can pop out.

Next thing to do it make headboards!
This project is taking a really long time to complete. That's Ok though, because we don't plan to transition Mari into the new bed until she is about 2 years old.

Sunday, we didn't work on the bed at all because Daniel was busy replacing the intake manifold gasket on the Saturn. I helped a little bit. The Saturn has over 275,000 miles on it and has been problem free up until recently. For the past couple weeks the check engine light has been on. Daniel wasn't 100% sure replacing this would turn off the light, but figured it was worth a shot. He knew it was sucking in air because the idle would change when he sprayed cleaner around intake manifold...  Sure enough, the old gasket was falling to pieces and in pretty bad shape. I went to Pepboys looking for a new gasket, but they don't carry that kind. Advance Auto Parts had it, but first they accidentally sold me the wrong one. Fortunately we live about 2 miles from  them and I could do a quick return. Before going back, I wanted to make absolutely sure I knew what we were supposed to be getting, so I looked up the part number on the internet and wrote down other stuff too, including the price. When I got to the store and showed the guy the part number, he saw the price I found and said they would match it. So, that made me not so miffed that I had to run an extra errand. At least Mari stayed home with Daniel.
I should have taken some pictures of Daniel working on the car, because he got so dirty! The whole thing was harder to get apart than it was supposed to be. There wasn't as much room to get the manifold off as the instructions indicated, so he had to take a lot of other stuff apart. The weather was really nice (breezy, sunny, low 70's), which is great because he was outside from about 11am-6pm.
The other thing we did this weekend was yard work. I pulled all the weeds growing along the drainage area along our property line as well as the weeds in our driveway and path. Roundup would have been quicker, but we didn't have any, and it rained Saturday night, so they mostly came up OK. Our neighbor came over as I was doing it and said he would edge our yard with his edger next week. I filled up two large garbage bins with weeds and twigs.
That's pretty much our weekend!

Three and a half years ago...

...we bought our house. I wrote this post back on the 3rd anniversary in March, but forgot about it all my drafts.

We closed on our house on a Tuesday, over our lunch breaks. I don't remember why we didn't take the entire afternoon off. I was sooooo anxious to leave work that day and be at the house. I didn't even want to stop at the apartment for dinner after work, but we did at Daniel's request and drove over to our new home together. Other than walking through a couple times, I hadn't taken a good look around. I didn't check out the  insides of closets, cabinets or the shed, or really looked very closely at anything before we made an offer. When we were considering buying, that stuff didn't seem important to me. I knew based on the general atmosphere and my vision for the future that this would be a good place for us to live. So, our first evening there we explored a lot, amazed that we were HOMEOWNERS. We also marveled at how dirty the place felt.

Fortunately, we were able to spend a few weeks living at our apartment while we worked on the house, redoing the floors and painting. We also needed to prime the entire apartment, because we had painted all those walls.

Here's something I wrote in my journal in the midst of moving, "We have been working like crazy people, trying to get the house ready to move in. I've never done so much cleaning in my life. Every evening since we have closed, we have been working hard - trying to get rid of the smell.  I hope that soon all this work (and aching back) will become a distant memory. The first thing we did was take down all the blinds and curtains." 
Those red vinyl curtains were screwed into the wall amazingly well. I suspect they were never washed, because removing them took superhuman strength (so it's a good thing Daniel was there). Originally, our timeline involved tearing up the carpet on that first night. In reality, we didn't get to that until the next day because hadn't counted on the curtains being so difficult, and we enjoyed wandering around looking at stuff. Haha. After this house, we know to double whatever time restrictions I place on projects,because we never complete them on time.

Even the dirtiest jobs, like scrubbing the shower and discovering that it is supposed to be white and not tan and trying to remove the stains from the floors and painting ceilings were really satisfying, because it was our house. Daniel and I had a good time together, working on projects until 1 or 2am even when we had to get up for work the next morning. There were a couple evenings I remember looking at the clock and thinking that 10:30pm was still plenty early and I had lots of time to give a room a coat of paint. We shared many a frozen dinner on the floor because we were too busy to cook dinner and didn't have any furniture there. I have mostly forgotten the work and just remember how fun it was, until I look at the pictures.

Below are some before and afters.

Laundry room

                  We painted the walls, tiled the floors, replaced the doors and put up shelves in here.

After - Laundry room

Before - dining room

Before - dining room

This was an easy room. We took down the folding doors into the living room and painted the walls.

After - dining room.

All the other rooms need to be separate posts, because so much work was involved!