One step forward, one step back

I have moments when I wonder what I was thinking, taking on the project of putting together a house from scratch – and thinking I’d have it done by the end of summer.

I never expected that our foster kids would STILL be with us.  I had visions of spending the summer painting and working side-by-side with my twenty-year-old son.

Instead, he’s been my childcare provider every day while I’ve painted alone.  (Except that I take the morning and evening shifts with the kids so I don’t get a full day’s work in.)

Despite the slower-than-expected progress, most days I wake up excited about working on the house.

Saturday was one of those days when I felt like this project will never be finished.

For the last two months, our foster kids have spent Friday through Sunday with their biological family, giving our family a little time alone together, to relax a bit and enjoy doing the things you can’t do with two toddlers.

Like our standing Saturday night kayaking adventures on the lake.  And our afternoons playing the domino game “Mexican Train” while we listen to music from internet radio stations in Colombia, where my son was adopted from.

But this last Saturday, before the games and the kayaking, I thought we could get a couple of hours of “easy” tasks accomplished, just to feel like we made a little more progress.

First, I asked my husband to assemble the day bed in the newly painted bedroom he’s been using as an office.  (Pictures to come soon!)  Easy, right?

While I cleaned paint splatter off the floor, my son dutifully carried all the bed pieces in the room and laid everything out.  20 minutes later, I heard my husband and son still moving things around in the garage.  “Are you going to set the bed up?” I asked my husband.  “Sure,” was the reply.  “As soon as we find the bag of bolts that holds it together.”

Uh oh.

“Have you seen the bag of bolts?”  my husband asked, hopefully.

Uh oh.

Cue two hour search by three people through house, garage and car for tiny bag of bolts to assemble bed.

        Just one key element missing here...

While this was going on, I opened a bag of curtains I had ordered from Amazon, that had arrived the day before.  I couldn’t hang them until they were ironed, but where was the iron?

Cue twenty-five minute search for iron.  At least this one ended successfully.  The iron was in a huge pile of stuff in the garage.

This house has a three car garage, and we've STILL managed to fill it up!

It's mostly furniture waiting to be moved inside once the painting is completed.

Note my exercise bike in the foreground here.  I brought this from storage at home, thinking it would be the only way I could work out this summer in the 90+ degree heat.

Please don't ask me how many times I've used it.

I swear, I often feel like I spend 50% of my time in this house just looking for things.

When I finally got the new curtains ironed and hung (pictures to come!), I came out on the deck to vacuum it with our Shop Vac.  (The deck has a Brady Bunch style of green “turf” covering it that dog hair loves to cling to.)  The Shop Vac was given to us free from the couple of mother lode #2.  We had gone to their home to buy a $50 iron queen size bed (seriously, an incredible deal!), only to be given (or purchase super cheaply) most of the rest of the contents of the moving POD container in their driveway.

Anyway, when I went to vacuum for the first time I realized that although the vacuum worked great, you can’t vacuum a deck with a vacuum hose; we had been given a Shop Vac but none of the attachments it comes with.

D'oh!

So I stopped to order a set of generic Shop Vac attachments from Amazon so I can actually use it usefully.  (Of course, right?)  Though I won’t be able to tell if they’ll fit the Shop Vac for sure until they arrive.  If they don’t, I’ll then have to order the universal adapter to make them fit the machine.

At some point in a week or so, I’ll be able to vacuum the deck.

But that was how Saturday was unfolding, so I rolled with it.

I went in to the bedroom to find the husband collapsed on the bed, given up on his search for bolts.  “Everything I try to get done in my life ends in failure,” he informed me.

“Maybe you could install the dog gate on the deck?”  I suggested, hopefully.  “Or figure out the water filter situation for the house?”  He just rolled over.

So what went right on Saturday?

Well, I came in 2^nd in dominoes.  In a game with three people, that’s not losing.

And my kayak cup holder from Amazon had arrived that week.

“BLLM” my husband said, putting an icy can in my hand.  “Bud Light Limes matter.”

When your Bud Light Lime can can hold itself upright in a kayak without help, somehow all the rest of the little problems just float away...