Happy Halloween!

 

Don't be afraid!

Here is the Goodwill Ghost corner of our porch:

I found the ghost at Goodwill a few weeks ago for $3.99.

He is haunting Bob (my fern) who was born when I divided Bill (his father fern) into 2 plants.

(In other words, he was free.)

The orange planter on the right was also at Goodwill, $4.99.

It's got some fancy Walmart chrysanthemums (they're tall, and so cool looking!) that were half price ($4.44).

And on the left again is one of my favorite flower planter tricks, the trash can-as-planter.

I think it was $2.99.

We love inexpensive beautiful things. 💖⚘⚘

Happy Halloween!!

A necessary break

I've spent the last three days preparing and painting the final bedroom here at the House of Goodwill.  I'm forced to take a break today to return to the home/house for a doctor appointment tomorrow.

Since I don't have much of an update to post, this will be a time travel post.

I thought I'd share some pics from our recent trip to Cincinnati over fall break.  We had just returned our foster kids to their mom, which coincided with my son having a few days off from school.  So we took a break from work, from school, from fostering and from the house project to spend a few days somewhere else - somewhere within near driving distance that wasn't currently turned upside down due to protesting, etc.

It turned out to be perfect, and to be truthful, COVID did us a favor.  Nowhere we went in the city was busy at all (including at our quiet hotel downtown) and almost everything was open, just without crowds.

It was peaceful, it was fun, it was just we needed.

Here are a few pics:

There is a beautiful fountain in the square in downtown Cincinnati named "The Genius of Water."

A close up of the fountain which came from Germany in the 1800s.

The city at night.  It was still warm enough to enjoy a drink on a rooftop bar overlooking the city.

It was a beautiful day at the Cincinnati Zoo!  (And not crowded!)

The trees were all showing off...

It's always a good day when you get to see a tiger.

Viewing an "El Greco" at the Art Museum of Cincinnati.

It's a wonderful museum.

A Van Gogh!  This is what I hoped to find.  I've been reading about Van Gogh over the last few months, and it reminded me that it's been years since I've been to an art museum.  I was needing to see some great art, and I found it!  I just love the impressionists.

The coloring in this Rookwood pottery is breathtaking, and the photo doesn't do them justice.  I didn't realize that Ohio was such a hub for the vintage pottery pieces I love so much.  The local pottery display was a great and unexpected surprise to find.

We spent an afternoon hiking at Shawnee State Park in southern Ohio - it was a perfect day.

We were the only people on the trail.

The Cincinnati Aquarium was our last stop.  It was the only busy place we went - and it was probably less busy than normal because of Coronavirus.

We ate some great food, went to the local outdoor market, walked around downtown and down by the beautiful riverfront and visited an escape room for the first time.  (But no, we didn't escape 😒.)  Still fun, though!

We finished off our days in Cincinnati with a family visit in Ohio, which was everything we hoped it would be.

Since this is a thrifting blog, I will take a second and mention that our four-night downtown hotel room was totally free (thanks to rewards from a credit card) and the Art Museum of Cincinnati and the William Taft Historic Museum were free attractions as well.  Of course, walking the city and riverfront are always free, so this was a definitely a budget-friendly getaway.

(I forgot to mention the William Taft historic home museum.  This was a fascinating place dedicated to a fascinating president.  And the city charges no admission, what a great surprise!)

Am I back on topic again?

Let the painting commence

Yesterday I started work on the fourth and final bedroom that needs painting.  I had to wait until the foster kids were gone to be able to paint this one; the time has finally arrived and I can work on it uninterrupted.

But only for 3 days - I have to return to the home/house on Thursday for a doctor appointment.  But after that, I think I'm good to work for a couple more weeks before I take a break for the holidays.

Yesterday I broke down the cribs, moved out some mattresses that are waiting to turn into a bed, vacuumed and spent over 3 hours deglossing the molding.  Today I can start painting.  Finally!

Below are some "before" photos - note: the current wall color looks totally different in several photos.  It's so hard to capture an accurate portrayal of a paint color in a photo - the indoor and outdoor lighting can change its appearance so dramatically.

Although the pics look different, it IS the same room in all the pics, despite the appearance of the different wall color variations.

The color is sort of a gray/brown - like a taupe, I guess - and the paint is flat and matte.  It's hard for me to imagine a color I like less.

This is probably the pic with the most accurate depiction of what the current color looks like.

The color looks a little more brown in these photos.

The current wall color.

Here again is the color palette I chose for the house.  (1970s!)

Of the 3 bedrooms I've finished painting, I have one in the second shade on each strip.

For this fourth and last bedroom, I decided to go with the lavender shade once more.

"Corsage," the second shade on this strip is supposed to be the color of the first bedroom I painted - the master bedroom - if you remember that story.  (It began with my arriving home and discovering I had two different colors in my paint cans that were supposed to be the same...a discovery I made halfway through the job.)

It will be interesting to see what the actual color really looks like (!) and how it compares to the first room I painted.

I expect this room to take me a full 7 days - it takes 4 or 5 coats to cover the dark molding, and it will only take 1 coat per day.  I'm also doing the inside of the closet which has lots of little shelves to paint around.  So by the end of next week this room should be finished.

I'm excited to get started, and I've got "David Copperfield" downloaded from hoopla to keep me company.  It's a 36-hour audiobook so it should get me through the job!

Time to return to the lake!

Two weeks ago, my family and I left the House of Goodwill to return to the home/house, to say goodbye to our foster kids and take a little fall break time visiting a nearby city we'd never explored and visiting some family we hadn't seen in 15 years.  (A New Year's resolution fulfilled that I really thought Covid was going to thwart.)

It was great!

And now we are back at the home/house again, preparing to return to the House of Goodwill tomorrow.  We were going to finish out the week here, but the forecast tomorrow is for 84 degrees - that's kayak weather!

I'll be posting regularly again very soon.  Until then, here are a few pics from our last week at the house before we left.  The first two pics were taken on an evening walk by my husband.

I haven't seen a deer in 2 weeks.  I miss them!

A beautiful early fall sunset.

These red Spider lilies were my second surprise flower of the year.  They didn't bloom until September.

Like the amaryllis lilies that seemingly shot up out of nowhere, these have no foliage at the base.  They are just flowers on stems.  The flowers have such an interesting form!

Goodbye, foster kids

Tomorrow is the last day with our foster placement, a two-year-old and three-year-old, half brothers.  They have lived with our family for a year and a half.

Tomorrow evening they will go to their mom's new apartment to restart their lives with her, now that she's clean and off drugs.

Somehow this feels like I'm writing a yearbook entry, and summing up this experience I'm tempted to say "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," or "What a long strange trip it's been" or some kind of appropriate cliche like that.  They fit.

After a year and a half of revolving our lives around the needs of two toddlers, not to mention all the appointments and visitations, we are ready to move on.  We've been ready for a while.  The kids need resolution, and so do we.

Every Friday night at 7pm for about a year I know where I have to be: dropping off kids to visit their bio family.  Every Sunday evening at 7pm I know where I have to be: picking up kids from visiting bio family.  And now the drop off will be for the last time.

It's a mixed bag of feelings, for sure.

When someone lives with you for a year and a half, they definitely feel like family.  When small children start calling you Mommy, they definitely feel like family.  Except that they aren't.

And that is hard.

And living that way for too long isn't healthy for anyone.

Honestly, my experience with "the system" wasn't great.  The kids had four different social workers in less than one year.  (Due to employee turnover.)

I never felt heard by anyone in the system.  Nor was anyone particularly concerned with communicating with me.  Over and over, I witnessed the child welfare system prize procedure and paperwork over the best interest of the child.

To be frank, our child welfare system sucks.  It's government, and government doesn't do a lot of things well, in my opinion.

The bureaucracy and the waste in the system are mind blowing.  It's a taxpayer black hole.

And those frustrations are on top of the actual work and emotional fatigue of taking care of the kids.  Someone sent me an article that said 50% of first time foster families quit after their first placement.  I believe it.

Do I want to do it again?  No.  But officially, we are just taking a break for now.  We'll see what's next.

You see, a part of me still believes in the idea.  I do want to help children.  God has given us the resources.  I don't want to be selfish with my own life.  (Although honestly, I kind of do.  I just don't think I should be.)

We're going on vacation the morning after we drop off the kids.  I think it's a good way to restart our lives again.  (This will probably be the last post for the next 10 days or so.)

I'm going to take some time over the next few months to rest, be with my family, enjoy the holidays and work on The House of Goodwill.  That I am very excited about!  

Foster kids, you will never remember us, or that you lived here.  But we will never forget you.  I will miss teaching you Spanish.  I will miss watching "Jorge el Curioso" with you while you ate your galletas and drank your jugo.

I will miss making your cribs into forts and reading you libros.

I will not miss my house smelling like a gross diaper all the time.  

And I'm not kidding, as I was typing the last sentence out here on my patio, I heard a very loud crash from inside the house.  When I went inside to investigate, I discovered that one of the kids (who was supposed to be napping), had swung his blanket up toward the overhead light and broken the glass, causing it to shatter and fall all around the room.

I'm not making that up.  There are things I WON'T miss.

I always told them not to go into a particular corner of the dining room where I have two 3-tier marble tables with plants on them.  One day, one of them managed to run back there, fall into one of the tables and hit his head.  As he fell, he knocked the table and all of it's plants over, which just happened to fall onto the other table with plants, breaking the marble (and the wood) on BOTH tables.

There are things I won't miss.

But there is a lot that I will.

And as upset as I was over the broken light fixture and the marble tables, I know that human beings are infinitely more important than things.

For better or worse, whatever this experience meant to us or to them, I know it mattered to God.  It was worth doing, and it is one of the few things in my life that I'm very proud of.

I'm excited to get my life back, for a while at least.

It was a long strange trip indeed.

Foster kids, we love you.  Vaya con Dios.

It's beginning to look a lot like fall...

We are now in the last stretch of our foster placement, and look forward to some time off next week when my son has his fall break from school.

We've paused work on The House of Goodwill, so we can had back to the home/house to return the kids and pack for a short trip out of town.

We are all looking forward to a little time off of school, work and the house project.  Vacation is a nice way to begin to readjust to life as a family of three, and we are all ready for more free time and the freedom that will come without factoring two toddlers into every life decision.

That said, we will all miss them.  More on that later.

For now, I will just share some photos from my kayak trip with my husband yesterday.  It was a beautiful early fall day; the trees here are just beginning to show signs of change.  It was a warm afternoon, there was little boat traffic and it was just so peaceful.

When we return here in a few weeks, the trees should be in full fall foliage.

Good thing I have a wet suit for the kayak!

I'm not sure we've been in a kayak yet without the Bud Light Lime - 

somehow it seems as necessary as the paddle. 😀

Check out this back pillow I got at Goodwill for $3!

This is kayaking in comfort!

This beautiful stone house went up for sale about a month ago (for $450,000) and sold within 3 days.

I feel so grateful that we got our house!

Here is a view of The House of Goodwill from the water.

The little A-frame "beach house" is ours.  The boat dock belongs to the neighbor.

Ours will be built this spring.

Our duck friend with the broken wing was out with his friend.

I'm pretty sure the time investment we've made worrying about his welfare borders on the ridiculous.

But I'm so glad he's not alone!

A paint project completed!

Yesterday I wrote about what an uphill journey it feels like sometimes, working on this house and getting it rental ready.  (Note: this is not a complaint; this is what is known as a good problem!)

I am definitely making slow progress, after spending a week deglossing and painting molding in 1/4 of the foyer, I decided to take a break from molding and take advantage of the beautiful fall temperatures to do some sanding outside.

One of my sanding projects was the vanity in the master bedroom.  Ideally, I would love to replace the bathroom sinks in this house with something newer, but those will be projects for the future.

For now, I'm focusing on cosmetic updates while we spend the big money building a swim/boat dock and sandy beach on the shoreline.

I forgot to take a before photo, d'oh!

Here's the best I can show you as far as what it looked like before I redid it:

The cabinet was stained a dark walnut with brass-ish metal hardware.

It looked the same as the kitchen cabinets below: (BLAH! DARK!)

Here it is sanded:

The cabinets sanded better, quicker and more easily that I expected, giving me hope for when I eventually tackle the kitchen. 😬

I debated between painting them orange, green or the purple in my house palette.

Because the curtains I bought for the room have dark purple in them, I thought it would look nice if the cabinets coordinated.

Here is the cabinet completely finished.  I painted the hardware a metallic silver.

And lined the drawers....

Here is the master bathroom when we bought the house, with the gray paint (which looked darker in real life than in this pic), dark molding and dark vanity:

Here is the finished space: finally, one room in the house is completed, paint-wise.

(I'm not finished with the furniture and wall decor.)

Like everything else, I way underestimated how long it would take me to complete this "little" cabinet makeover.  It really didn't take too many hours, but I had to do it over a week in order to put multiple coats of paint on both sides of the cabinet doors, and allow them to dry completely before I reinstalled them.

I didn't spray paint the hardware, I painted it by hand, which also took a little longer.

But I'm happy with the final product.

It's lighter, brighter more colorful and more cheerful, I think.  Just like a vacation home should be!

The Sunday evening sermon (aka. when all the hills are up)

About a month ago, I started running again.  

Over the summer, with all the work on the house to do, the foster kids to watch, and all the little things you have to do to keep life going (not to mention that it was about a million degrees everyday), I quit working out.  With limited time and options, it just seemed easier to pause for a while.  It was one of the longest seasons of my life with zero exercise.  (Dog walking notwithstanding.)

Exercise has always been my stress management system, and we've had plenty of stress this year.  (Not all bad, for sure, but we've had a lot going on.)  So it felt good to start again.

But wow, starting over is hard.

Something about the area around the lake - it's ALL hills.  All of it.  And somehow, they all seem to be up.

On my second day out, after surviving the first, I made it to the stop sign at the end of the neighborhood.  Since the route to town is to the left (a long, gradual, obvious hill), I decided to see where the road went to the right.  I had never been that way, and from the stop sign, it's just a slight hill to the horizon line, which I couldn't see past.

"I'll just run five minutes to the right," I decided.  "And five minutes back."

It seemed like a good plan.  You can do anything for five minutes, right?

So I ran the short distance up to the horizon line.  It took about 30 seconds.

And then I looked down.  Way down.  I had no idea that the direction I chose was such a steep incline.  The good news: the next four and a half minutes was all down hill.  The bad news: it would take all five minutes to get back up the hill again.

So I ran down the hill, and this is what I saw:

This hill is actually a lot steeper than it looks in the picture.

And see those two poles at the top?  That's really not the top.  When you reach the poles, the road plateaus for about 20 feet and then starts going up again to the left.

So I stood at the bottom of the hill for a few minutes, trying to talk myself into starting back up.

And I started thinking about what a great metaphor that hill felt like for my life.

This house is one of my current hills.  It's a big project, and a project I love, but it's been full of ups and downs and I haven't been able to work on it at the pace I'd like due to our foster placement dragging on.

The foster placement is another hill.  Between the lack of communication from the Department of Children's Services, the fact that they never listen when we talk to them, and their general lack of urgency in working on our placement's situation, it's been frustrating.

And of course there's the myriad of smaller hills there always are: nagging little health concerns, questions about the future, indecision about major life decisions, etc.

Sometimes life just feels like one long hill.

So I took a deep breath, put one foot in front of the other, and started up that hill.

Truth be told, I walked about ten steps in the middle.

But I made it up.  Barely.  But I made it up.

I did not run fast, I did not do it gracefully (or with any style at all), and I thought for a few seconds I might be having a heart attack and regretted not owning an apple watch so I could call 911.

But I made it up.

And as I willed myself up, I talked to myself: The house will get done.  Our foster placement will end.  My myriad of little issues will either resolve themselves or I'll die on the hill, which would also resolve them.

But I will make it up my hills.

In fact, I've been running regularly since my near death experience, and I'm pretty sure my heart must be about as strong now as it's ever been, thanks to the Pine Lake Hills.

And aside from feeling MUCH better, the other positive the hills have given me: the joy of making my son run up them with me.

I'm still on the hills.  I'm going to make it.

But I may ask Santa for an apple watch this year just in case.  Just sayin.'

A deer little community

I just love the area around the House of Goodwill.  There are beautiful lake views, lots of trees and all kinds of birds to observe.  One of my very favorite things here?  All the deer!

There are deer EVERYWHERE.

And another interesting thing about small communities and neighborhoods without “real” HOAs – they can be a little quirky.  This can go different ways, but I think it’s often much more good than bad.  When people have the land and yard space to really show off their personalities – it can be fun.  As long as your potentially junky neighbor is an acre away, who cares, right?

One day this summer after taking a wrong turn home from the public beach here, we were driving through a “neighborhood” when we passed a house that was definitely on the awesome end of the quirky country living spectrum.

I LOVE this house.  And now, I go out of my way to drive by it all the time.

The first thing you notice as you pass this little house is, about a million deer.  Surrounding this house on all sides are deer.  As you begin to wonder why all the deer seem to adore this particular yard, you notice “Deer Crossing” signs on the side of the road.  Then behind all the real deer, you notice all the statues of deer throughout the yard.

The deer house sits on a corner lot, and as you round the bend you learn why a million deer love this place: you see the giant feeding troughs right on the corner by the road.

Clearly, these people love deer.  Even more than I do.

Whenever I can swing by this house, I do.  I have never seen less than one deer in the yard (feeding time must have ended), and I’ve seen up to ten.  Standing, sleeping, eating, relaxing.  The deer know where they belong.  

I've seen an older gentleman and an older woman out working in the yard a few times.  The deer are obviously comfortable with their presence, peacefully grazing while the humans go about their business.

Don't you just love houses - and people - with personality?

At the House of Goodwill, we love our ducks.  But now you know the buck stops here too.

Sorry.  I had to doe it.