Work, work, work

The past two weekends have been work weekends for the Frost family. A few years back, Joe and I entered into an ongoing discussion about teaching your children to work. (I believe one of the plagues of our prosperous society is the lack of parents to teach their children the value of hard work). For some families that may be fairly easy if you have a business at home or a farm or a ton of kids. We happen to be really blessed and Joe has an office job, so unless we make them up, the opportunities for physical labor are few and far between for our kids. (Of course moving every couple of years helps, but we are not doing that anymore!) One of Joe's goals in finding a piece of property nearby was to find a place where we could work and involve our children so that they could learn the value of hard work. Unfortunately, most of the work we have done lately has only involved the adults, but the kids are around and they help when they can (and believe me, they are standing around begging to help).

Last spring, we purchased a house that was on the property adjacent to our original property. At the time, it had some people living in it. They smoked and didn't clean much. We knew that before we could use the house, we would have to do some serious cleaning and gutting. Last weekend, this became the top priority on our ongoing to-do list.
Austin came (he lost a bet with Joe and so he owed him some hours of work) and helped us rip out the carpet. The existing carpet was the indoor/outdoor type carpet, and it was very dirty.
Here Joe is scraping up the tack strip.
Upstairs there was a small wall separating the big room from where the water heater is, but it was not a permanent wall, so Austin and Joe removed and dismantled that. (You can see where it was, the paint is different).

I got the fun task of scrubbing the walls and the ceiling and the cupboards and anything that was going to be painted. It was so coated with nicotine that I frequently had to just throw away my rag and start over...

Here is the downstairs. The stairs had carpet on them, but there were a ton of industrial strength staples that were holding down the pad...those all had to be removed and several nails...that was another lengthy project.

Once we got the carpet out and looked, we got excited because we noticed that the windows and walls were all trimmed out and the walls have a bead board type material on them. We thought it would be fun to paint the walls a neutral color and then all of the trim white and we could have a cottage style "lake" house.

This week, we finished scrubbing the walls, taped and started painting. The plan was to have all of the painting done this weekend, but nothing ever goes as planned.

Here is Joe painting the ceiling, we all stayed elsewhere during it:

Actually, the camera's flash made it look worse, it was a little more like this:

Unfortunately, the sprayer was temperamental, and after he painted the ceiling, the sprayer stopped working. With the grooves in the bead board, you couldn't just roll the paint on, so we had to go and paint all of the cracks on the walls. Adam and Michael were very happy to help. (I never let them paint at home because I don't want them to ruin the nice carpet).

We didn't get much of the wall color done. Here is a picture of the corner that did get done...this is definitely a "to-be-continued" project.
Now that that is all done, I get to go home and do a weeks worth of laundry tonight!

"The daily grind of hard work gets a person polished."