Abby's Second Cast

So Abby broke her arm this past Monday night on a routine walk/scoot/bike around the block. She let go of her scooter's handle to move her hair out of her face and CRASH! Broken arm. It's right around where she broke it last time, too. Anyhow, when we went to the Dr.'s office, she looked through all the colors and chose blue. Blue? It seemed like an odd choice for such a girly girl, but she was happy.

Well, that was before I knew what she had planned. Apparently the art teachers at her school have been known to decorate other kids' casts, and she knew this. She had to wait three days until she was in art class again, but check this out! Probably the coolest cast I've ever seen!

First Day of School 2010

Abby and Collin are both in school!!!

So I'm not going to make many notes about today because it really went SO SMOOTHLY, but I've got to tell you about this picture below.  Collin as we were walking him up to school was telling the crossing guards, teachers he recognized from walking Abby to school last year, and random people, "Today's my first day of kindergarten!"  It was so cute!

The Laundry Chute

There are a few of you out there who read this blog but are not on facebook, so I'm going to post pictures of this project here for you. If you've already seen these pictures, good for you! Feel free to once again tell us how awesome this is!  (Oh, I copied the descriptions from what I have in facebook, so there's some references to time that you can disregard if you desire).

This is one shot of the laundry room where the chute is going. The door on the right goes to the garage.

The door between the dryer and the garage, you'll find this small closet. Right now it's where we sort laundry anyway, so it seemed like a good spot to do this. Our other option was to do something over the washer and dryer, but after considering how we might dress this up on the second floor and how it might look in the laundry room if we were to ever move, this seemed like the more logical location.

This is the hole in the closet ceiling. A few things to note about this. We wanted to put this smack in the corner. However, before working on any of this, I cut a small hole roughly around the upper left corner of the current hole just big enough for me to fit my hand through. On the left there is duct work for AC as well as some electrical wires. I just wasn't up for trying to mess those. So I got Amy to buy into the idea of moving it over just a few inches. I went to drill into the upper right hand corner of the 12" x 12" hole, and I hit a joist in the ceiling. I definitely wasn't about to try to cut that. So we made it just a little smaller and went to work on the chute being that size. Also, you can see the work that I started upstairs. I drilled holes in the plywood from downstairs (after doing some careful mapping), then went upstairs and started cutting. That sheet of plywood that you see here is at least 1" thick, and is where I only managed to cut out a little before the jigsaw blade broke... and I set of fire alarms...

After getting a new set of jigsaw blades, I was able to get the hole finished up in the Texas basement. Again, you'll notice this isn't right up against the wall - that's just where things align from the closet in the laundry room. Where we hope to eventually put some cabinets in this room, I figure it's not a big deal. Pretty cool though to look down from one floor to the next.

So this is the chute. It's 9" x 12 " x 8'. We were originally going to make it a square 12" x 12", but as I'll try to show in one of the other pictures, it wasn't really an option if we wanted the chute to go in the location it's going. Also, the chute still needs painted on the outside (polyurethane on the inside).

So we got this up to the second floor tonight. I had to cut about a 1/4" extra downstairs, and I was a little more off than I thought I was upstairs, but it fit! It's not finished yet - we want to get some trim in several places to make it look really good, and we need to put a lid on the top and anchor it a bit more. But it's awesome!

This is what it looks like from the bottom floor up!

This is what it looks like up stairs (with a very temporary lid). Again, some finishing to do to make it look really good, but not too shabby! I got to drop the first towel down tonight!

Funny how quickly a project can change. Amy and I had talked about maybe one day putting in a desk in this area, and putting a cabinet over the chute. Well, when we went to home depot this afternoon, we were looking for just some misc. materials to make the lid to the chute close, and were up to about $50 in the cart. $50! Just for the lid! That's roughly how much we'd put into this project!

Well, then we found this cabinet for $50 (on sale), and found this counter top set for $40 (it was much longer and damaged on the ends - nothing a saw couldn't take care of), and well, the rest is history.

I wouldn't call this project done yet, but it's way better than I thought it would or could have been when I woke up this morning.

Uh, aerial view? We just grabbed some stools from down stairs - they're too high really for the level of the counter top. We'll either make them shorter or get some chairs, but neither needs to happen today...

We decided to keep the two back boards high on purpose. We thought as the kids get used to using this, the two back pieces could function as a back board for them to bank their dirty clothes shots off of.

First Half of Summer

Wow.  It's been a busy several weeks for the Sheens O'Round Rock.  Amy and I both had our birthdays, we've been to Houston and Dallas and had several adventures in between.  Thankfully a good part of the time has been with others - family or friends - so there's pictures somewhere on the interwebs of each place or activity.  And rather than trying to play catchup on the last several weeks with a barrage of posts, enjoy a hodge podge of photos that we have taken!