Redo and Fixing Up

    "When we moved into the house on Wilson Lane, I wanted to do some painting and fixing up and that kind of stuff that I would need to do on my own. Ralph was still doing a lot of traveling. One of the things I wanted to do was to get rid of the popcorn ceilings. We bought the house from the Billeter family and they had added on a wonderful family room and also the updated kitchen – that’s one of the reasons we liked the house was because the family room, dining area, and the kitchen areas were so nice and big and spacious and there would be lots of room for our family. 

     "It didn’t have popcorn ceiling but the Living room, the hallway, and all the bedrooms had a popcorn ceiling.  So one of the first things we did – a couple of years into it – we decided ok, we’re going to start fixing things up. We had a friend come help us – Ralph and I scrape the popcorn off the ceiling in the living room and had a friend come help us texture that and we then we painted it. We were going to paint it because at this time we had some furniture in the Living room. Ralph teases me about this but I actually painted the Living room three different times before I got the right color. I had tried a salmon color, and then I tried a pink color, and it was just not working so I went to a friend of mine with a sample of the carpeting, and the chairs that went in the there, and the furniture that was in there and she flipped through the box and said, “This is it English Cottage.” 

     "It’s this lovely tan color that just works really, really, well and makes the wall seem so much warmer beside the basic white. You know I grew up with white walls, my mom had white walls because “It makes the room look bigger.” Well, it also makes it look really sterile, and cold, and not warm and inviting. English Cottage was the color we wanted. 

     "We painted the walls in the living room and then we put up some crown molding – and Ralph helped me with that. When Ralph had gone out of town – I found I would start these projects when he would go out of town – he would go out of town, the kids go off to school and Kylie would be at playgroup or she’d go down for a nap and I would start to work. 

     "When he was out of town I completely scraped the popcorn off the ceiling in the hallway and when he got back I said, “Hi honey, surprise you get to texture and then I’ll paint it.” And he just kind of rolled his eyes and said, “Ok whatever.”  Same with our bedroom, he left to go to Kuwait and the day before he left we has somebody coming to replace the linoleum  in the kitchen which had a big crack in the middle of it – so we got it replaced with this wonderful stuff that even now looks fabulous and it does not show the dirt so it is wonderful. 

     "I started working on our bedroom – and he was gone for forty days to Kuwait. Kylie was one and Amy was 11 at that point (?) I guess. So anyways they were pretty small, it was summertime and so they would just play and I would say, “Ok I’m going to go work on the room.” I’d get them all settled down and everybody was happy and hunky-dory and I would take off to the room. I scraped the popcorn off the ceilings and I textured the walls, I mean the ceilings, I painted them, then I got the walls all painted. 

     "Bless their hearts – I wanted to put up crown molding and new baseboards in the room because I think they look so great – I’d ask to borrow the miter saw from Shawny and Verne Ernst – and when they found out what I was doing they decided to come over and help me one night. So one night we got it all done – the kids just played and they got it all done, they are just a great team and they are just the most wonderful people and did it so much better than I could have ever done it. I was just going to borrow their stuff and it would have taken me forever.

Lisa, Shawny Ernst, Teemaree Capener with Andres and Stephanie Lambertson - watching youth play

     By the time I got done it was great – I also got new bedding for the room – and by the time Ralph got back the room was completely done and he just walked in and like, “Wow, you’ve been busy.” I said, “Yup.” That’s how we would get things done in the house. I would just start working on it and he would say, “Let me help you finish it.” 

      "One of the first rooms I had done in the house when we got here was Eric’s bedroom because he kept asking to go home, and kept asking to go home. “This was our new home.” But he didn’t understand that he was just two and was going to be three. So I painted his room and – I’ve redone it one other time also – Amy and Kristy’s room has been redone twice – before we did it the second time we hired Anthony Durst to come over and scrape the ceilings in the three remaining bedrooms. By that time my arm wasn’t working very well so I just decided yeah I’ve done some extra work at the school and so I decided that I would hire him to have that done and also he put ceiling fans in the three bedrooms. That was fabulous, oh my gosh that was so great – just to have those fans were wonderful and made a huge difference in those rooms cooling them off several degrees. 

     "Kylie’s room has actually been done three times. When we first got in that house I decided for Ralph’s birthday one year, I redid the room as a den. I put up this wonderful tan and kind of mossy green color - wallpaper.  The wallpaper I put in, paint, and this trim, I put all the way around the room. I got it all painted, and cut and he helped me put that in and then we ordered a comfy chair to go in there and that was great. 

     "And then a couple of years later when we ended up having child number four and we needed to get that room for a bedroom we moved the desk and the computer out to the family room and we turned that room into a bedroom. We had it painted one way for a while and then - for Kylie - and then - just recently this – about a year ago we did her room again. I told her, “Kylie this is the last time.” 

     "So anyways this has been fun doing it over the years kind of make it ours. It’s not professional by any means you can see all the flaws in it but it’s a lot cheaper to do it ourselves and it works well and has been kind of fun. We did the hall bathroom twice now I’ve painted it and our bathroom also – I’ve painted that."