20 December 2009

On Monday the Activity Day girls had a roller skating party and it was cheaper to pay for Sophie, Abe and Helen to roller skate than to pay Sophie to babysit. This was Abe and Helen's first time roller skating and they had a great time. Abe thinks he fell about 50 times.

On Tuesday Sophie's school had their winter music concert. Sophie sang in the 6th grade choir and played the clarinet in the beginning band. School band is such a bargain. For the price of renting an instrument ($16 a month), Sophie gets free lessons 4 times a week. The photo is of Sophie warming up her clarinet before the concert.

Not many people take on new home improvement projects in December, but Brandan recently got started on some bunkbeds for Sophie and Helen. He's talked to them to get their ideas, looked at plans in magazines and added his own ideas to come up with truly unique beds. The beds will look like a 2- story cottage when they're finished, with a bed on each level. Brandan always loads his own wood so he can pick out the best boards. The kids enjoyed pretending the cart was a pirate ship.

Here's the framed in structure. The beds will be built in place. Becky loves built-ins because it reduces the amount of floor space to clean.

We let Sophie and Helen choose whatever color they wanted for the interior of the cottage. They picked orange, or to be more specific, "Exotic Bird." The kids helped Brandan with the first coat of paint.

Hard to believe from this photo, but the kids got surprisingly little paint on themselves and no paint where it wouldn't clean up. All this graffiti has now disappeared under a solid coat of orange, but it's fun to see the project in process.

Incidentally, the screams of horror you hear are from our builder. The same one who tried to talk us out of large windows in our family room (Where will you put your big screen TV?) and a wood stove (Nobody wants a real fireplace anymore.) Orange built-in bunk beds might give a realtor an eye twitch, if she made it past the climbing wall in the stairway. If you left it up to builders and realtors, the world would be taupe. Hooray for some creativity and color!