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Building a staircase wall

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There’s been a lot of work done on our house in the last few weeks. The current project that my husband and I are finishing up is a living room wall. It’s one that we knocked down a few years ago between the upper and lower stairway. Yes that’s right .. we’ve had a big opening between the basement stairs and the main floor!

So we’re building a wall now, but not a full wall like it was before because we enjoy the light that comes down from the upper floor that we didn’t get when there was a full wall in the past.

I think tomorrow we’re going to do the wiring for the light switch to the basement stairs and an electrical outlet in the wall. We had been using a cable raceway to hide the electrical cords going to the area in the past but now that the wall is going up we won’t have to do that.

It’s going to be so nice once the wall is up and I can finally look at the wall and the staircase as complete. Believe me it’s been years since I’ve sen the area looking finished! Next is the living room dining room ceiling and then a whole lot of painting throughout the house.

Why did it get so cool?

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I can’t believe that it might snow tomorrow. It hasn’t been all that warm this month, but SNOW???? That’s crazy! Here I was thinking how nice this spring was overall – I mean my garden is growing and blooming so nicely and oh the weather in March was as warm as May and June.

Hopefully it really starts to warm up again soon or else I’ll start to wish that we could give spring a dose of xomax so it would shape up! LOL

Are you having strange weather in your area too? Was it warm and then cold and then maybe warm again? It’s so strange this year!

Almost done cleaning the basement clutter!

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I think I’ve mentioned a few times now that I’ve been busy trying to clean the massive mess that is my basement over the last month or so. Actually I’ve been trying to clean it since the end of December if you want to know the truth so I guess that means I’ve been at it on and off for three months or so! Well .. I think the job is getting closer to being done.

No .. not finished .. I think I’ll have to sort through things at least one more time, but the first major round is almost done. My husband and I spent 8 hours in the basement last Saturday and we went through about half of the basement – the worst part of the clutter. There’s only a small area of unsorted clutter left! Did you know I still had some boxes of unpacked stuff from when we moved from our Apartment in 2001 to the house? I knew there were some small boxes of nick knacks and stuff that were unpacked but one of the boxes had cosmetic and about 7 bottles of womens perfume that I had totally forgotten about. You see I had stopped wearing perfume some time ago because I’m very scent sensitive so I had put my perfumes aside and when we moved to the house I guess I meant to unpack that box and at least put the cosmetics and perfumes in an upstairs closet but that never happened.

The perfumes were nice ones too … like Channel number 5 and so on but the bottles were probably more than 15 years old – packed away in the basement for 11 years and as I said it had been an additional 4 or more years since I’d last wore any of the perfumes so I decided to through them out. That was probably a couple hundred dollars worth of perfume that I threw in the trash!

However, throw out things I must do if I’m ever going to clear out the basement. Did you know that we have a sectional couch downstairs that I hadn’t been able to see (see the seats anyway) for several years? Well as of last Saturday we could actually sit on most of it! So yeah … progress is being made. I think within a month the basement will be pretty clear and we’ll be finishing the renovations upstairs.

Hoping to go back to work soon

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Earlier today I renewed my nursing registration. It’s something I have to do every year around this time.

Unfortunately I haven’t been a practicing nurse for about 6 years because I’ve been on medical leave … but, I’ve been feeling quite a bit better in the last 6 months or so … or I was until something very stressful started happening about three months ago – and I had started to think about returning to work.

I’m pretty sure I still have my job placement at the hospital if I want to return to it, so if I can overcome the current stressful situation that I’m under I might be able to go back to work. In fact, getting out of the house might be very good for me. I need a change of scenery and need to renew my sense of self worth.

So please wish me luck. I’m hoping that maybe by February I’ll be able to say that I’m starting back to work at the hospital. I’ll still be blogging of course too – so you’ll still hear from me.






Getting tired of marketers calling my house

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It seems like almost every day lately my phone rings at least twice if not ten times with 1 800 numbers and marketers trying to sell me things. They’re even starting to call my cellphone. I’m getting very tired of all of the calls.

Luckily I have call display so when I see the same numbers come up time and time again I just don’t answer it – or if I see a 1-800 type number or a number that looks odd like 1234567889 I don’t answer. I have an answering service on my phone so if a real company or person I’m sure they’d leave a message – right?

The only time this strategy kind of bit me in the butt lately was when I was actually waiting on a call for a life insurance rate and they called with a 1-800 number that I didn’t recognize and didn’t leave a message until their third call!

Do you get a lot of spammy calls on your phone or cell phone? I’m on our national do not call list but it doesn’t cover all kinds of calls – like newspaper companies or charities or companies that you’ve previously had dealings with, and also some of the calls come in from other countries so the DNC list can’t do a darn thing about that!

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