Super Dave!

This house is in Coshocton, OH. Dave is planning to spend next week helping a friend out with wrapping and siding it for another friend who is flipping the property. This does not sound like my idea of a vacation, but Dave's looking forward to the challenge and the time out of the office. Of course the skills he learns helping friends have come in handy around our house too. Here are some pictures of our living room floor before, during and after Dave refinished the floors two weeks ago.

This orange/brown carpet was here when we bought the house.

We chose to live with it until our kids were walking well.

Taking out the old carpet and pad.

The oringinal wood floor only goes a bit more than half way across the room because the previous owners did an addition to the house at some point. We were aware of this and planned to put carpet over the subfloor half of the room.

After sanding down to a smooth surface.

Dave and a friend/partner in large home improvement projects, Ross, stain and poly the floor.

Look at that shine!!!

This is the adjoining room the guys did two years ago.

The carpet was installed just a few days later. The kids love having thier side of the room for playing with toys and wrestling and rolling on soft new carpet.

I truly appreciate the carpet installer and his patience with our son. The man was here for two hours and was followed closely by a curious 4 year old the entire time. John knew he could not cross the line into the half of the room where the work was being done so he sat right up next to it or paced back and forth along it while asking "why?", "what's that?", "what were you for Halloween?"

Thank you so much Dave for all the hard work and hours you spend making our home better for our family.

Halloween 2008

John picked out the largest pumpkin in the patch this year. He cleaned out most of the ice-cold pumpkin "guts" himself and asked for the knife when it was time for carving. I handed him a marker instead and I cut out his design. I enjoyed the process remembering carving pumpkins this way as a kid with my brother and dad.

Grace's pattern was a little more difficult for me to follow with a knife so we just left hers un-carved this year.

John, trying to resemble his pumpkin.

All dressed up for trick-or-treat in Centerburg.

They looked good coming....

...and going. The tails are my favorite part. Dave called Grace "Little Stinker." John could not decide if he was a dragon or a dinosaur. It changed each time someone asked him.

John's preschool Fall Party. This was his turn to destroy the bat pinata they made as a class the week before. The teacher did a wonderful thing. When it broke the candy was already divided into 16 baggies, one for each student, much less competitve and dangerous. Notice the little sister in the skunk costume stealing an apple slice from a student's plate while the class is distracted.

One boy's dad who is a firefighter came in to talk to the class a couple of weeks ago. As you can see he made a big impression as there were three firefighter costumes in the group. John told Dave maybe he'll dress up like a banker next time.