The Daniel Academy presents "Tilly"

Wow! We went to see the play "Tilly" tonight. It's a drama about a woman who had aborted a baby years before and meets her aborted baby in a dream. You may have heard it on Focus on The Family before. It's a powerful story and the kids did an amazing job of retelling it. Rachel played the funeral director.

Josiah, Hannah, and Chloe were all children in heaven. Great job guys! Josiah is the only one not pictured.

Sophie's New Friends

On the other side of the fence in our backyard is a horse farm. We aren't exactly sure how many horses are there yet. We keep seeing new ones. When Sophie is playing in the yard the same few always come to the fence looking for company. (Or treats) Some of the horses look like they could walk right over the fence. Then she could have a tea party with them.

A Few Before and Afters

We've put in some long hours. Here are just a few before and after shots. This bathroom had a huge hole in the wall that had to be fixed. We now have a new place for our duckies. (There's a story behind the tons of duckies we collected in MN. John helped a large promotion for several years in Willmar to raise money for the local United Way doing a duck derby. We now have a collection of duckies that makes a cute bathroom motif.)

This is the master bathroom. We had to replace the floorboards due to rot and mold. Looks a lot better now.Here's the kitchen after we replaced the ceiling, floor, and painted. There was water damage on the ceiling and a bad repair job to try and hide it. We put back the original lighting in all the rooms but we will slowly replace them as we're able to. The kitchen island and refrigerator were bought off of Craig's list and picked up by Tracy and his handy horse trailer.

This is the dining room. A little paint goes a long way in improving the look. We painted over the wallpaper on the bottom with Kilz. There was a very fowl odor in this room left by a cat marking it's territory. We bleached and painted over the floor with Kilz to get rid of the smell.

Although this picture doesn't look so bad, this is our biggest dilemma right now. The floor is bowed in the middle which caused the tile to be broken beyond repair. We tore it out only to find bigger problems lurking beneath. We've been advised to rip it down even more to see if it's a joist problem or a major house settling problem. For now, this is the look we will have. Carpet and linoleum scraps covering the floorboards.