Handyman Mom

Mom has been quite busy doing handyman things and teaching us how to do stuff.  As soon as she arrived she began pointing things out in the house that needed fixing, etc.  With everything she pointed out, our reply was that we didn’t know how to do it.  Most of the stuff she was pointing out was stuff that she knew how to do with some exceptions.  I often comment about how Gary is a walking, talking Bible where you can basically ask most any question about the Bible and he can answer it.  Well, that is how Mom is with household things (indoor and out).  For example, they were outside today and Gary pointed out the moss that is all over our backyard, and my mom just said to put lime on it.  She also pruned our apple trees while they were outside.  Soon after coming in, a guy across the street began pruning his fruit trees.  Mom and Gary went over to talk to him about our trees.  He said that the family who lived here before us actually had him plant the fruit trees in the yard and that now is the time that they need to be pruned.  He said that our trees need it really bad (which makes sense, since we’ve never done it!).  Our other neighbor actually came over last year or the year before and pruned the apple trees himself, on his own initiative, since they are still pretty small and growing.  After Mom showed Gary how to prune the trees and they talked to the guy across the street, Gary is motivated to prune all of our fruit trees now. 

We talked to Mom about how we hoped to paint some day but we don’t know how, and it cost too much for us to pay someone to do it.  She just looked at us and said that she could paint while she was here.  Our neighbor, Jennifer, is good with decor, etc. and came over to talk about paint colors and explained how painting is different over here than in the US.  Everything she said meant nothing to us, but Mom has painted all of her homes, so she knew exactly what Jennifer was talking about.  That is when Gary and I began learning about painting walls.  During this time, we also learned that you can’t paint water-based paint over oil-based paint, which is what happened this fall when Gary’s parents were here and Gary accidentally bought oil-based paint for his dad to paint some shelves, and then bought water-based after it ran out.  So, we’ll see what happens with them. :-) One thing that was quite frustrating for us was that you can’t buy little swatches or samples of paint over here to test out on the walls.  You have to buy a liter (about 1/4 of a gallon), and paint is much more expensive here than in the US.  We finally decided on a color and Mom began.  She painted our kitchen and living room.  We love the colors!  Hopefully Gary was able to watch enough so that we can do any future painting in the house ourselves. Here are a couple of pictures of Ethan and Sienna with the finished brown living room wall in the background.Here Mom and Ethan are putting on upholstery fabric to a chair that had ripped fabric and foam coming out of it.  We had to go to one store to buy the upholstery fabric and another store to buy the foam.  Then we borrowed an American stapler gun from our neighbor.