Our Life: April Upload: Project Weekend

I know…it’s June. All I can say is that we are BUSY! And it takes time to sit down and write about what we’ve been doing. But don’t worry…this will be a good ole long update! As long as Steve doesn’t kill Dan in the background before I finish!

Project Weekend

April 15 landed on a Thursday this year. So, Jesse, Ben, and their parents took off early April 16 for a 4 day fishing trip to Mississippi where Kathy’s family lives. So, while the boys are away, Cammie and I do PROJECTS! This time we had quite the undertaking! We made cute towel swimming covers for Ali and Steve. Made 2 darling skirts for Ali. And then spent the rest of the weekend designing and making 2 PVC pipe playhouses.

We found, what we thought, was a great set of instructions from a blog. But, they turned out to be TERRIBLE, so we ended up designing 2 different playhouses. That wasn’t the hardest part though…we then had to re-design in the plumbing aisle at Lowes because the connecting pieces we needed don’t exist at our Lowes. Then, because we didn’t want to buy the PVC pipe cutter, we went back twice to the plumbing aisle to cut our pipe. Then we went back again to get more connectors and actually buy the dang cutter. This basically took all day Saturday, and we had 5 kids in tow! I don’t recommend that part! But, this still wasn’t the hardest part, even though we thought it was at the time! It’s actually amazing we even finished this project because we were so over it about 10 times! It seemed like right when we thought the hard part was over, we’d come up on a new dilemma.

Well, we got them built late Saturday night and thought (ha ha) that it would be a piece of cake making the fabric cover part and that it would only take a little while. So, after church on Sunday, we packed everything (including our disassembled playhouses, so all the many pieces) up and moved over to Cammie’s for the remaining 2 days. My playhouse was smaller, so we thought (ha ha) it would be easier and take less time, so we started on it first. We built it and started figuring out the cover part. It wasn’t terrible, just time consuming, and when we finally mostly finished it, it was time to tackle Cammie’s bigger playhouse. Let me just add in here that Cammie had a distinct picture in her mind of a PVC pipe playhouse her mom had made for her and her siblings when they were little, and she just knew it was bigger than our original design, so her’s ended up being HUGE! But it was still awesome! Her kids are bigger after all! Anyway, so we go to start rebuilding her playhouse and can’t find the connectors ANYWHERE! I mean we turned Cammie’s house upside down, I even drove back to my house to make sure we hadn’t forgotten them, and they were no where to be found. Remember how I said that this project almost never happened like a 10 times, this was another one of those times! Until the connectors turned up in the deep freezer in the garage! I know…how?! Well, we had SO much stuff packed into Cammie’s van and my SUV coming from my house that the bag of connectors ended up on top of a box that got put in the freezer. Still…what are the odds, and why did we end up looking in the freezer! Because there was seriously no where else to look!

So, to make a long story longer, we finally finished the dang playhouses just in the nick of time before the men got home, and now the kids have the best playhouses EVER to play in FOREVER! And we will probably NEVER build another PVC pipe anything again!

The bones. Oh yeah, we came up with a great way to remember how to set this thing up every time. A numbering system that we totally messed up on Cammie’s! Good luck with that one kids! ;)

The finished project. Serisouly, Steve LOVES it! So it was all worth it!
Peek-a-Boo!
I don’t know if you can really tell, but the thing is huge! A lot bigger than I thought it was going to be.
Here’s the swimming cover I made Steve.
Movie time while the crazy mammas do an insane amount of projects! They were so good!This is how the kids slept at our house. All I can say is HILARIOUS!
I’m not sure it this was actually during our project weekend or another time, but Steve and Ali fight over these shoes a lot…so I thought I’d throw in this pic for fun! Jesse’s gonna kill me!
Here’s Cammie’s playhouse. It’s really not that much bigger than mine, but enough to make a difference! Oh, and we found out that the roof Cammie SWORE her playhouse had growing up was not pointed, it was just flat across the top! Too funny how we remember things!