It's official

Here's how our front porch looks when you stand at the end of our sidewalk not too bad except for the ripped screen {kids!}.


I even bought this new doormat a few weeks ago because our other one was at least 2 years old and spent a good part of the summer upside down in the mud {roofers! IE: my husband!}.


Then as you walk up the front walk, here's what begins to welcome you, see the stuff peeking our from the sides of the porch. It's screaming


the title of POOR WHITE TRASH! Keepin' it real, people -- you all are thinking it anyway!

That changing table has been there since August from the yard sale, we don't change the kids out there -- it's going to the resale shop, I'm actually waiting for it to walk there on it's own, I guess.


My husband thinks our front porch is a storage space! We have 2 garages in the back -- one for our neighbor???? and one that Aaron stuffs full by randomly putting stuff in the front and middle of the floor. Then he will complain on a daily basis about how he can't walk in his own garage or find anything . . . I seldom venture in there because there's lots of places for possums and raccoons to hide. But when I do I notice the things I have told him belong in the garage are randomly set down here, there, and everywhere. Organization is not his strong suit; I guess I'm no professional in that area either as told by the photos.

In wintertime he sometimes likes to store these strollers and that wagon in our living room by the front door.

If you've been in our living room there is no room by our front door or anywhere else in our house so then if I complain enough he will take the stroller and stand at the top of the stairs and toss it in the basement. So that our basement can be an unorganized mess that he will complain about daily and if I need a stroller I will have to trip around down there and carry it up.

Things like this drive me crazy but I don't have extra time to deal with this stuff by myself (I do have time to photograph it and blog about it though) nor do I know where to put them, other than at a bigger house! It eats away at me every time I go in and out the door . . . sigh.



Look at the pumpkins . . . they are going to be spread about our yard! We have 13 pumpkins right now. Yep I said 13 and Ethan still has one at school! We got 4 of them on the school pumpkin patch trip. This past weekend we picked up 5 more at Tanner's Orchard.

Then my dad, who has something against pumpkin patches, thinks he needs to grow pumpkins for us including that humgo one that he said weighs 75 pounds but can only sit up leaning against something very study.

I think he doesn't like that we spend money on the pumpkins but he doesn't get that it's the memorable experience of getting the pumpkins not just having someone bring them to you or buying them at a store. If we were to grow our own, then that would be a fun experience too. I'm not ungrateful but this family of 6 doesn't need 13 pumpkins sitting on their front porch. Last year somebody smashed one of ours so having 13 is just screaming to all the late night hoodlums: "COME TO THE MURRAY HOUSE!" although I don't know if some teenagers could smash that big one without power tools.

So Aaron took tomorrow off. One of his projects: clean the garage. Which means I can probably get some of that stuff off the porch. After all Aaron got a new 5' skeleton to hang on the porch for Halloween which I was informed will be hung with a noose --- gotta keep the POOR WHITE TRASH theme going!

The BIG Job Continues

I think we have now passed week 3 of the roofing project. It's coming along. I say a little more than half of it is complete. The $#^*!@ scissor lift promptly breaks down about every second day and then the weather is uncooperative about every fifth day. There's a lot of sweating going on along with some colorful phrases and interesting conversations between Neil and Aaron.

They work well together and Aaron says he's learning a lot about roofing mainly that he never wants to do this again. I doubt that this is the last time he has to lay shingles on a home we own but maybe we will be looking at prospective homes in a different way and basing a purchase on how steep the roof is . . . something to consider.

It is pretty high up there.

It's hard to tell by this photo but the front porch is complete and for some reason there was 4 layers of shingles to remove off this part but the rest of the house only has one layer. It took Aaron's Dad a whole day just to remove the old shingles just off the porch.

This is the other side that still has the old green shingles. And we are running out of shingles which is super puzzling to Aaron and he just can't understand why he didn't get enough. Things like that drive him crazy. I say accept that we didn't' get enough and move on and get more but he must question it over and over . . . and we'll probably never know the answer to that puzzle.

Then there's the back porch that is our laundry room and pantry. It looks small but Aaron assures me it's not that small and it has BIG issues.

Looks like sheeting will have to be replaced . . . see the big dent . . . I wonder why we don't have a waterfall in our laundry room on rainy days. And turns out I do have a green thumb . . . look I can grow trees in our gutters. The tree is this photo is not my only one . . . I have several propagating on all sides of the house . . . pretty talented, wouldn't you say?

The roof was one of two BIG projects we have on our to do list for our home. The other starts to show it's ugly head here. This is the window we took out when we remodeled our bathroom last year. Pretty, huh?

And look here . . . the gray area is the aluminum siding showing through our peeling paint. When the sun shines on it, it's very sparkly like glitter or diamonds but as much as I like those embellishments in scrapbooking, I don't think it's going to attract a lot of buyers. We were going to paint our aluminum siding. Before we started the roofing job, our slave neighbor, Neil, said putting up vinyl was no harder than painting and he knew how to do and it wouldn't be much more than painting. . . we'll see if Neil doesn't offer for us to use his paint sprayer the second the last roofing nail is hammered in.

Today we had a collision in the universe with an early thunderstorm to make every wet enough to hold off roofing until late afternoon. Once Aaron got all the equipment out to begin then the lift magically wouldn't work. So nothing more was done on the roof. On to week 4 . . . roofing sure is hard work!