While waiting for the experts to tell us how to save our house, we decided to take some temporary measures to make it more livable.

My friend, Pam, was over exercising and asked if we had thought about buying some cheap carpet squares.  “Um, you mean like these?”  I motioned to a dark corner where we had a large stack of them.  We bought them to finish our basement with, but set that project aside for bigger things.  I had never thought about using them upstairs until Pam said something.

So the children carried them upstairs for me and laid them down in a basket weave pattern.  The floor is now clean and soft underfoot.  Yes, it’s too dark and shows every speck of dirt.  And the squares shift around since they aren’t glued down. We didn’t cut anything, just overlapped squares when they didn’t fit quite right.  But with no money out of pocket it’s starting to feel a little more like home.

We had stacks of flooring all over the house and Heidi helped me move them to one central location then cover with a cloth to use as an island.  (I have since traded out the green cloth for a flannel backed vinyl cloth with fall leaves on it.  I wanted a moisture barrier to protect the hardwood flooring in the boxes.) We moved some of our cooking things down here too.  The ceiling was so low in the attic and there wasn’t enough space to sit as a family that I finally said, enough.  There isn’t much storage down here, so I’ve only brought down the bare minimum in cooking items. And will continue to store stuff up there.  BUT we are so much closer to where the food is kept that life is much better.  During this whole process the thing I miss most is a table where we can all eat together.

I also hung 4 clipboards on the wall so I could display some of the brilliant art work the children do at school.  There are 4 more clipboards for the other side that I will hang eventually.  The hardest part about hanging them is getting everything lined up just so.  I bought these at amazon, because I really wanted this style of clip, but they have the smaller clip styles at Dollar Tree which work really well too.  I was thinking about trying to stain these clipboards a darker color, but they seem to have a slick finish on them.  I’m not sure stain would penetrate very well.

I love these two pieces of art.  Dub was embarrassed about the upper piece because it was supposed to say, “Hello, Fall.”  But I love it just the way it is and told him so.  We now have a real leaf in the upper clipboard and a second painting by Dub in the lower right. Brandon made the tissue paper piece in his kindergarten art class.  “Why do you think it looks like fall?”  He wanted to know.  It just does.

I bought the felt leaf shapes from Dollar Tree and stitched them to squares cut from canvas drop cloths to make these pillows.  The idea came from Tatertots and Jello.

The children went to the pumpkin patch with Aunt Erica and each brought home a pumpkin, so we have scattered them about too.  I love real pumpkins. I’d love to change out the flowers in the vase for each season.  Maybe pinterest has some inspiration for me for things I can gather from the yard?