Visit to the Carsons in El Paso

 Kent and I flew to El Paso over Veteran's day weekend to visit the Texas Carsons.

                                                             We arrived in the early afternoon, so one of the first things we did was to walk to Andrew's school to pick him up from school.                                       

Some cuddle time in the back yard.

 Lo and behold, the next morning father and son discovered they had accidentally worn matching outfits!

 That day we went to Andrew's school to eat lunch with him.

 It was fun to see Andrew's cafeteria and school. Tyler checked Andrew out of school after lunch and we drove to New Mexico. (Tyler changed his shirt so he didn't match his dad.)

 White Sands is a national park not too far from where the Carsons live in El Paso.

 It was amazing to be driving along a normal landscape and then to see hills of white sands rising off in the distance.

 The twins had fun playing in the sand.

 Rachel had borrowed some sledding discs to slide down the hills.

 It was a little bit chilly, which is why the twins are wearing their knit hats.

                                                             

I thought this picture of the waves in the sand from the wind was really cool.

 Everyone took turns going down the hills. 14-month-old Christian even went down by himself once!!

 The best family picture I could get----

On our way home we stopped at the White Sands Missile museum.

 It was a bit pricey to go inside so we just walked around all the interesting things outside the museum.

 Then we stopped at IHOP for dinner. It was a really fun day!

 Sylvia and Andrew really like to help Mommy in the kitchen.

 Family pictures before church. You can see that Sylvia decided she didn't want her picture taken.

On Monday we went to Los Cruces, New Mexico

There was a fun gazebo in the old town square.

We had lunch at a famous Mexican restaurant, called La Posta de Mesilla. It's in a historic building that was a stop on the stage coach line back in the 1800's.

 The decor inside was very colorful. They'd already put up their Christmas decorations, so we took some pictures by the Holy Family.

 Some last pictures of the kids playing on the automated rides.

 Christian especially thought it was fun to sit in them and turn the steering wheels.

As usual, it was awesome spending time with Tyler and Rachel and the kids in El Paso!

Basement Remodel After Flooding

The day we arrived home from our trip to Egypt at the end of October, we woke up very early to find that a pipe had broken and our basement was flooding. Kent turned off the water, but not before about 90% of the floor had been covered with water. We called our insurance company at 5am and at noon we had workers come out to soak up the water and rip out the wet carpet. They set up three de-humidifiers in the basement to absorb the water out of the air and walls.

Below are some pictures of the basement with the carpet pulled up.

The leak came from the pipe in the opening in the wall, so this was the area that got the most wet.

The workers went through the basement and cut off all the drywall that had absorbed water.

Next this storage unit was delivered into our driveway, and the workers

proceeded to pack up the contents of the basement and load it into the storage container.

Considering the items were just being moved to our driveway, the packers did a very thorough job of wrapping the furniture and boxing everything up.

The only thing they left was my piano. Since this is where I teach, I needed to have access to the piano. I taught for a couple of weeks at the church, but had to make lots of changes to my schedule to fit everyone in before 7pm.

The workers refinished the walls and repainted the entire basement, but when it came to doing the floors, Kent couldn't find a company who was available to put them in immediately. By now it had been a month and we were ready to be done with the project!

                                                                 Kent worked it out with the insurance company that he would do the work putting in the floors himself. He hired a young adult man from church to help him.

He decided on using a vinyl flooring that looks like wood and is installed in planks.

It went in very well and was easy to work with. Part of the flooring was already tiled, but the rest of the basement had been covered in wall to wall carpeting. Now the entire basement is covered in the vinyl flooring.

It looks very nice and should survive getting wet in case the basement ever floods again.

Kent finished installing the flooring the first week of December, and the movers came and brought the boxes back into the house. I was happy to see my belongings again after six weeks, but I didn't think about the fact that now things I was looking for were packed away in boxes and would have to be unpacked! And it was Christmas season, the busiest time of the year!!

I didn't get most of the boxes totally unpacked until the middle of January. We bought an area rung to cover the center of the room, and the remodel job looks very good.

I bought new curtains for the room since I was tired of the old window treatments I'd put up in 2008.

Now that all the work and hassles are behind us, we're glad to have a basement makeover!