Painting the Cabinets of DEATH!!!

I have a man that loves me and let me tell you I had no idea the amount of work we would do the next 5 days when I finally talked him into painting our cabinets with me.  So all these DIY bloggers who say they just need a "quick change" and so they decided to paint the cabinets can just shut up now.  This was a HARD project!  We hit several bumps along the way.  The first one being sanding. Just take off the doors and sand them down with an electric sander, not hard right?  Well our cabinets had this sticky goo all over them, you know when grease gets on something and then dust settles on it.  Imagine that all over the cabinets.  The sander could even scratch the service so we had to take a scraper and scrape off all the cabinets before we could sand them.  The next bump was how do you pain cabinets inside and out, what do you do with the doors???? So after sanding them all down we attached them with the original hard ware and realized will just have to do touch ups the best we could.  Then we though we will use my Dad's paint gun.  It will go on nice and smooth and it will go really quick.  Well pain guns don't go on really smoothly unless you can stand back away and with all the nooks and crannies we had a big mess on our hands with our first coat or primes.  Okay scratch that, get nice purdy brushes and flortrol and do it by hand. FIVE COATS LATER...  5 days to complete the project, and our poor children's brain going to mush by all the games they played on the ipad and movies they watched we were finally done!  It does look nice and clean and opens the kitchen up and I think it will help with buyer appeal when we finally sell this place.  But I would not recommend painting your cabinets unless you have to, like we did.  It is worth the money to tear out and get new ones!  Thanks babe for helping me do this project, I would have lost my mind without you.

Earning Stars

We've been doing star charts at our house to help the kids learn how to take a little more responsibility around the house, be rewarded for good behavior, and learn delayed gratification.  Christian chose a cool batman toys set to earn and Evan chose a monster truck set.  We bough it and put it on top of the fridge so they could see it every day.  They earned stars for helping me with chores, making their beds, clearing their plates, cleaning up toys, sharing, choosing the right, etc.  They could also loose stars if they were behaving badly.  This works really well for Christian since time out is kind of old school for him now that he is getting older.  I remembered to take pictures of Christian's chart, but not Evan's  :(  trying to get better, I've fallen out of the habit.  Since this picture Christian has completed another star where he earned $10.  He then used another $10 he saved and we pitched in $10 and he bought himself a razor scooter which he loves.  Evan is close to completing his chart too.  Love these kiddos.