Because He is God: The birth of a room...

A few things before the long awaited exercise room reveal. (I say "long awaited" not because I'm fooled into thinking there are millions of blog readers out there on pins and needles waiting to see my exercise room...but because it's long awaited for me. This room has been a dream of mine for months!)

Last night I had a ridiculously productive night and I credit it all to daylight savings and the extended hours of sunshine. (I also owe my house temperature to daylight savings. It pains me how much propane we go through running our furnace. So our house is set at 65 degrees and when we got home from work, it was 68 and stayed that way until about 10pm...no furnace all day yesterday!) Anyway, last night...I ran before supper, washed dishes after supper, cleaned out my flower boxes to get them primed and ready for a spring planting, helped Dan clean out the third stall of the garage AND stayed outside to play basketball with Dan. (I admit my defeat...I was so against that ugly basketball hoop. But we had so much fun playing last night that I now see his reason for fighting tooth and nail to keep the thing up. It really was fun, even for two adults.)

Tonight's the night. We're celebrating St. Patrick's Day by finally caving and enjoying a dinner of Americanized Chinese food. The buffet has lobster, and any time we've seen a Red Lobster commercial in the last two weeks, we look at each other not to comment on how good Red Lobster looks, but to remind each other of our Chinese date. (We're so...interesting.) By the way, we're not really "celebrating St. Patrick's Day"...it just so happened to fall on the day we're having Chinese food.

I've been experimenting with running barefoot on the treadmill. I've read/heard that your feet are the most appropriate running shoe - that they're fashioned to cushion and support in all the right ways. It's...different. I realized that running heel-first on a treadmill without the rubber sole of a shoe gets VERY loud with each footfall. So I've been running kind of on the top of my feet...like a kangaroo kind of. It's a calf/hamstring workout like NONE OTHER. (Not so sure that this running style stays true to the "best support" theory though.) Anyway, I can handle the calf workout for about halfway through the run, but then have to slip the Asics back on.

I love this time of year, because when people open the door to talk into the office, I can hear birds chirping :) In the little newborn tree in our front yard, there's already a little bird's nest. We're thinking about where to hang the bird house that my Grandma Ruth gave me. We'll wait until there are leaves on the trees to hang it, though.

My sister just finished reading the Harry Potter series. She's always been an H.P. movie supporter, but has never had the time to devote to reading the books. I'm SO happy that she finally finished, and so is she! She now understands my constant complaint that the movies just don't do the books justice. (Nothing specific to Harry Potter...I think all books-turned-movie franchises have that issue. It's impossible to avoid because movies lack imagination the way books promote it.) Anyway, she sent me this text message yesterday and I told her I had a strong desire to post it in a public forum. So here we go: "It is SO true that the movies are so much better when you know the whole story...all those years, you had such patience with me...and now, I revel in the fullness of the story with you - no longer as my teacher, but as my fellow, true Harry Potter fan equal." HA!

Okay, exercise room!

The room when we moved in - plus our broken, unusable treadmill

Looking left at the doorway, t.v. wall

Right into the doorway - the closet juts out

Looking left at the doorway again (Not sure why I took this picture twice)

Looking at the doorway from the back corner - closet on the left side of the picture

Prepping the studs for drywall. They had all this nasty goop and glue from the drywall that was torn down before we moved in

More prepping...

Instead of fiberglass insulation we used foam and covered it with plastic. Dan is cement glue-ing the foam insulation to the concrete

Almost finished with the insulation...

Cutting the foam pieces down to fit between the studs and around outlets

Looking cleaner but still a looooong way to go

Stapling the plastic over the insulation as a moisture barrier

Up goes the plastic

Plastic up - just needed to be cut off at the bottom. I could've sworn I had a picture of the plastic up and finished, but I can't find it on this computer. Oh well.

And onto the drywall! This is looking left inside the doorway. The little black spot is the t.v. mount.

Drywall, drywall and more drywall. It made a HUGE difference to have the room closed off.

Looking at the closet and doorway, drywalled

And then...came the mudding and sanding. I would NOT recommend anyone to do this on their own. SO much dust. It was awful. I have nightmare about trying to do the whole basement ourselves because of this process.

Dan checkin' out a corner

T.V. wall

Closet

Dan sealing the bucket of drywall mud :)

And sadly, I got lazy and didn't take ANY pictures of the priming, painting, door hanging or trim process. I'm irritated with myself. So the next thing you'll see is....(wait...the floor lamp is because we're having some electric issues in this and one other room, so for now we have a floor lamp because the ceiling light doesn't work - but that's temporary)

THE FINISHED PRODUCT!!!