Hardwood floor dilemas

Summer went by waaaay too fast.  This month started my 12th year of homeschooling and now all five of my babies are in school.  It breaks my heart.  It's the end of another era for me as a mother and I miss having actual babies and toddlers and preschoolers in my house but there are perks to having only kids that can communicate coherently and get their own dadgum snacks.  Really, heh-heh, those are the two biggest perks.  Mamas with little ones, savor every moment, even the sticky, stinky, exhausting ones because it passes by so quickly whether or not you're enjoying it so you might as well soak it all in and enjoy it.

Besides schooling, we've been eating a lot of veggies lately.  Madison loves, loves, loves to garden. It's right up there with painting in her book and every day this summer, and still now, she spends time tending to her huge garden.  She has brought in loads and loads of vegetables, a grocery bag full, every day. Everything she has grown this year has been delicious and we really hate seeing the growing season end.  Well, except for Sophia, she does not like vegetables.

This is only a portion of the produce that we have at the moment.  There's more in the freezer and all over the kitchen counters.  Yesterday, she brought in a THIRTY POUND watermelon!  The watermelons she grew this year have been fantastic.  (The pretty potted flowers in the background are also Madison's doing.)

This month Sophia and Evelyn turned six and eight.  Thankfully, that's still young enough that I get to do all the baking for their birthday's. I always combine their birthdays to keep myself from too much baking in one month but I still manage to get a little bit carried away and make more than necessary.  I had so much fun decorating sugar cookies for them, especially the ice cream cone cookies.

Okay, now onto the housey stuff.  A while back we finished the spare bedroom upstairs and I'll show you the pictures in a second.  It's the first room in the house that is completely finished (except for one light switch cover).  It makes us feel like there is hope for this place yet; although, we're seeing that it would take a miracle for the house to get finished by the end of the year.  Time, energy, and drive are resources that are hard to come by so we continue to plod along slowly.

For the floor we used low odor, water based polyurethane on unstained tavern grade oak flooring and I absolutely LOVE the way it looks.  However, the polyurethane caused some pretty bad allergic reactions in a few of us that forced us to come up with a new, safer plan for the future floors.  We decided to try pure tung oil mixed with citrus solvent on the next floor we did as our safer alternative and I'm not loving the way it looks...but it's safer.  Now I'll show you the two to compare.

This is the tung oiled floor in our upstairs living room/craft room/school room/play room...I don't really know what I'll use this room for yet.   It takes a month to fully cure and we're a bit over half way there.  The color keeps lightening ever so slightly but it's just too dark and rustic looking for my taste...but it's safer. Behind the door is the finished bed-now-storage-room with lighter, more contemporary and glorious floors that I love, love, love.

You can see the big difference in colors between the two floors and the lighter floor only accentuates the aspects I don't love about the tung oiled floor...that's safer (lest we forget).

If I were more dedicated to my blogging craft I would have taken pictures of the bedroom before we shoved it full of crap but evidently I am not.  Below is the only portion of wall that isn't hidden behind piles of stuff (because I moved said stuff for the picture).

And while I'm showing you bad photos of my house, I might as well show you the other side of the room I have yet to purpose.  (For the record, I would like it to be a second living room which would be way more fun to decorate than any of the other more reasonable/useful options.)

You and kind of see that this room is in a large dormer which is why it has such an unusual shape. Jeff almost didn't build the dormers which would have meant the upstairs would have been one long, dark, narrow room with one little window at the end.  I asked for dormers a few of times in the drawing stages and Jeff always said it would be too much work, time, and money so, no.  Then while he was framing the addition with the help of JJ, who must be his very-best-friend-in-the-world-in-all-times-ever!!!, JJ suggested building dormers and Jeff thought it seemed like a pretty good idea so they did. Now every.single.time we're in that room Jeff says, "Can you believe we almost didn't build these dormers?!"  Sigh.  Thank the Lord for good friends. 

So that you can get a feel for what I'm talking about, below is an outside picture of the back of the house. Can you imagine that as one long room with only one little window???  Also, please don't judge us based on the level of redneckedness you see in the picture.  Aw, who am I kidding.  It's really much worse than what you can see here.  You should see an aerial view of our house, it's really sad. If you look closely at the background in the birthday picture you'll get a glimpse of what I'm talking about.  Home sweet home, gotta love it!!  :)