Riley and Avery

Our art bins have always been a disaster. No matter how organized they start out, there's always lidless markers mixed with crayons and colored pencils and Avery saying "Mom! I need a red! Find one for me?" Ugh. So I had the brilliant idea of getting the girls each their own art bins. And voila! They are neat and clean and organized and the markers are always put back, without me even asking. Nice! The little things...

I am finishing the dollhouse that I started, like, a year ago. I stopped working on it when my wallpaper job went awry and I didn't feel like messing with it. Now, I'm back at it! Ace Hardware opened up a new store right near us, so I hopped over there to look at whether I could paint the interior walls rather than papering them. Turns out, they have these interior paint samples, 2 ounces worth, in hundreds of colors, for $3 each. Score! I picked out one color for each room and went to town. When I first started this dollhouse, you would basically have to buy a pint of any given color, but these little tester pods are awesome!

And since it was been so long since I worked on it, the Gorilla glue dried up, the shingle glue dried up, the white paint dried up, and the shingle stain dried up. Yay. The only thing I haven't replaced yet is the shingle stain since I have no idea where I bought it originally and the stores I've gone to don't have it. I really hope I can find it since I stained the roof way back when and now need to stain the porch roof. Dude, I even put in baseboards! (well, almost done with the baseboards, I ran out and have to get more) Rudi thinks I am absolutely insane!

Which reminds me, I went to Hobby Lobby to get shingle glue and after wandering around in the dollhouse aisle for some time, wandered over to the glue aisle. A man walks up to me and asks me if I need any help finding anything. I ask for suggestions on glue for shingles, so that they don't warp when glued. We get into a looooooong conversation about dollhouses, he asks me which one I am making, if I'm going to put electricity in it (yeah, right!), and so on. He suggests ways of dyeing the shingles, and a ton of other things. He tells me that building dollhouses is his hobby and when they're finished he donates them to a charity to auction off. Then he says "These dollhouse kits hardly ever go on sale, so the best thing to do is wait until they have a 40% off coupon." And I'm thinking, they? Why didn't he say we? Then I notice that he has no name tag or anything to suggest that we works there and I come to the realization that this is just some random guy wandering around Hobby Lobby! I guess it can be seen as either creepy or kinda nice. This isn't the first time that a random customer helped me out in that store. When I was buying a model airplane for Rudi a while ago, a customer helped me find everything I needed. Ah, Hobby Lobby, such a strange, cool place, full of crafting freaks like me!

One problem with the dollhouse is that Avery was not really interested in the dollhouse that much when I first started it. I mean, she would play with it a little, and she was interested in what I was doing, but she wasn't covetous of it :) Now she wants her own dollhouse (luckily, she wants a smaller one!), which got me thinking, I am hoping that this house will last for generations, so shouldn't each daughter have one to pass down? We really don't have any heirlooms in our family, so it would be nice to create one, right?

And that concludes my boring post about something that no one cares about :)