Baby Boy turned 1 recently. Here he is in his birthday suit. 🙂 
He very much enjoyed licking the bowl clean when I made his birthday cake. Several of these pics are from a recent camping trip out east where it was still toasty warm and absolutely BEAUTIFUL, and though I’m sure there’s a peaceful way to accomplish posting them in the right order, I am technologically challenged and refuse to waste another minute on it. Use your imagination to pull all of the pics that look like they’re camping trip related together and the ones that are obviously snaps of our house in its new form in a group of their own.
Do you have any idea how hard it was for them to sit still this long and attempt a decent pic? I came out with a couple that … between them, you can see everyone’s face. Sort of…
This was his FIRST FISH!! Oh he was SOOO excited!!
It’s not actually this dark in the school room but I can never catch the lighting just right in there for a good pic. Anyway, you can see where we removed the chalkboard and put in another side of desks.
That messy thing on the wall is a Scrabble puzzle of our names. I jumbled it for the web…but in real life it looks much better.
This is our canvas tent. It has a wood stove…very handy for cool nights. It was much more like glamping this year, especially since I took the blender and Instant Pot. … WHAT? Don’t look at me like that. So what if I totally forgot the dutch oven. I had better things to do than stand next to the fire all the time. Like…fish with the boys, play volleyball with the teenagers (there were like 30 of them there this year)… sit gazing at the beautiful lake with the toddler in arm. 
The greenhouse is doing really well!!! We hope it does this all winter.
This pic turned up way out of order. Use your imagination to stuff it back up there with the fishing pics. We had a big water balloon fight with like 50 other people and little man here managed to snag his very own balloon, which he finally busted all over himself.
The first change was boot holders, made from regular 2×4 boards and 1″ dowel rods. DH cut them and the children painted them. Now the floor is boot free, and everyone’s boots have their own home. And THIS means that I can tell even the two-year-old to put his boots up and they go into their rightful place, out of the way.
The next thing we did in the laundry room was put a wall around the hot water heater. DH installed his first free-standing wall during this project. He’s so handy-man! He also craftily installed a door in front of the water heater for access, and then covered it with laundry baskets. We now have a basket for each member of the family hanging, so when the dryer beeps, I simply open it up and drop the laundry into its rightful place. And I’m finished with my part. The children are capable of carrying their baskets to their rooms and delivering the laundry to its drawer or hanger (more on that later).
Here’s the free-standing wall DH built. It encloses the stand up freezer (left) and hides buckets and a dirty laundry hamper underneath it. He then built a table that is just big enough to hold my mixer, Vitamix, and food processor. I want these here for a couple of reasons: 1) they take up too much space on my kitchen counter and I use them too often to keep them in a drawer, 2) they are loud to operate and I often find myself mixing and blending in the early morning hours while little people aught not be awoken. Lastly, he placed a couple of shelves above the appliances so I can store my economy sized boxes of Ziplocs and trash bags. 
This is my favorite part of the “new” laundry room. This pantry shelving reduces every nook and cranny we could find in the entire house to hide canned goods into one neat, tidy, and completely findable (is that a word?) location. Woo hooo!! Oh, and since I really get tired of tripping over brooms, mops, etc., on the floor, DH hung them on the back of the laundry room door for me. 
This pic shows the divider between the washer and dryer and the shelf. DH had to remove the top of that divider in order to fit the shelf, so he replaced it with a piece of wood (not shown). 
This is how we removed the clutter in front of the living room doorway. When we had only a few children, a basket next to the door did the trick; but, as the family size increased, so did the amount of shoes and dirt build-up at the front door. Now, if the children leave their shoes out, I can simply tell them (even the two-year-old), “Put your shoes in their bin.” 
This is my school room. I used to have a table sitting the middle of this room, and over time it became a thorn in my flesh because it inevitably ended up piled several feet high in the center with books, old papers, and other debris. There was never enough room for the children to comfortable do their school work. One day, I decided we needed a change, and I came up with this! I found the filing cabinets on Craigslist for anywhere from $2-$15 a piece. After we found four of them, DH purchased a 4’x8′ piece of plywood. He cut it into pieces that equaled the entire length of the desks and the shelving above them. I painted and sealed them so they’d be easy to clean and then he installed everything in to this very productive and neat school area. Now, if I don’t want to look at someone’s books or … debris… I request that they clean their desks and it all goes away. 
This is just a close-up of a typical desk in our school room. With four children, grades 8th to 1st, I have a lot on my plate when it comes time to teach. We do Bible study together and then they all do their individual work (generally, I sit between the 1st and 2nd grader and help both at the same time). Each student has his/her own dry erase board with magnetic labels (found all of it on amazon) that tell them what to do that day. Every day, they are required to finish all of the things on the “To Do” side before quitting for the day. This accomplishes two things for me: 1) Everyone becomes responsible for their own school work in a way, and I can focus on the things that require my attention, like teaching reading and multiplication, and 2) I don’t forget to do piano or Social Studies for someone. It’s easy to forget when there is so much going on at once. On the other side of the school room is a chalk board, but it will be replaced in the next year with a set up very similar to this one, as eventually, we’ll have two more children in the classroom.
This is our boys’ room. While it’s usually cluttered with clothes, train tracks, trucks, and worst of all, LEGOS…everywhere… it works well to provide bedding for all of them, plus extra space to play. I’m pretty proud of DH for not only designing, but building this entire thing himself.
This is the continuation of the bunks that DH built a couple of years ago. The loft is generally where they sit and play with LEGOS/K’nex and it serves as a fort during war games. When we added the loft, it was simply to provide extra space for the active little guys and give them a place to be alone if everyone else is running around the room.
The Mountain Mamma 