New Year's Eve Project

This poor room in our basement has been everything from my attempted office/craft room to Craig's office to this attempt at a play room. As you can see, we failed miserably at the play room. The scary thing is that this picture was taken after at least a third of the "junk" had been removed. When we first started you could not even see the floor. Well yesterday Craig and I decided it was time to make it into a functional playroom. Here's the before...

and here's the after!!! We're still going to do some fun things (hopefully) with decorating, but that will have to wait for a bit while we recoup from the cost of this. It was wonderful to have the room done for last night since we had people over to celebrate the New Year. The girls did crafts on the table, watched movies, and played games in here while the 4 youngest boys played the Wii in the basement family room and the 3 oldest boys played the Xbox in our den upstairs. It's only taken us 6 years to get this figured out, but hey, maybe after 10 we'll finally have the whole house figured out! :-)

I believe Craig took this picture to show that for about 40 minutes last night we had 36 people in our home of which 17 of them were 14 and 15 year olds! Our good friends were here and got a call at 10:45pm from their daughter saying that she and her friends were wanting to head to their house for the countdown. Well, that would have meant that her parents would have had to leave our playing, so Craig and I invited them to bring all the friends here. We didn't have a clue as to how many there would be, but we knew we had plenty of food and could handle the group. Well, they came, and we had a wonderful time watching these teenagers mingle for a while. The younger kids were in awe of all the girls and boys here, and we had a fun time counting in the New Year! Maybe having teenagers won't be so bad after all! (I can hope, right?!!)