Little kids and big projects just don't mix.

It's hard enough to get any work done on big projects around the house with a near-toddler in your care, but it's basically impossible to get anything done when those big projects are in the most-used room of the house. What I would like to do is just keep working on the dining room floor until I've gotten off all that I can of the old linoleum adhesive. But that's just not going to done by this weekend, and the dining room is indispensable and unavoidable: You have to go through it to get from our primary entrance (the back door) to any other room in the house except for the laundry room and office. And you can't get to the kitchen without going through the dining room. So we can't just close it off and make it off limits to Crawling Monkey Baby (aka our 1 y.o. granddaughter) when she's with us on the weekends.

So what that means is, even though I'm only halfway through getting the subfloor staples removed and getting just the loose flaky part of the old adhesive up, and so not even 1/10th of the way through the overall time I'll need to put into this project, come Friday we'll need to wash the floor as well as we can, put the big area rug back down, put the furniture either back into place or at least in a place that's not in the way when we're trying to carry, feed, or watch the baby, and put everything out of reach of monkey-girl's roaming hands. Then we'll have to put things back into ready-to-work mode come Sunday night when they leave.

I love our granddaughters so much that it bursts my heart, and I dearly love that we get to spend this much time with them, but the baby in particular definitely makes house projects difficult.

Oh, just to record: All I was able to do today was remove staples from and dry-scrape about 1/3 of the room total. Tomorrow I have obligations that will keep me from doing much until evening, then Friday I'll have to focus more on baby-proofing than really making any progress.

But since work on the dining room floor is suspended over the weekend, at least I can hopefully start work on my rainbarrels! If the design I've come up with really works, I'm going to post a very detailed how-to in my blog, because truthfully the instructions I've found online so far either didn't make sense and/or called for parts that are either called something else here or just weren't available. If I can help someone else do this, that will be great! But again, the key thing is that I need to make sure it works first.