We are having door issues. Actually, I think we’re having house settling issues, but the one is causing the other. Take a look at the top edge of our front doors:

It may look like an innocent little difference, but that difference makes it nearly impossible to get the doors to connect. In short, we can’t lock the door. For the past couple of weeks we’ve been able to rig it so that if you push down on the doorknob while locking the deadbolt, you can get it to lock, but that hasn’t been working so well for us the last couple of days. In fact, our new door locking system looks an awful lot like this:

Yes, I know I need to vacuum. That’s a completely different issue. So you see our fancy door locking mechanism there? It does a decent job except for two major things: 1) It’s hard to do this when leaving the house and 2) It’s really hard to get back in.

“So go through another door,” you might say. To you I reply, “All of our doors are doing this right now.”

Yes, it’s true. We’re having trouble with all of our doors. What? Go through the garage? Good idea, except that we don’t have a working garage door opener. We have come up with a bit of a solution, though. When we need to leave the house, most of my family goes out the normal way through the front door. I then stay inside to set the chair in place. I go through the garage, open the door and wait for it to fully open. After it’s open, I run toward the opening, making sure to hop over the sensor at the bottom so that the door will actually close. It’s a nice little form of exercise and it’s guaranteed to make my kids double over in laughter. I’m all about that.

So nice! We’re now officially locked out of the house. But wait! There’s more! When we come home from wherever we needed to go, we just send Chloe around back. She crawls in through the doggy door and removes the chair from the front door. Presto, the rest of us walk in like normal people.

Except there’s just nothing normal about that at all, is there?

My parents are coming tomorrow and guess what’s number one on my dad’s list of ways he’s preparing to serve us? Door maintenance.

The second thing on his list is mirror removal. Take a look at this:

I know this is hard to believe, but I didn’t do a single thing to this room before snapping the photo. We’re all friends here, right?

This is our dining room that I was originally planning to use as a, well, dining room. Since the start of school, though, we’ve officially switched gears and decided to make it into a school room that can convert to an overflow dining room if and when that day is needed.

Either way, we don’t need the mirrors. So my dad is going to remove them from this wall and then I’m going to paint the room eggplant purple. I’m thinking about some big bulletin boards and maybe a section of chalkboard paint as well. Darn it, it’s time we had us a real school room!

My mom doesn’t know this yet, but I’m thinking about asking her to figure out how in the world I should organize all the cabinets in the girls’ bathroom. We have two hall closets up there as well that need some attention. I think she might be able to solve those problems for me.

I’m also hoping she just takes over the beautification of my front porch by way of some new fall wreath action.

After my parents are done checking off my to-do list, we plan to go to The Passages and maybe even hit up one of the free museums on Saturday. Ambitious, much?

Regardless of what we actually DO accomplish, it will be nice to have my parents over for a couple of days and here’s hoping we can actually use our keys to lock the front door after tomorrow.