Thanksmas 2024!

We have been working towards remodeling our 17ft high "crawlspace" under our house into usable space since Sept 2021. There's been lots of things to overcome which I'm going blog about eventually. My hope was to be able to use the space for Thankmas 2025, but then God was like...nope I can actually make that happen this year. I love that He cares about the little things that make us happy! 

This is our old pantry under our stairs. We knew eventually this would be the stairs to the basement so in order for us to use this as stairs Michael had to build me a place to store all that food. 

So he built me these cabinets and they have been wonderful! We still used the under the stairs closet for storage because we are a family to 6 and you use all the storage you have when you have it. 

This is how the closet looked during the beginning of 2024 after the broken pipe. 

This is how it looked in November 2024. 

In all honestly I never thought this day would come...we have stairs inside our house that go to our basement! This was huge step...no pun intended...in the process. As you can see the stairs go down a bit and then turn to the right. 

Here's the rest of the staircase as it leads to the finished space below. There will be a door at the bottom of the stairs eventually. 

This year we really had no idea how we were going to have Thanksmas because our garage was a mess from all the constructions we've been doing. We actually contemplated getting heavy duty plastic and enclosing the covered deck space we have so we could set up tables out there. That didn't sound ideal though. Once I saw that we were actually getting close to have a semi-finished space I talked with our contractor and let me know that I would really appreciate it if we could utilize the space on November 30th for Thanksmas. He didn't give me a definitely yes, but he did seem open to shooting for that goal. He actually ended up coming over on Friday, November 29th in order to finish cleaning up the area so we could use it. 

The morning of November 30th, Ga-Ga & Pa came over early so Pa would have time to get all the tables set up. At first we thought we might do separate tables like we've done in the past...men, women and kids, but with this nice huge space we opted for just one long table and people could sit wherever they wanted.

The space is usable, but not completely finished. We have limited electricity down there and zero heat so I went online and rented an indoor propane heater from Home Depot. It was a little noisy, but it made it so everyone wasn't freezing! 

Our chiropractor was selling his practice and he asked if we wanted these cabinets for free. Yes please! We plan to make this basement space into a studio apartment so these will come in handy. We used them for the dessert and punch table. 

I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the food all set up, but here's food line. 

We ended up having 22 people present for dinner. Poor Christina wasn't feeling well so she stayed home. :( 

Since Papa comes over most Tuesday's for guitar lessons with Jack he'd actually already gotten to see the work that had been done. 

Later on Justine's family stopped by and we played a new game we learned called Tens. 

You're really supposed to play until someone has 200 points or something like that, but we were only able to play one hand. 

Look at this handsome guy! 

Cuties always wearing their matching shirts! 

While we were downstairs playing most of the adults were upstairs because it was warmer.

Ga-Ga is sitting with Linda Patrick here. Linda is such a gem and I'm so happy she was able to come to Thanksmas. She had just had surgery earlier in the week. 

The kids were horsing around upstairs for a bit. 

The bromance is strong! :) 

Gotta love this cute picture of me and my Dad with Owen cleaning gunk out of his eye in the background. Hahahaha! 

Caleb has gotten so tall! 

These girls are such beauties! 

Justine's Mom, Jhaycee and his little sister Micah...they were only able to stay for a little bit because they had already attended another party that day. 

Pa and Bill...such a wonderful, longstanding friendship. 

Thanksmas was awesome! It was such a treat to have so many people over and get to utilize the new space. I'm so excited to see how this space transforms even more this next year!