Lots to report!

We've been super-diligent with house work recently.


Cyndi, Katii and Dad came to help us with painting this weekend. We three girls went to Lowe's to "look at" paint and ended up coming home with three gallons. James had picked out the colors on a previous trip, although he didn't know that's what he was doing at the time. We were meandering down the paint aisle, and he picked up three paint cards and said, "What about these, for the kitchen, den, and living room?" As that was the first time he'd shown any interest in paint colors, I took that to mean that he was head over heels for those colors. Turns out he had only a passing interest in them, but how was I to know that?


First, we painted the den--a lovely lime-y green color, which turned out a lot brighter than we thought it would. As Cyndi says, "It's not the color you chose, but it's the color you'll love" Never were truer words spoken. I am infatuated with my den color. Here are some pictures:



Of course a good paint job starts with taping.




Cyndi hard at work--she's quite the expert at painting.



A little silliness.


After the family left on Sunday, James and I did the living room. The color is called chilled cantaloupe. It looks like a fleshy, peachy, salmon-y color. We're not as thrilled with it as with the den, but it'll look better when there's furniture in the room and paintings on the walls. Lots of paintings on the walls.

Speaking of the walls. There was a lot of spackling to be done in the living room. Here's a tip: the spackle has to dry before you paint. We thought we'd start painting in the areas of the room that didn't have spackle and work our way to the patches and by the time we got to them they'd be dry. Not the case. It seemed like the more we painted, the longer it took for the spackle to dry. Probably we added too much moisture to the room with all the paint. Lesson learned. We didn't have that much time wasted, but there was probably a half hour or so that we were literally watching the paint dry. Or the spackle to be more precise.

Here are pictures from that day:










On Sunday night and Monday, we ripped up carpet and started stripping the old finish off of the wood underneath. That is a big project which has not been completed yet, but there are sure to be lots of pictures when it is complete, as well as a too-long description of the hardships of stripping floors by hand.