Lots of you blowed up stuff real good over the weekend - good for you. We spent our lovely holiday weekend working around the house, literally. Lots of things to do for which we've finally scraped together some dough (including a generous guilt love offering related to the UB, which we gladly spent). We didn't get it all done this weekend, not by half, but we're off to a good start.
I need to say this first: when my wife gets the bit in her mouth, it's best just to let her go until she runs out of steam. HOLY. PAINTING. BATMAN. She's awesome, but exhausting to watch. We played the heathen this Sunday and stayed home, choosing to sleep in. Once everyone was awake, however, it was ON, baby. I corralled the kids downstairs while Beloved started scoring, soaking and scraping the awful wallpaper border off our dining room walls. No, it wasn't nearly as bad as some houses (my brother and his wife had six layers on one bedroom in their house, I think), but it's just freaking annoying to stand there and scrape above your head just so's you can slap on some new paint. At any rate, once she had the scraping done and sanded down the holes I'd spackled the night before, she jumped right into the painting.
At that point I could no longer control the Sisters downstairs, so upstairs we came to watch the progress. That meant "helping" Mommy, of course:
Meanwhile, we also made a trip to Lowe's and bought lots of fun new things for the house: new doors to replace the ones we ruined when the carpet was installed, drywall patches for the basement bedroom (yes, I finally got it patched, and will sand and texture tomorrow!), new curtain hardware for the dining room, stain for the doors and cabinets (and, eventually, the trim as well), and most importantly, new vinyl flooring for the kitchen. I wanted to do porcelain tile, but that was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY out of our price range, so I'll have to wait to tackle that project. My brother's coming in a few weeks, and we'll send Beloved and the Sisters off to visit her sister while we boys install the vinyl (and likely take in a ballgame or something fun on our own).
I'm of two minds about this kind of home work. On the one hand, the clutter and mess drives me nuts. I HATE having things scattered hell to breakfast around our house, especially since Alanna has reached the "I can take everything out of this?" phase and regularly demolishes our movies and bookshelves. On the other hand, it's a lot of fun to see the end result of all that work, right? We're finishing up the dining room/kitchen painting tonight, so it'll be nice to see how all our work makes the house look that much nicer (and more in line with our taste as opposed to the former owners).
Best of all, we get to enjoy it for ourselves. We watch a lot of "house porn" these days (DIY and HGTV are two of the channels we didn't lose when we went to low-tier cable), and it seems like everything is geared toward increasing value for resale. While we're certainly not opposed to making money on the house, we're not going to be selling for a while, hopefully, so we made these changes for US to enjoy. That, combined with the satisfaction of doing the work ourselves, makes for some enjoyable living these last few days. Now if only I could keep the garage clean for one day...
Grace & peace,
Scott
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