Progress.

Well, after right around 19 hours of painting this weekend, we have made some progress on the walls in the living room & kitchen. To be honest, I enjoyed about 15 of those hours of painting because I found it relaxing to trim & roll since it made my brain focus just on paint. It was a relief to relax my thoughts and shut off all the thinking for a few hours. But by hour 15, I started to get impatient and flat-out tired of painting {go figure.}

We’ve worked hard this week & despite the chaotic state of my house right now, I feel like we’ve made good progress. Since I’m a list-makin kind of girl, humor me while I spout off all our checks for this week {this makes me happy.} :)

• Clean living room & kitchen walls
• Clean living room, hallway & kitchen ceilings
• Remove nails & curtain rods in living room & kitchen
• Spackle & sand nail holes
• Remove frame on half doorway ledge between kitchen & living room
• Spackle & sand half doorway ledge
• Paint two coats on kitchen ceiling
• Paint in living room ceiling {bye bye sparkles!}
• Paint hallway ceiling
• Trim & prime kitchen walls
• Trim & prime living room walls
• Trim & paint first river reed coat in kitchen
• Trim & paint second & last river reed coat in kitchen {halfway done}
• Put the rooms back together

Yeah for progress!

So here’s some pics from this weekend. Here’s the messy state of our living room once ceilings were painted & walls were primed with the Problem Solving Primer I mentioned Friday. PS you can see some of my wondrous blooms in the pic below. More on those later this week. ;) It was funny to me how much larger the living room seemed once we covered over that awful deep maroon.

Yikes. Whatamess.

For the paint color in the kitchen, we used Olympic Premium {zero VOC} in River Reed. I’ve posted the pic of the lid with the color’s specifics fyi.

Oh, and I took some Young House Love advice and bought their highly recommended Premium XL Tight Spots 2″ Angle Short Handle Brush found at Sherwin-Williams for right around five bucks. And let me tell you, this baby was oh so worth it! I’m a cheapskate, but man this brush was nice! It really made it so much easier to trim a straight line.

Um, got a little paint on your fingernail. {I’m a messy painter, there, I admitted it.} So here’s the River Reed first coat going on…

Below is the first coat dried next to the white primed area I’ll be adding chalkboard paint to later {see my mood board for more explanation}.

 

Oh, and nothing like finding dog food in your paint pail. Mmmm.

And here’s the two walls we did the second {and final} coat of River Reed on. I took this pic this morning, before the sun was fully risen, so the lighting’s a little rough, but you get the idea.

I like the color, and I think I’ll really like it once we get rid of the hideous red faux brick vinyl flooring and paint the doors & trim white. Slowly but surely, we’ll get there. :)

Its gotta get worse before it gets better.

I took today off work & spent 10+ hours preparing our walls & ceilings in our kitchen and living room, priming, and painting all day. Thus, no time to take a break to blog. Since I didn’t trim when I painted the kitchen ceiling two days ago and last night, {I know, I should have done this first, but I really didn’t feel like it!} I went ahead and trimmed this morning.

I also filled the million of holes that were in our kitchen walls. It really makes me wonder what the stink they were hanging all over the wall!

Then I enjoyed a little demo time, ripping off the frame from the weird half doorway/window/ledge thing between our kitchen & living room. We plan to open this doorway up all the way soon anyhow.

   

And then I had to putty over where the frame was too.

Then onto priming the walls in the kitchen. Once that was done, we moved on to tackle our living room ceilings.

Now let me tell you, we like to joke that our house if a party house. It’s true for two reasons. #1, we have bowling alley boomerang countertops AND #2 {wait for it, wait for it} we have glitter all over our ceilings. Lovely. Pictures don’t do it justice so you’ll have to take my word for it, but trust me, it’s something special.

{You can kind of see the specks of sparkles on the ceiling in the pic above.}

Needless to say, with the glitter and previous poor paint job where the dark wall paint was smudged all over the ceilings, we needed to paint the ceilings.

I just kept reminding myself today that it has to get worse before it gets better. Sheesh, our house is such a dusty, chaotic mess right now.

And we didn’t stop with the ceiling. We got this awesome “problem solving” primer from Lowes to tackle the deep red {I can’t tell you what I call this color because it’s pretty disgusting.}

This stuff is seriously impressive. It didn’t reek and it covered so well; check it out…

We only got half the living room primed, but I’ll finish it up tomorrow.

 

Who knows, maybe I’ll even have the color on the walls after this weekend. Is it weird that I literally get giddy just thinking about covering this nasty maroon & finally having some pleasant hues surrounding me!

Wondrous thing in full bloom.

I haven’t blogged about my daily wondrous thing for a while, so here’s an entire post dedicated just to that. In case you’re new to my blog…I like to note my “wondrous thing” for the day so that I’m reminded to look for the little things {like catching a sunrise, or a simple call from a friend, or even good weather} that God places in my life each day to remind me that He loves me. I originally got the encouragement to look for a daily wondrous thing from my mom, who has done this as long as I can remember. I truly believe the Lord takes great delight in blessing us with little love notes in the form of wondrous things. And it makes me smile every time I notice one!

For the LORD takes delight in his people;
   he crowns the humble with victory. Psalm 149:4

 The LORD delights in those who fear him,
   who put their hope in his unfailing love Psalm 147:11

Although I complain a lot about my job & the rough hours & little support, I will admit, one of the big perks of my job as an event coordinator is {on a rare occasion} I get to take home leftover fresh flowers used in centerpieces. I’ve worked three big events in the last five days, and God gave me a little pick-me-up today by leaving me some beautiful Spring flowers free for the taking left from my event yesterday.

How can you not smile & feel uplifted just looking at the bright colors of these fresh blooms?!

The sunflowers are my favorite. Paired with the bear grass, they take me right back to the day of my wedding. Oh, LOVE. :)

My house may be an ugly disaster zone as we continue remodeling this weekend, but it will also be beautifully adorned with these gorgeous fresh flowers in every room {admits the drop cloths and paint cans!}

   

Fresh flowers on frozen ice; I’m looking forward to Spring {so much!}

So there you have it. My happy wondrous thing for the day – a box full of free fresh flowers for my house. Thanks for that smile, God. Just what I needed.

Just call me Martha.

I have this problem. Anytime my husband’s away working, which he is frequently now that baseball season has started {he’s a head varsity coach}, I feel guilty sitting at home relaxing. So what do I do? I work.  It’s crazy, I know. And my husband tells me to relax all the time, yet I still feel this push to keep busy since he’s working so hard too. Needless to say, last night was a pretty productive evening! When I got home from work, Eugene & I took down the ceiling light fixtures in our kitchen.

Then, I had to putty over & later sand the holes left in the ceiling from the light fixture.

 

Once that was done, Eugene had to go to his first baseball practice as a high school head varsity coach. So I went ahead and started to clean the ceiling and walls in the kitchen to prepare them for paint. When I finished that, I got out our 5 gallon jug of new white ceiling paint, only to find it was a chunky mess. I then had to return it to Lowes, where they were kind enough to give me a new {more expensive} type of paint to replace the glopy stuff. Apparently, when we had the ice storm a while back they had a truck full of paint that froze and didn’t thaw correctly. Interesting.

Finally back home, I took a “break” to throw some balsamic chicken into the oven & started my first experience painting ceilings. It was nice that I didn’t have to worry about getting extra paint on the walls or the floors, since the floors will be replaced and walls repainted soon {hopefully!}

The dingy, dirty ceiling before {with the wall paint on it too.}

Here’s the wet painted ceiling…

  

And I also read that if you wrap your wet roller in saran and put it in the refrigerator, it’ll last just fine for up to four days without needing to clean it. {Score!} Hopefully it works!

And for the made-up chicken dish – hardly counts as a recipe – it’s thawed skinless, boneless chicken breasts with some salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese on both sides. Place it in a baking dish covered in plenty of foil.

Pour on the balsamic vinaigrette dressing & wrap it up in a foil packet. Bake it at 375 for 40 or so minutes, or until it’s no longer pink.

Bake it at 375 for 40 or so minutes, or until it’s no longer pink.

I ate it with cold leftover green beans because I was too busy painting, but hopefully you have time to get warm sides to go with it! It’s even better when you marinate the chicken in the dressing for a few hours. :)

So painted ceilings and baked chicken…just call me Martha Stewart {ya know, minus the whole jail time thing!}

Back to ice.

Eugene & I both agreed that if our family didn’t life in Ohio, we’d pack our bags and move to somewhere south & warmer {Florida or South Carolina} quicker than you can say sunshine. But, we’re homebodies & love being close to our family, so we’re stuck here in the buckeye state freezing our tails off with ice and snow, despite the fact that I went on a sunny run around our neighborhood just last week in shorts and a long sleeve t-shirt. That’s Ohio for ya – cold, hot, rainy, dry, all within hours! The pup’s been slightly obsessed with sitting by the big window in our living room. He’s just barely tall enough to sit & watch out it. He was intent on watching the snow this morning.

Yesterday was probably a 9 out of 10 on the scale of stressful days for me. Among other things, I had a big event to deal with, and despite the thick ice that fell an hour before the event, we still had a nice turn out, plenty of food, no AV issues, and got out on time.

Whew! Now I just have another huge event tomorrow to get through & then I’m on the downhill ride to the weekend. I’m really hoping to paint some ceilings this weekend. :)

Starting to feel fenced in.

Another Friday night date spent at a home store…this time picking out $800 worth of fencing material {not including the actual chain link fence we purchased at Lowes earlier this week.} Eugene, Eugene’s dad, and I started early Saturday morning installing the rest of our chain link fence. We were lucky enough to have both longer sides of our yard already fenced in by our neighbors & they gave us permission to tie into their fence, so we only have to fence the back of our yard and the front sides to the house.

We also rented a two-man auger to help us drill holes for our posts, even through the roots of our trees.

image source                                                                       image source

This guy was a beast to handle…basically gave me an extremely intense speed squat work out along with forearm curls. I flashed back to volleyball three-a-days, but this time around I was way out of shape! The auger was 55 bucks to rent for four hours, an unbudgeted splurge, but because of the roots, we decided it would be a good idea. Plus, we only needed it 2 hours {and 1 hour was spent trying to dislodge it from the very wet ground once we accidentally got it stuck.} The rental employee told me once I returned it, “Yeah, we probably should warn people when they rent those that they get stuck easily when the ground’s wet.” Um, yes, that would have been very helpful. Thanks for sharing that two hours too late. :/

And since I’m being honest on our budget for the house, I should confess that I was way off on my budget for the fence. I only priced the chain links {$300}, but once you added in all the poles, hardware, quickcrete, etc, we were up above $1,200. Sheesh, way off. Knowing this, I was even happier that we didn’t have to fence the entire yard.

So six or so hours, three trips to Home Depot {the concrete mix was too heavy for one trip}, two trips to Lowes, and LOTS of muscle and hard work, took us from this…

to this…

See the poles in the back by the evergreen trees? Here’s a closer view…

I know it doesn’t look like much, but we were happy to have made this progress.