Halloween Craft Time

 Picked up some Halloween wood craft items this last week and finally got them all finished and dried and put together today! I love them so.

So cute! Little monsters! Little ghosties! 

Painting Rocks

Tonight for YW, we painted rocks for the activity. One of my YW loves to paint rocks and although the rest of us had never tried it before, we gave it a go. I went for simplicity, because I'm not a great artist haha.

Now I put it on my doorstep and it's a great greeter!

Ketchup

All right, I know it’s been a while since I’ve been here. In my defense, I have been a little busy. What with the moving, the unpacking, the cleaning, the painting, the mounting of pictures, etc, I still haven’t had very much free time at all. But here’s me, hopping onto here, to explain where I’ve been.

Last week, it was my birthday. My desk was decorated awesomely by Chelle. She did a princess theme this year, as you can see. Last year, she did a theme for soccer, my favorite thing ever, but because the balloons were black and white, everyone assumed she was calling me over-the-hill, which of course, she wasn’t. So this year, pink was the theme!

Also, she got me a crown to wear that day, and I got to wave wands around. I wore the crown until the night, when I went up into the canyon for a dinner ‘round the fire. I didn’t want my crown to ruin, obvs. But it was a fabulous birthday, (thanks Chelle for the awesome work experience) and I loved turning…late twenties. :)

The rest of my time has basically been spent cleaning. Cleaning the new house, cleaning the apartment (which, we finally accomplished on Sunday, and then got to hand over the keys on Monday, so we’re all done with that, woohoo!) and just…general fixing up of stuff. We’ve been putting up blinds, changing light bulbs, etc. This weekend, we’ll be taking advantage of (read:ruining) the three day weekend by finishing all of the painting once and for all. All that we have left to paint: the 2 stairwells and the 2 bathrooms. I have confidence that those painting (I still will not, sorry everyone) will finish the job awesomely, and I will be…hanging out, doing something. Lets be honest, I’ll probably be cleaning. There are still a few boxes that I need to clean out, but for the most part, until I get some bookshelves, I can’t unpack anything else. Hopefully I’ll be able to get those soon, so I can finally feel like we’re moved in. Another thing that’ll help with that is if we actually got furniture into the front room. So far, we’ve been using that room as a dumping ground for things that we don’t know where to put yet. So it looks a little like we’re awkward hoarders.

So there it is. That’s what I’ve been doing. Nothing exciting, but I can feel that soon, in my future, we’ll be able to have a day where all I have to do is sit and do absolutely nothing. I look forward to this day. And when it happens, I’ll be singing from the rooftops.

Painting, painting, painting

Last week, we (FINALLY) closed on our house. After taking a while on Thursday of last week to sign all the paperwork, on Friday, at 2:00 PM, everything went through, and Husband and I now own our first house. We immediately went into makeover mode. As everyone knows, we were going to paint, and I so didn’t want to. But hiring painters didn’t work out in my favor, because Husband didn’t want to. Ugh. So we painted a little over the weekend, (only a little, because the city had turned off our water, and its difficult to clean brushes with no water) and then on Monday, really tackled it. And by we, I mean Husband painted. I warned IN ADVANCE that I wouldn’t be painting, that I hated it more than anything, ever. So I spent the week cleaning the house (drawers, etc) while Husband, Sister and Sister’s Fiancé painted. We were doing ok, we ragtag bunch of painters, until we realized Wednesday that we needed the house painting done by Thursday night, so we could steam clean the carpets the next morning, and have them dry by the time we were going to move in on Saturday.

So we all took Thursday off of work, and went into super-painting mode. By this point, all of my drawers and cabinets were clean, so I had to jump onto the paint train. Since I still hate to paint (yeah, this didn’t change) I was mostly in charge of taping off the trim, painting the trim, and general clean-up. We got started early, at like, 9 or so. We were also joined by Brother-in-Law, that was a help. So all the guys are downstairs, doing all the big painting of stuff, and Rory and I are upstairs, cleaning up all the mess from the wallpaper (that took about 3 days to get off the wall), doing the trim, and just working in general. As we’re cleaning up the final bits, I look down at the carpet, and see red splotches all over. Let me preface this with, the night before, as we were painting with the cranberry color, someone stepped in the paint and tracked it all over the light blue carpeting. That made me upset, but seeing it happen again today, I just about flipped my lid. So after I spent some time screaming at everyone (I had to yell, seeing as how we were all in different rooms!) I look down, and notice that its on this thing where I had just stood. So I look down, and its not paint – I had apparently sliced open my foot at some point (but didn’t feel it, or register it, I guess) and I had been bleeding all over the place. So after I apologized to everyone and got it all cleaned up, we kept cleaning. After a couple of hours, the upstairs was totally painted, the floor was finally wallpaper-free and clean, and everything was done. We stopped then, and had lunch.

Then, the rest of the house. At this point we lost Brother-in-Law, he had other things, so it was the 4 of us again. We taped, and painted, and sung, and talked, and worked tirelessly for a long time. It got to be about 6-ish before I started to lose it. At this point, I was sick of painting, I was sick of taping, I was sick of being in the super hot house (we couldn’t have the AC on in the house, because the guys installing carpet were having an issue with the AC and the carpet. Plus we needed windows open for ventilation). So this is when the mood turned slowly from having semi-fun painting to hating paint and hating the house and hating everyone around me. Needless to say, things got dark. But after an hour or so of a downfall of moods, things picked up. We finally finished the painting and clean up at 9:30. We all slowly shuffled out of the house, burned out, tired, dirty. On the way home though, we stopped at Arctic Circle and got ice cream cones. We all skipped dinner, so you’d think we’d have been starving, but no. I was just ready for bed, and an ice cream cone sounded like the best thing ever.

So now, here we are. The house is done, all that’s left is a little light cleaning, and putting vent covers/outlet switches back onto the walls. And by tomorrow evening, we should be totally moved in. I can’t wait to be moved in there, and I’m just glad that we’re done with all the painting. And here’s to hoping that I’m done with painting for the rest of my life.

They say taupe is very soothing.

Today, I have done something I have meaning to do for a long time. On January 6, 2007 (yes, this long!) I bought myself a can of paint, to paint my bathroom. I remembered after buying it however, that I hate to paint. I painted the bathroom when we first moved in, and I think I gave up after finishing like 2 or 3 walls. I had to call my older sister in to finish the job. The original color was white, and I painted it a purple/pinkish color. Looking back now, I'm not really sure why I chose that color, but after a couple of years, I got sick of it. So I finally decided to get myself some more paint and change the color.
I chose a whole different theme for the new color. Since my favorite color is gray (I know, thats weird) I chose a slate color. Its really very pretty. But since I don't paint, I had to try to get someone to paint it for me. For the last two years, I have been hounding people to help me out. For every birthday and Christmas present, I kept telling people that they didn't have to get me a gift, all they had to do was paint my bathroom, but still, I had no takers. Finally, on Easter Sunday, Rory told me she would paint it. Having heard this before, I was skeptical, and didn't really think she would. But on that Sunday (after a gentle reminder from me) she showed up, bringing Joseph. Imagine my surprise when they got started. I sat outside the bathroom and kept them company. Mostly that just entailed me laughing hysterically at things that were only moderately funny. Turns out, when I am on Loratabs, not only does it make me super tired, I think everything is hilarious, and laugh until I cry. Which did not help the pain go away any more, so maybe it was a bad idea. They came back this afternoon to apply the second coat, and I gotta tell you, things are looking good in there. Rory and Joseph kept telling me that the dark color would make my bathroom seem like a prison, but I don't think so. I like it in there, and I like the dark color. I can't wait to get everything back in there to see how it'll look. Tomorrow we'll be painting the base boards (or something, I don't really remember) and then we can get everything in there. And of course, while they're doing this, I'll be there, to laugh like a hyena.