I made it to post #10 before complaining about the daily blogging regimen. I really thought it would be much easier this year, but this was a tough week. I've got a couple other projects I've started that are taking a lot of time, and I'm enjoying them more than this right now. On top of that I was on "Pager Duty" at work this last week and I ended up getting pages 4 days in a row at about 5:00 AM. I don't usually start writing my blog entries before 9:00 PM and this week I was up till midnight almost every night (it's 11:12 PM right now). And on top of this, Tina decided that it was time to paint the interior of our house. Actually just our living-room/dining-room area and two hallways. Events like this make me thankful, thankful, thankful that our house is under 1200 square feet.

So the painting plan is to change the colors from greens to yellows and reds (though now it looks like the red might end up purple). The real killer here is that once we started it became very apparent that the ceiling was going to have to be painted. We have one of those awful popcorn ceilings which I have always wanted to scrape off and have retextured, but there is just no way to do that and live in the house at the same time, so I finally caved in and consented to painting it. I am really happy to say that it looks great because the process of painting a ceiling is AWFUL!

Another blessing for me is that Tina really enjoys painting, which means that it's pretty easy for me to get out of most of the brush and roller work, except I did end up doing a lot of the ceiling today. And of course, nothing makes a painting project more fun than having a couple pre-schoolers in the house while you're doing it.

Here are some pictures of the state of the house today...

Here are Kai and Shen "helping" us move stuff out of the way and drape stuff...


This is wrecked dining area where we piled stuff out of the way. It's already painted so you can see the yellows we're using. The facing wall is the darker shade and you can kind of see the lighter one on the left, though it's actually much lighter than you can tell in this picture.


this is a picture of corner where you can kind of see the shades we're painting over. The darker shade is called "Chateau Moss" which is way too appropriate name for our house. The lighter shade is called "Lemon Smoke" and looks brighter in this picture than it really is, though you can get a pretty good idea of its shade against the white ceiling. The yellow wall above used to be the dark green color. I read somewhere that in this climate you should use warm colors not earthy green tones, and though I have always liked the greens, I'm glad to see them go. When Cam and Brittni came to dinner earlier this week, Cam looked at the yellow and said, "fourth grade?" He was referencing the Waldorf school's color schemes, as each grade at the school has a specific color it is supposed to be painted. Actually, third grade is yellow, and fourth grade is green, so we're moving back a grade.


And now, a product endorsement. This stuff is great! The container accommodates a full size roller and has a grate inside it for rolling off excess paint - no having to pour into trays to roll!. It also goes on pink so you can see where you've painted, then it dries bright white. Very nice stuff to work with.


And now my post is finished and it's only 11:50 PM. Made it.