May turned out to be home-improvement month with the departure of Dan from our midst early in the month, and an anxious 16 year old waiting in the wings for his new bedroom makeover. I can now say I have had my fill of repairing drywall, taping, priming, painting and re-carpeting for a little while. Thank heaven for Josh and his help with his portion of the transformation process, because by the time we finished his room I was completely shot. I was duly rewarded with a nasty cold/flu virus that laid me out flat for 3 days. There's no justice...
Our projects started with the transformation- and yes, it IS quite the transformation - of the guest room. Formerly known as Dan's room. This is where I re-learned the joys of reparing drywall as my darling son had managed to put not one, but two, substantial holes in the wall during his time there. Don't you just love boys? Anyway, I devoted all of Mother's Day weekend to repairing the damage, taping, priming and painting. The result, I will proudly say, was worth the effort, and we now have a place for overnight guests to stay! See photo. Dan was a little surprised when he saw it, but he did admit that he thought it looked nice. Anyway, for those of you who have been making up excuses not to come HERE to visit, I'm not listening......
On to Josh's room and the demolition of Memorial Day weekend:
Our youngest, bless his heart, has been steadily outgrowing the furniture we bought back when we moved into this house. While the bright red bunkbed and matching red-white and-blue dresser set was great for two small boys, Mr. long legs has rapidly outgrown them both in height and years. To correct this, we decided to make his room a little more adult looking with the addition of new carpet, new furniture, and we finally ditched the chair rail that divided his walls in half horizontally. He liked the colors that I picked for the guest room so to save a few pennies I mixed the two colors I used there together (two shades of a soft country yellow-gold). We pulled the carpet that the cat managed to shred and replaced that too. We did the installation ourselves, and I can say with certainty we won't do that again. All Hail to Carpet Installers Everywhere!!! What a hideous job. Anyway... three coats of primer later to cover the navy blue that some idiot thought would be a good idea for the bottom half of the wall (me), I was ready to paint.
This is the point at which Josh dived into the project to help. I think he was getting a little antsy about having to sleep in the "girly" guest room. Tired mom? Too bad.. let's keep going and get this done. Ah, the energy of youth... Anyway, to bring you up to date, I started the priming on Saturday morning. Early. This took all of Saturday to accomplish and part of Sunday. Two coats of paint hit the walls on Sunday, and somewhere around 11:00 pm I finally gave up and went, aching, to bed. Rich incidentally is, at this point, sick as a dog so I'm trying to accomplish all of this as quietly as possible so he can rest. Monday morning, Josh was raring to go and happily pulled staples from the old carpet pad, and hammered nails to even out the floor. By Noon we had the floor prepped and ready for the new pad. I begged a reprieve for lunch before I fell over. By 1:30 we were laying down new pad -a really noisy project I might add - and by dinner time we were done. Now by this time, everything aches and I am ready to quit and pick it up tomorrow. No such luck. "Let's do the carpet tonight Mom!" " Oh gee son, can we???" After a quick trip to Home Depot to rent a carpet kicker and another break to eat, we hauled the carpet in and started that project. Rich, who isn't getting any sleep anyway, and who was feeling marginally human, helped with this task. Good thing too. I understand how the carpet kicker is supposed to work, but I don't have the necessary OOMPH to make it a success. Unfortunately, we were a little too successful, because by 8:30 we were ready to re-install the baseboard, and "since we were on a roll" someone decided he wanted to sleep in his new bed too. I think I crawled into bed (literally!) around 11:00, and oh joy, crawled out again at 4:30am.
The rest of Josh's furniture was assembled in good time, though not by me. By Wednesday, I was battling whatever bug Rich had and spent the rest of the week in and out of bed. Now I ask you, what sort of reward is that?!?!? I guess the reward is in how nice Josh's room looks now. No photo at this point but I'll see if I can get one soon. For now, I'm going to grab my cup of rapidly cooling coffee and see if I can find a sunny spot on my deck to enjoy it.
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