Quiet weekend

This weekend was a quiet one around the new place.  Grandma Franny came into town and spent Thursday and Friday with Jackson while Billy and I had to work.  Not being able to go back to MN for the holidays, it was great having her come out here to spend some time together.  Jackson warmed up to her quickly and loved spending time with her, as did Billy and I.
The big exciting thing that happened here was we FINALLY got our cable and internet hooked up!  A week without it felt like ages.  We had a COX cable the previous year and it was fine and all but Billy really had his heart set on a company that provided better quality cable so we changed to Verizon’s Fios.  Many are still unfamiliar with it, but it’s essentially the newest of the TV cable technology (I guess).  It is great though, and internet seems fast so that’s nice! 

I am SO excited to get home from work tomorrow to some PRIVACY! We haven’t had blinds up since we moved in and we nailed up towels in the bathrooms, and just have had to deal with the fact anybody can see in the rest of our windows.  However, we had a guy come out from Home Depot, he measured all our windows, we told him we wanted the faux-wood 2″ blinds, and he’ll come back once we pick them up from Home Depot and presto they will be installed!  He’ll come back tomorrow while we are at work and install each of the 15 windows that need blinds.  For being one that loves DIY projects, there are just certain ones I’d rather close my eyes pay the check and open my eyes to find the project completed 😉

I have a few small projects to do this week that I’ll post about so until then… have a wonderful day!

CHEERS
PB&J

Rainbow of color

Well the first project we jumped into was  painting of our living room. 
I knew right away I wanted to bring color into the living room and I love the shades of blue/grey that are very popular right now.  However, picking a shade of blue/grey is a lot harder than we thought!  We went to the stores a few different times to get paint card samples and taped them on the wall to help decide.  Then headed to the store to buy paint samples and actually see what the paint will look like on the wall and in different lighting.
Here’s what we came back with…
It’s the hardest when you like the paint card, and the paint sample looks nice but the second you put it on the wall… it looks like a completely different color.  All our original 5 samples looked way too “nursery blue” once we put them on the walls with our lighting.  Our next trip to the paint store we decided to go a lot more “grey” than originally planned.

We finally choose our final color …
Obviously hard to get the full idea … but it’s a great color.  Final picture of the living room to come….

Our wall surface is different from what I am used too, it’s called “knockout”. It’s this textured wall plaster that’s been applied to the drywall, and I guess it’s supposed to be an “upgrade” like crown molding.  It’s on every wall in the entire house, and I prefer the flat wall surface, but I am sure over time it will grow on me. 
We knew that it would make painting a little more difficult… we just didn’t know how difficult. 

We first started with priming our walls with the primer made for dry walls assuming the walls would be “thirsty” and the primer would help.  We got that accomplished Sunday night in pretty much no time at all with both of us tackling it.  Then coat 1 was Monday night and coat 2 on Tuesday both completed by just me since Billy was away at work… they took a few hours longer than expected when completed by just one person. 

We can finally say the painting of our living room is done now though!  And happy to claim that no fatalities or big painting oops occurred! YAY! Small victories and day by day right 😉

CHEERS,
PB&J