Do I look stupid to you?

Well don't be fooled- I am. In school, people always thought I was smart. I'm not sure what it was but I was usually considered one of the "smart kids" but that's not really the case, I made decent grades but i certainly wasn't smart. Now, I'm just plain stupid.
We had another huge house project this weekend. One that I have been putting off for a year but always wanted to do. We stained our den concrete. We have been working on this project from about 1:00 Friday afternoon until minutes ago at 9:30 Sunday night. I love the results but it was a HUGE project. I would be happy to give you advise if you want to do the same thing but there's no way i'm doing this again. Here's how it went...

First we had to pull up the carpet, and the pad, and the tack strips all around the room, then sweep up the mess and dust and see what we were working with. While we had hoped to find pristine concrete under the carpet we instead found that the previous owners had a paint fight on the concrete. So, we poured all kinds of brain damaging chemicals on the concrete to remove the paint and scrubbed and made 4 trips to Lowes and scrubbed some more. There was glue, footprints, paint can rings- all kinds of things. Late Friday night we went to bed and figured that was as good as it was going to get.

Here is mike pulling up the tack strips. He worked so hard this whole weekend. I'm not kidding, if you want someone to work as hard as possible on your project without stopping, he's the one.



Here's what it looked like when we were finished cleaning the concrete before going to bed. So clean you could eat on it, it just doesn't look like it!

Next step is to apply the stain. The concrete had to be wet then you spray on the stain. Let it dry for 4 hours then wash the floor with baking soda and water. Well, according to the video, only one water/soda scrubbing will do but for us- 3 scrubs later we finally stopped. By "scrub" i mean, pour water on, scrub with brush, wet vac up the water, test to see if the color is still coming up.



After that dries you roll on an epoxy sealer and wait 12-24 hrs. for that to dry. The picture above is shown mostly finished and we are still waiting for the sealer to dry. Hopefully we can move the furniture back on tomorrow and I'll post pictures then. It's very crazy but we love it!

If you are feeling down-

Take a look at this. I just wanted to make those of you who are having a bad day or feel like their house is a little messy, or their life is spinning out of control feel a little better. These photos are what my house has looked like all weekend, and actually, right now as well. And, unless I am struck by some miracle of motivation, it's going to stay like this until tomorrow- or possibly next weekend. Who knows. Enjoy!



Is that my entertainment center and TV in the kitchen? I think so. My sofa is in there too, you just can't see it.

What's new in this picture

I know that pictures of my living room are getting old but I've been wanting to get curtains on the windows for a year now and I finally got them. These, of course, are from Ikea and i think they work great. Anyways, just wanted to share. Thanks for looking :-)

LOST

I love waiting for LOST each week. It's by far my favorite show and even though my brain is too small to comprehend everything that happens, I still like trying to figure everything out.
So, we heard last week on the promo that "Someone will die this week" and my question is: Who do you think it will be? My guess is Michael. I have my reasons but I don't want to influence your decision so leave a comment and tell me who you think.

I have recently discovered the best web site ever. It's called Lostpedia and it is a complete reference to everything Lost. It's not a cheater site so secrets won't be given away but you can search anything Lost and it will give you a very descriptive answer. I like going on the day after lost runs to read the synopsis of the episode and there are always things I missed. It's also a good place to find screen shots of the things you want to see again. I just went in and typed "numbers" and got a definition of what that means for Lost as well as a list of every time the numbers appear- broken down by "numbers used all together, used individually, etc." So cool!

Oh, my other prediction is that Jin is not really dead. I think the grave was made for him when the news released that flight 815 had crashed and they were just visiting it. But who knows.

March in Texas

I think everyone probably has similar photos from today but here's what Mike and some of the neighborhood kids did in the snow this afternoon. The house across the street had a fort too so they could throw snowballs back and forth. We really enjoyed the snow and getting off work early but it looks like tomorrow it will be back to normal, except I have 2 hours of work to make up and a grocery store trip to make that keeps getting postponed.
There's nothing like watching Lost on a snowy day with a cup of hot chocolate by the fire though, it doesn't get much better than that.

Painting the Den

So, we finally decided to paint the den. It's something I've wanted to do since we first moved in so 1 year later is appropriate. Last weekend, we moved all the furniture, taped off the edges, and started painting. It went easier than expected but was still a very long, tiring weekend. Lets review- here is what the den looked like before:

Previous owners had dry brushed a dark brown on to the paneling in attempt to make it look like wood? (a question mark because I can only assume that's what they were thinking, whatever it was, it was a bad idea). Next we have a progress photo- we painted the window frame and bar cabinets white.
Next, we painted the entire room Macadamia. After we rolled one coat we had to brush each of the seams in the paneling then roll another coat. Here is the stage after the first roll. I think mike is saying "Do you think it looks good like this?".
And here is the final product. I was really happy with how it turned out. I still have a lot of things i want to do to the den but this was a good start. Another new addition are the 2 new mirrors over the sofa we got at West Elm this weekend. Well, that was last weekend and this weekend we are still recovering. I'm not sure what the next project will be but I can tell you this will be the last time we paint the den.