Productivity

Oh man, I did more today than most people do in a week! Okay, that may be a teeny exaggeration, but my day was packed. This morning, I bought cupcakes and brought them to school with Ryan, dropped Kaylin off at a Parents Day Out program, went to a going away party for a friend, picked up Mike and headed to Ryan's school to celebrate his "un-birthday" (since he has a summer birthday, that's what they do now - but we missed the singing by 5 minutes due to some rescheduling of snacktime - Ryan's teacher felt horrible and I was a little sad that I missed the big to-do), dropped a project off at Kinko's, went to Harkins to pick up movie tickets, went to Lowe's to pick up paint chips, went back to Kinko's to pick up the completed project, picked up Ryan from school, went home, made lunch and went through the paint chips with Mike, then picked up Kaylin from PDO. All by 1pm. I think I may have blown through an entire tank of gas! (okay, another exaggeration...most of that was within a 6 mile radius)

When the kids woke up from their naps, I was so project-driven that I loaded the kids up and went to Lowe's to buy paint and supplies. I decided yesterday that I needed to spruce up the house a bit. And the cheapest way to do that is to paint, right?

So after dinner, in the hour that most people were watching reruns of The Office on TBS or the final 3 contestants on American Idol, I did this:

It took me an hour. Literally...one hour to paint 2 colors. That includes prep work and cut in. I asked Mike to help and in an attempt to avoid me, he went upstairs to "change his clothes" and got caught up entering receipts into Quicken. When he came downstairs again, he shouted, "No WAY!" I was finishing the second coat of the top color. I tell you what...when I'm motivated, LOOK OUT! Needless to say, I didn't get any help from the husband. He thought I was doing just fine on my own, but dude - things go so much faster with two people! Anyway, I did get help from Ryan:

I was happy to let Ryan "help" but it made Mike too nervous. I was giving Ryan a lot of grace about having poor impulse control because from his perspective, we were painting on the walls. Think about it: he has only ever painted on paper. How cool must this have been for him??? Mike ended up keeping the kids in the playroom to get them out of the mess. I'll admit, there was a close call with someone walking backward and almost stepping in a paint tray, sending paint flying, but all was well (and clean) in the end.

After Mike put the kids to bed, I decided to tape off the rest of the walls and at least do the bottom color. That took another hour and if I didn't have a gallon and a half of paint called, "Bread Basket," I'd be willing to leave it as-is. So that commits me to finishing the project. My idea is to add a wood chair rail and paint the baseboards the same color brown. It's really going to warm up the front room a ton. I'm pretty excited and will update pictures of the finished product when it's done!