kiki's spot: great weekend :)

This has been a bit of a whirlwind weekend. Friday morning I spent two hours at Lowes getting some necessary things for my house and looking at items I will buy in the near future. Then we headed to the condo to tape stuff in preparation for painting the next day.

Here's a tip for you about that: I like to try to do things as cheaply as possible when I can...and I love the Dollar Tree store...and they have painters tape. But don't do that. Buy the "real" stuff. You know, the Scotch brand painters tape. Otherwise you will come back later that evening and find this:

Puddles of painters tape!! Ack!! lol

Anyhoo. Saturday morning I stopped and grabbed some "real" tape and headed over to the condo once again to begin the painting process. We got most of the downstairs done yesterday, thanks to my parents and several friends who came and helped!

The color I chose for the main living space downstairs is called Hinoki yellow. It is soft and warm and inviting and cheery and I love it. However, it is actually somewhat close to the color that the walls were already painted - just with more yellow warmth to it - so you may not notice a huge difference in these pictures from the ones I put up earlier, but here's what it's looking like so far...

If you look closely (click on the picture to make it even larger), you can see the slight difference in the color the walls used to be and the yellow that we painted them. And they got a little darker as they dried of course.

It just so happened that Michael's nieces and family were in town this weekend so they spent the night with Lauren Friday night and came to help me paint for a couple hours on Saturday. We definitely would not have gotten as far as we did without them there!!

This picture is funny because the yellow isn't quiiite this dark...and it looks like we hadn't painted that bump out in the wall...but we had!

Aaand this would be half of my kitchen in the dining room ha! Anyone want to buy that stove? It's for sale. Brand new. Never been used. Going on Craig's list soon.

This shows you in full light how the walls look. Funny, these last three pictures were taken from the spot on the floor I had finally plopped myself after being on my feet all day long...just turning my head slightly for each one, the walls look different in all the pics! ha. Oh well. You get the idea.

Man my feet were tired!

Here are a couple other details before I get to more painting:

One of the shower curtains I ordered came so I went ahead and put it up in my bathroom upstairs - already makes it look better! :)

So this was the hideously ugly and extremely dirty ceiling fan in my living room, but it is no more, thanks to my mom for picking out a new gorgeous one and my dad for taking this one down and installing the new one! (And my brother who helped!)

Beautiful new fan!

Ok so back to the painting. Those of you who know me well know that I have always wanted a RED kitchen. Well my little kitchen here is a galley kitchen and my mom suggested I just paint the end wall red for fear that red on three walls would be too dark and overwhelming. But just one red wall would not give me my red kitchen! :-p Then Leah came over to see my new place and I asked her what she thought and she had the brilliant idea to just paint two walls red, which solved several problems and I think is going to turn out just perfect!

Mom nervously applying the first bit of red.

Yeah, definitely needs a second coat, but I love it!

When I said red, I meant it!

Show stopper red to be exact. :}

So after working all day, I went and grabbed Lauren and Reegan and made Reegan a cute little tiny purse while we waited for Michael's nieces to finish eating dinner with their family.

So cute! That is almost life-size! :)

Then we grabbed the girls and their uncle and tried out a new frozen yogurt place called Sweet Frog and their Frog stands for Fully Rely On God! And their bowls have the reference John 3:16 on them! So go check them out at Turkey Creek, ok??

Lauren and Emily

the funny little sisters, Claire and Reegan :}

and Abby, who just got her driver's license!

(and a photo bomb by the uncle. goofy boy.)

Then this morning we headed over to cheer for Melissa, Michael's sister-in-law, who was running in the relay marathon race downtown.

Who says you can't have fun while running a marathon??

She had to have had more fun than the army guy we saw running in his fatigues with a complete pack on his back! Bleck!

Waiting...

Three of the four relay runners on Mel's team. The fourth one had to leave immediately after her stretch of the marathon due to a child's soccer game or something like that. :) Being a mom never stops - even when you do something as awesome as run a marathon relay lol.

Actually stepping on the finish line. So I was so excited to get to use my telephoto lens on my camera to get better shots than I did two years ago when they did this same race, that I forgot to zoom out just a little bit so you could see the "finish" banner as they went under it! Ha. Next time...