Busy Saturday....

It all started today at 3:40am for me! I was in RI and MA for work and have a friend there who Morgan and I met on a cruise several years ago and wanted to visit with her last night so I stayed. The problem was that there are not many flights out of there and the later one was a lot more expensive so 5:30am it was. It wasn't too bad and I slept on the plane and then crawled in bed with Craig when I got home at 9am (after the hour drive from Cincy).

After my brief "nap" I got up and we started the home depot list...actually we went to Lowe's but being from Atlanta, Home Depot is sort of like saying Coke when you want soda. We had a modest list but ended up spending over $300 by the time we got out of there. I tried to take a picture of our lovely yellow counter on my camera to the store so we could choose a paint color for that room and someone in the process we decided to pretty much redo the whole bathroom. Not pulling anything out but painting the walls, getting an updated light fixture, the light switch, painting the cabinets, and bathmat and shower curtain and stuff. I picked out a nice neutral color that went really well with the yellow that I thought our counter looked like (though the picture on my camera had it a much uglier color). I actually liked the way the color looked with the yellow. Since I was in charge of the paint part Craig was MIA. He said I should pick some and then he would say if he liked them or not. So after I am standing there FOREVER he comes back and tells me to follow him. Turns out that he has found some product where you can actually cover your laminate counters! It was only $40! $40 for no ugly yellow, um, yes please! You tint it so we chose the taupe color (side note: I always think that taupe is a different color than it actually is) and decided that it would go really well with the color that we had already picked and liked. Craig is going to start trying it tonight...you have to wait 4 hours between applications and then let it dry for 3 days. Perfect project for him as I go out of town tomorrow for only a couple days :-) I am so excited that he not only agreed to let me paint it but that we get to update the whole thing and it only cost about $200 (the rest was just other random stuff we needed and bike stuff)! The reason I am extra glad is that when we got home I put the yellows up to the counter and the ugliest one...the one we hated in the store was the one that most closely matched our counter and the one that looked the worst with the wall color we picked. I feel like we are doing our own version of one of those HGTV shows. I asked Craig the same thing as we were leaving Lowe's and he just laughed, then looked at me and said "no". Oh well.

Here are the before pictures. I didn't get any before Craig took down the awesome olive green shower curtain so use your imagination if you will.


Let's hope the counter stuff works. I asked the guy at Lowe's and he said that a lot of people buy it and no one comes back to complain but no one has ever told him if they liked it either. I promised him that when I came back for my paint that I would let him know :-)I probably need to get another one of the lights but if you look at the picture you can see the lovely dressing room lights that come in an old house...we are replacing that as well. I don't feel like you can get a full appreciation for the color of the walls verses the color of the counter but it is awful!
Don't worry, the tub is just as ugly. Luckily we found a thing that you can use to refinish your tub..IN WHITE. YAY. It will look so great if it works and I am super excited. Maybe I should take a couple more photos of some of the detail so you can fully appreciate it when it looks so much better.

My craft room is still a mystery. It about 7.5 by 12 feet. The colors that I seemed to like when we were at the store were blue (but Craig already has two rooms upstairs that are blue, but we both really like that color) and yellow, which I didn't give a fair chance because I was so annoyed by the ugly yellow counter. I also found a kelly greenish color that I liked but I kept thinking that some of the colors I saw were too much for one room. I want it to be bright but not hideous. So, I am looking online now at some craft room designs to see what colors they use. After looking at them I realized that duh, I will have a big table and shelves/storage of some sort that can help tone down a bright color. I am going to try to find a few to show you guys. Anyone have strong feelings about the three colors that I mentioned above?