February 11: Staples :(

Today Mom and Dad put the first coat of paint on the living room walls. It was too gray. The idea is that the foyer would be a dark brown, the upstairs living room would be tan, and the basement living room would be gray. You can see all three colors when you first walk in the door, so we wanted to make sure all the colors worked together well. But, the living room tan was way too gray, and not a pretty one. It looked like putty. So, we picked out a color from one of the Behr mini magazines. I was so excited about it!

After that tough decision was made, I pulled out staples from the old carpet... in every room. Slow job. I pulled them up with a screwdriver and then yanked them out with a pliers. I was very slow at this. Nate came to help and we got into a rhythm. He would pry them up really quickly, so I just picked them up with my hands for the most part. We got most of them up.

Nate also pulled insulation out of the crawl space. Thus began his odyssey to make the crawl space the sparkling jewel of the house (more on this later). There was talk of making it a wine cellar or just a "man cave". The insulation wasn't put in correctly, wasn't the right thickness, and had generally become nasty - so it all came out.