Let them be Red

Hello!! We had a great, great weekend - one of the most relaxing and fun we've had in a while. Why?? No tedious house projects like painting, paint scraping, border scraping or cleaning cat hair and dust out of tiny crevices. We got to do the "fun" house stuff - shopping!! We FINALLY found a bedroom suite we liked - and it is GI-NORMOUS. If it's anything like our beast of a microwave we're going to have to cut some holes in the roof of the house for the posters of the bed to stick out. if it looks big in the store.....well, it's just huge.

It was a weekend of total special orders. The bed is made "just for us" so it will be here in 6-8 weeks. Then we went to Home Depot to order some blinds. Because our windows are so long there are none that can be cut to fit in the store. Out of every window in this house we can only fit one window in the store!!! So, we special ordered blinds for our bedroom and bathroom, since they're on sale this month if we really like them we'll go ahead and order for the rest of the house. See ya later blue-gray aluminum mini blinds!!! Then we went to Joann's to buy some fabric for bedroom curtains. Since the windows and ceilings are so tall we can't buy regular curtains, either! We picked out a lovely fabric that would've cost us $500 to make curtains for our bedroom!!!! SO then we picked out a very similar one that's only going to cost $100. And of course they didn't have 17 yards of fabric so that's on special order too!! We also walked around and started pricing out new kitchen cabinets, countertops, appliances!! It's all very exciting and it's about to get super expensive & super stressful around here. We're also starting to meet with the architect who will (most likely) start the blueprints for our upstairs expansion. See ya roofline! We're at the point where the house is starting to feel so cozy and we just want to be complete with all these major projects. Since we've been homeowners for the past 7 years we know there will always be projects, but it will feel so great to have the biggies behind us.

We also kicked back, watched a movie and hung some art around the house. Our guest bath is so cute now! We have brand new fluffy towels for our guests, art on the walls, and I love my new curved shower rod. It reminds me so much of some of the great hotel rooms we've stayed in on some of our travels.

For running news....there's not much to report. I skipped a few runs last week to work on painting and finishing off the kitchen. We didn't run long last weekend because we just didn't want to. I got some treadmill runs in and that's about it. I don't have any expectations for Georgia, which should be obvious from our (lack of) training. I'm more excited about our posh hotel room and shopping at IKEA than I am running 26.2 miles! If it doesn't go well I'll run the half and then just cheer on the marathoners.

Here are pics of the current state of our kitchen. We took it from electric blue/light blue faux finish with some white walls and a horrible sun/moon/stars border with blue-gray trim on the doors and windows to bright red with a black ceiling, updated light fixtures, and shiny white trim on the doors and windows. Next we'll get all new cabinets, appliances, build out a pantry and change the floor!

Happy running everyone, enjoy the pics!

Here are some before shots:

































And here is After - MUCH better!! It almost makes the really ugly cabinets semi-ok!