Painting and Decorating

Last Wed we began a rather HUGE project, we began to re-decorate the girls'(Hannah, Rachel, Caroline & Sarah) room. I honestly thought that it would only take a couple of days and that by Sunday we'd be finished and back together.... boy, was I wrong. We began by unloading everything from the girls' room, except for the bunk beds, into the family room and kitchen. We took down the curtains and mini-blinds and began painting. There was one problem I didn't count on: my allergies. My allergies have been causing me problems for a couple of weeks, and every time I went to bend over while painting, my head began to spin and I nearly fell over. I'm sure I looked quite comical. :D Though it did allow Hannah and Caroline to learn to paint; Rachel was unable to help because her allergies were also acting up. Because of the size of the room and having the beds in it we had to paint 1/2 at a time. We primed and painted the first two walls Fri and the second two walls Sat. This worked well because Gene was at work and then out witnessing Fri night, and he went to Galveston to witness at Mardi Gras on Saturday.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been getting a lot of really good ideas from Cat's blog, which caused me to decide to declutter and minimize the girls' things. Our youngest, Caroline, will be 10 next week and the girls are reaching that age where they are outgrowing a lot of their toys, which makes this is a great time to minimize. My desire to not take things back into their room that we don't want is making the project take longer than I anticipated.

Another thing making this project take longer has been my health. I am rarely sick, but I had to go to the doctor again today. As I said, my allergies have been acting up, and beginning Sat. I had really severe headaches lasting most of the day and night. I also began to feel a little swelling in my lower left jaw. It did this last August, so I recognized it when it happened again. It always begins on the weekend; I don't know why. I began taking colloidal silver last week, hoping to fight this off, but it didn't help. Sunday, I had severe headaches with facial pain, and Monday morning I woke up looking like a chipmunk with nuts in my cheek! :rolleyes: I went to the doctor, and not only did I have a severe sinus infection, but also an ear infection. There is a technical term for the swollen lymph glands, but I don't remember it. The swelling is caused by the lymph glands producing too much fluid which then goes all around it making my face and under my jaw swell. When you feel it, it's rather firm, not squishy (nice medical description don't ya think) like you would expect. Hopefully the medicine will help it begin to decrease quickly.

Hannah has been doing a great job of organizing and sorting everything, and we hope to begin our work on their books tomorrow. The girls have tons of books and we are going to set them up by the dewey decimal system so that we can easily find them!

Here are a couple of pictures of Hannah painting. The walls are a very light lavendar; we didn't want to get it too dark(I've had a habit of doing that in the past). I will post more pictures when the room is finished.

Click to see larger images:

Lindsay has already started on our next project, the hall bath. It will be painted a light yellow and we will be putting in red brick tiles(the stick on kind). The floor had carpet and over time has become mildewed from the water. I'll post pictures of that as we finish, also.