Time for an update

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted here. I don't think I've ever gone that long before. I've been on a two-week vacation. My husband and I drove to Yakima, WA to see my son and DIL. Well, he drove. I navigated.

Before that we spent over a week painting walls and refinishing our tongue and groove pine kitchen floor. We started the whole floor project because somehow a bottle of Future floor polish (purchased as an art supply) that I put in the trash leaked out in a stream all over the floor as we were on our way out for a day of inservice. When we got home it had dried in a stream around the kitchen. At first I thought someone had come into our house and gotten a drink from the sink and left a trail. It didn't take long to realize that it was something shiney dried on. When I tried to scrub it off the stain and polyurethane came up with it. What a mess!

We were needing to redo the floor anyway, but had decided to put it off for another year. My husband rented a floor sander the next day. While he was sanding, I painted our bedroom dark green (a planned project). It looks great - quite a change. I'm usually not that brave with wall color.

Day three we finished sanding and bought stain and paint. We decided that since the house would stink from the kitchen we might as well repaint the living room floor too.

I did half of those projects (furniture on the other side of both rooms) on day four while Johnny was at an inservice. We slept in the camper because of the smell. Or I guess I should say crashed in the camper. I felt like I had been working out and trying to keep up with Mr. Universe.

Day five I could barely move, but it was back at the floor with a coat of polyurethane. The bad thing about doing floors is that they have to wait so long between coats and the stuff stinks so bad.

We also did some patching with mortar on our logs, since we had all the furniture at one end of both rooms. Day six we painted the living room walls with texture paint before we finished the floor. The furniture was already moved and the room was stinking anyway. Day seven we painted the living room and worked more on the kitchen floor. Day 8 we did the other half of the living room. The whole time we were still sleeping in the camper and cooking in the bathroom on a hot plate. The day we left for our trip I added a second coat of urathane to the kitchen and painted the second half of the living room floor. I get tired just thinking of it all now.

I took photos of my journals tonight and there were, yikes, 26 spreads! It will take forever to get them all posted. I'll try to do a couple a day til it's done.

Some of them aren't complete yet as I left spaces for pictures when I get around to printing them out. I think I'll go ahead and post them both ways. Who knows when I'll find time to finish them with school starting soon. It took me months to get the pictures into last years vacation pages.

We had a wonderful trip, so much packed into such a little time. Coming home was great too. We are blessed to live in beautiful northern Arkansas, and it was so nice to come home to all the newly painted walls and the re-finished floor. Oh and the tomatoes too, I guess. I canned 36 1/2 quarts today.