Swimming

My cousin's Jason and Jennifer were in town picking up their oldest daughter from  EFY and decided we should have a little get together before they left the next day.  My cousin Lisa, Jennifer's sister, lives in a community with a pool so we all decided to head over to her place to do a little swimming and have dinner together.  Braeden really loves the water and so does Drew.

I opted out of getting in the water, but Michelle was a good sport and played with the kids for awhile.  My sister Rachael was also able to make it, as well as, my cousin Amy, and my cousin Jean-Jacques with his kids and sister.

By the time it we were ready to eat Drew was getting a little cold.  You can tell from his expression he wasn't having fun anymore and just wanted to be kept warm.

We had a really fun time all together and as usual it was sad to see the evening end, but it was nice to see everyone since it doesn't happen too often.

New Carpet

So before we decided to get our stairs redone we had decided that we would like to get new carpet, but we wanted to have the stairs done first.  Then we decided that before we got new carpet we would want to paint the bedrooms first.  During the last weekend in May we decided on paint colors and purchased about sixteen gallons of paint.  All four of the bedrooms, two bathrooms, and laundry room had the same color paint on the walls as well as the ceilings and the baseboards and doors were an off white color.  Our goal was to repaint the doors, baseboards, and ceilings white as well as paint all of the walls the colors we had chosen in all of the upstairs rooms in that one weekend.  Needless to say we didn't finish in that weekend.  It ended up taking us a month before just the bedrooms were finished and we are still working on the bathrooms and laundry room.  The only real reason the bedrooms are done is because we purchased new bedroom furniture and didn't want to have it delivered and set up if we were going to get new carpet so we needed to paint the rooms and get new carpet before next week.  Luckily the carpet we ordered arrived a few days before the furniture arrived.  Here are a few pictures of what our floors look like without the carpet.

I thought the pink padding was a great look for the house and suggested that we just keep it like that, but Michelle was against it.  I tried to argue that it would be cheaper than putting in the actual carpet, but it didn't help.

They were able to lay all the carpet in one long day.  The guy was working all by himself and I am sure was getting tired of going up and down the stairs, but he did a great job.  He finished just before we needed to head out somewhere.

Our previous carpet was much lighter, dirtier, and not very comfy so we decided to go with something a little longer, softer, and darker, especially with little kids who like to make messes.  I thought it might be too dark, you know it is hard to tell how a house is going to look when you only have a square foot sample to compare, much like a paint swatch, but it turned out looking good.

It is nice to finally have our house put back together, for the most part, and have some soft carpet under our bare feet.  Here's to one project finished.  It would be nice to think that our home improvement days are over, but they are just getting started.