Sunday May 7th...

Pariticipants:

• Kelli
• Mom
• Rozzilyn
• Sadira

...and Mr. Whyndam (who looks upon every ladder as a fun climbing challenge)

Well...we're considering changing Creative Sunday's to "fixing up our houses Sunday's". So, as you may have guessed...we were at my mom's house again painting even more of her kitchen! This day it was the floor. She was up at 8:30 (actually, knowing my mom...earlier than that)...and cleaning off the floor...well, as best as it can be cleaned (and leaving a thin layer of dirt over all the surfaces in the kitchen). To explain further, my mother bought a Queen Anne Victorian house a couple of years ago, at an estate sale, just knowing we would fix it up. Well, we were hopeful that we would indeed fix it up, but really the only experience we've had is various houses we've both owned in the past and a large history with the pouring over of various decorator magazines (where everything looks easy and doable). So, we may not be the weekend warriors we thought we were! This house had not been taken care of well, and verges on extremely neglected...and by an elderly smoker who was pretty blind by the time she passed away...so everything was in a bad state and kind of the same color of smoke stained (including the inside of the windows, carpet, walls...and every available surface).

The floors were covered (sort of...where it wasn't worn off) with linolium...and old paint. These pictures show the floor and the one on the right with the cupboards reflect a large part of the floor that was cut out by an overzealous contractor, ahem...Rather than sanding off old lead based paint...we just went ahead and painted them! There was one really large crack that my mom keeps loosing whole vitamins down, so she devised a system of rolled up felt that I crammed down there with the help of a screwdriver and then put some seriously smelly wood putty over the whole thing...and over some other various cracks (really we could've spent some serious $$ and really sealed up a lot of these cracks...but lack of time and $$) (ha)...and painted all the edges, while Kelli was in the small back room primering the walls and ceiling...then rolled all the paint on!

I love the way it turned out...it's really light and yummy, and makes the entire room more cohesive...probably because we chose all the colors from the same pallette. I think my mom was really wanting it to be darker, but we both agreed that any darker and it may have been too dark in the room! Also, a lot of the cracks still showed up, and we were tempted to just get another gallon of paint and spill it across the floor to fill them all up!

And all of this painting of the kitchen has inspired my mom to hang a really cute shelf with all sorts of fun stuff on it...or as she calls it, "give me 5 minutes and I can fill up shelves with all sorts of crap!" I just couldn't help but stand and admire the room for quite a bit of the rest of the afternoon...it just looks so much better! Bigger and brighterand cleaner. And we painted the back room too...the same color white as the kitchen walls, and it just lightens up the entire back of the house...especially when you stand and look from the living room through to the back! We were all a little slap happy by the end of the day, even Rozzilyn who picked up a brush and helped us paint as well...and my legs are quite sore today, but it was certainly worth it.

My mother Rozzie and I ended up with dinner on the patio here at my house, and a bonfire as well (with some Newman's oreo cookies, no less) I just love this time of year, being able to spend more time outside with everyone...in fact, I've spent the morning planting flowers, and cleaning up a bit around here (but just a bit!)

So...I've made a two page list of things I need done to my house...what do you say girls?

Next Sunday...?