A fantastic plan.

Who's lying in bed while three able-bodied men paint her house?

If you guessed "Laura," you're totally right. Ka-chow!

So we took the leap and are brightening up our entire living space. Honestly, all we have is the paint color. The rest of it? We'll just see where it takes us.

We're going from a dark gray to a super light icy blue. I know. That made my tummy flip a little too. We knew that the window treatments were too dark and that we were missing access to our great view. So down came the Roman shades and out came the paint samples. We have a fantastic rock fireplace that deserves a little more focus, and next to that fireplace is a very ugly built-in. We love the shelving on top, but below is this massive cabinet that sticks out into the room. Ewwwww...

Well it turned out that my built-in disgust coincided nicely with a visit from the Deacon From The East. Usually when Andrew's dad comes out, we have some project in the works and we tackle it then. In the past we've glazed cabinets, replaced doors, done major landscaping and things like that. This time we didn't have any pressing projects to work on, but we'd been talking about utilizing the house's natural light better for some time.

The first couple of days when he comes down, he just pops around the house, tightening things, adjusting things, cleaning things and so on. Yesterday he helped to get the Roman shades down and I managed to pull the old solar screens out off the garage and wash them. While I washed windows he rehung the screens. I can't believe we didn't doo that 2 years ago. What were we thinking?? We had wanted the view to be completely unobstructed, but we realize now that using the screens means we don't need window treatments. This way even if our view is a little darker, we're still treated to a better view and mute natural light than we had. A very quick little fix that made a world of difference!

So now we're on to paint. We have a five gallon bucket of a"so light you might be imagining it" blue and Andrew, his brother Tim and his dad are out there painting away. I spent a large part of the afternoon painting and my back is done with that jazz, so I'm headed to bed before it gets worse.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to uncle Tim, which will be incredibly sad for all of us. Two days isn't enough! Claire is just in love with him. I took her to a meeting this morning and she ran into the house when we got home, screeching, "Teeeeemmeeee!" He's getting plenty of love/abuse from the kids - it's weeks like these that we wish we all lived closer!