Another long weekend of very hard work. I am amazed how long I can go, actually, but when I'm done I'm really done. I come home completely exhausted and barely able to move. Thank goodness we invested in a good bed - I really think it makes a huge difference in my recovery each night.
This weekend was spent waiting for the floors to be refinished (see before and after) and getting the kitchen painted. I decided to just go ahead and paint the whole thing and ignore the lead paint issue for a while. I know it's not the right thing to do but it seems the best remedy at this time. We also spent a good chunk of the weekend picking away at the snow-turned-ice in the driveway. It seems no shoveling whatsoever has happened since it started snowing in December. 70+ inches later, we obviously have a problem. We can get one car in the driveway now and we'll see about the second one later.
We also spent most of Sunday cleaning the filthy floors, bathrooms, and Thom putting on some floor reviver in the upstairs bedrooms, which we didn't get refinished. I think they look better but are definitely different from the newly refinished downstairs.
Two concerns now have arisen: one is the nasty fluorescent lighting in the kitchen. We bought yellowish paint to match the ugly vinyl floors that we will have to look at until the remodel this summer - in the light in the kitchen, however, it looks more tan. I hate fluorescent lighting.
The main issue of real concern, though, is that we went through almost an entire quarter of a tank of heating oil this week. I don't see how we'll make it through the rest of the winter without going poor. There has to be some other sane alternatives to this fossil fuel reliance. We really need to start looking into them here.
On my way to work this morning I decided to stop by the house to take out the garbage and got sucked into the kitchen vortex. I ended up spending 7 hours priming the kitchen as the weather was rather iffy in regard to teaching tonight. I was really concerned about the kitchen since, as I mentioned before, we found lead paint. I suppose this wouldn't be all that bad except that it was chipping off the wall in several places. We first thought we'd go with temporary wallpaper until the remodel this summer but after an unsuccessful visit to the local wallpaper store last night I decided to give priming the walls a shot. So a couple hours were spent cleaning the walls and getting the remaining wallpaper paste off the walls and then a bit of spackling. The priming went relatively well except for the spots where the paint was chipping - painting it just seemed to pull it off in bigger chunks. All together, I'm not sure how many years off my life I removed today with the lead paint but the kitchen looks better...and, hey, that's all that matters, really.
