Weekend Finale

We've all had a fantastic weekend! This is my favorite picture, it's from Friday:

Not only was it quality, but it was inspirational too! We spent saturday night catching up with friends, and I got to see firsthand an idea that I had considered but dismissed due to lack of courage and fear of wasting money.

In our hallway downstairs we have wallboard on the walls. We had discussed drywalling this, but felt like it was alot of money and effort for a basement hallway. You see, the sheets of drywall come in 4x8' sizes and our ceiling down there isn't 8ft high - basically there'd be alot of cutting involved. After you have the stuff up, you still have to plaster and sand, plaster and sand. We learned from the upstairs renovations that the plaster dust is nasty, it gets in everything.... EVERYWHERE. It also seems to stick around f o r e v e r after the fact. Rather discouraging for future, unecessary applications.

Now I painted the wallboard almost right away, which definitely improved the space for the time being - however I don't see much point in putting on the mouldings because quite frankly it just doesn't feel finished. What to do, what to do.

Then last night, I see that Michelle has gone ahead and done it. She purchased the paintable wall paper and wall papered OVER top of wallboard she wanted to coverup. Seriously. Then she painted it (hence the paintable wall paper) and it is a definite improvement. She went with a stucco design, which I can understand, those big floral prints are nasty. Either way, it isn't something I would do as a permanent change, in a high traffic area like our main floor, but I think that for the basement hallway it may in fact be the answer I've been looking for.

This has gotten me pretty excited to start renos again! We have a section of wall taken out for electrical we had to do, so we will have to putup drywall etc to fill that in - but we wont have to plaster it even since we are going to try this paintable wallpaper overtop. Can you feel my excitement? It's also got my brain turning about the basement stairs and the leftover flooring we have stored away. Woo!

I ended up doing some replanting of seeds this evening. Alot have come up, especially the few peas I planted and spinach. I have also a few lettuce sprouted and a couple onions. Overall, I think in hindsight, I might've had the soil packed too densely, and perhaps the seeds down to deep. So I dug out the cells that weren't germinating and replanted them. I also learned something very interesting from my dad this week - Did you know you can't grow carrot seedlings? Apparently, they can't be transplanted. Rather makes me laugh, if you think of it you can see why moving a carrot root could be an issue. He got a giggle when I was talking to him and he let me in on the secret. So I replanted all the carrot cells with lettuce and spinach. I figure that isn't something we can have too much of.

Also, I splurged this evening and bought the animals a toy that has been haunting me around town for over a week. I agree with the idea of it, similar to the Kong toy, it's supposed to give the animals a challenge - use their brain power to figure it out. It's basically a big ball that you put treats in and it has a hole shaped so that if you roll it around on the floor enough the treats fall out as a reward. Well. They don't seem very interested. To me they are getting alot more treats than I would normally feel comfortable giving and without doing any work. Sort of a waste of $10. Perhaps there is some sort of learning curve to it. I will try it again another time, hopefully with better results. Otherwise it might be a dud for us.

Ok, I've stayed up past my bedtime - haha. Jess is coming over tomorrow morning to help me with my scrabble craft so soon enough I will have pictures to post of that. I'm really looking forward to it, her and I haven't gotten to hang out together in WAY too long. Gnight! Hope everyone had a fantastic weekend too!