sense of accomplishment

i feel like we have accomplished so much since my last blog entry.

not only have we finished spraying the stipple ceilings, we are almost done the wood slatted ceilings, a project that has been much more work than i had originally anticipated. as of yesterday afternoon we had sanded, mudded and tsp'd the entire house; finally, the majority of the grunt work is done! last night we began to paint the walls and thanks to our amazing familes and a couple equally as great friends, last i heard, we had completely finished the upstairs and the living room - the key lime green, pomagranet pink, sky blue, forest green and salmon are officially gone, replaced by a neutral, warm beige. i cannot say they will be missed. now, if only the bright yellow and orange disappear...

for the most part, we are on track. i would be lieing if i said we haven't had a few blips along the way. the vacuflow, for example, just does not want to work for us. it has been broken, fixed, rebroken, refixed and so on... it just will not cooperate. kevin has been fiddling with it on and off and it seems that every time we think we have it, something else goes wrong. i am seriously starting to worry about it. i was definitely looking forward to the convenience of a vacuflow seeing as i have had one as long as i can remember, maybe this is someones way of telling me i'm too spoilt, or that i could use the added exertion of lugging an awkward old school vacuum up and down the stairs of my 4 level split? possibly, the vacuum itself is objecting to the sudden use, since it is fairly obvious from the state of her carpets that it spent most of its time coiled up in her cleaning closet with the rest of her household supplies? either way, it looks as though this is going to be an ongoing battle.

another thing that hasn't seemed to go our way is the carpet cleaning. since it was a balmy -25 degrees this morning they canceled on us last minute; apparently, the waterlines in the truck mounted system tends to freeze when it drops below -15. i still haven't decided how i feel about this. in one sense, i was relieved because it gave us added time to paint and prepare for them, on the other hand, i was completely annoyed since we had this planned for over two weeks and i am getting incredibly tired of smelling smoke and mothballs every morning when i open the front door. i think i would have been less annoyed if the lady that we spoke to on the phone wasn't as obnoxious. in all honesty, it probably worked out to our benefit for them to reschedule to saturday, but the fact that she wasn't the slightest bit apologetic and didn't offer us any sort of compensation for the last minute cancellation really rubbed me the wrong way. i completely understand that they cannot control the weather but they can control their customer service and quiet frankly, theirs is atrocious. in my opinion, if you cancel on a customer last minute, whether or not it is because of circumstances with in or out of your control, you should offer them some sort of compensation; they could have offered us a discount, or to do our furnace or fireplace, or even a bonus room? but they didn't. regardless, if it wasn't for the fact that we wouldn't have been able to get in anywhere else for over a week, i would have told her to stuff it. so saturday it is.

enough complaining. this morning when i left for work i was so incredibly pleased with our progress and that is what i am going to concentrate on. i absolutely adore the colour we chose for the walls, biscotti by benjamin moore. since we had to preorder the paint in large quantities we went with a colour we had already used in jesse's room at his parents house (just to be safe) and now that its on the walls in this house it looks completely different. i, personally, am not completely convinced that who ever mixed the paint did not make a mistake since it is much darker, but either way, i don't mind because i love colour regardless.

hopefully tonight and tomorrow we will be able finish the lower level and the man cave then we will only have the one wall we left in the kitchen and cabinets for saturday during the day while the carpet cleaners are doing their thing.

pictures of the new paint to come!