Summer is the time for projects!!!

I've never started a blog because being the mother of 3 young boys I don't feel like I have anything of interest to write. My daily thoughts consist of "whats for dinner?" "time to change the laundry" "STOP doing that!" " PB&J again? yuck!"....nothing very profound. I finally decided to start writing because I heard someone describe their blog as their journal. It got me thinking that I need some kind of a record of what goes on in my life. I'm not the writer that my two sisters are, but I've always enjoyed it and it gives me a chance to actually use my brain!

Well, this is the story of my life right now....projects, projects, projects!!! We put in our first vegetable garden this year and it's doing fantastic. Mike is framing a garage & master bedroom/bathroom and study. This last weekend we re-stained our deck and this weekend I get to stain the swingset. It feels like no matter how much we get done there's always more more more to do. On the up side, it's wonderful to see all this progress being made on our house and yard.

This last weekend I was putting on my old painting shirt before we started staining. My first thought when I looked down at it was "I really need to get rid of this old T-shirt". I first got it my senior year of high school 12 years ago. It's an old ugly orchestra T-shirt that we would grudgingly wear when we went on tour. I used to just wear it to bed, but it officially became my "painting T-shirt" after I accidentally splashed some paint on it while doing crafts.

It was the second year we'd been married and we had just bought our first small house. We officially moved in over Thanksgiving weekend. The budget was really tight that Christmas. I wanted to do gifts for a few of my family members, but I needed to keep it inexpensive. I bought some terra-cotta pots, stencils and paint. I painted cheesy little flowerpots that we gave away as Christmas presents. Of course I knew there was a chance of getting paint on my clothes so I went and put on the ugliest shirt I owned. Sure enough by the time I was done painting Ivy on one of the pots I had green drops across the middle of my shirt.

That summer we decided that the 80s paint job in our house needed to be updated. So, we got some beautiful wood chair rail that we painted white and a nice mushroom color to do the walls in. I immediately got on my Paint Shirt to do the job. I still remember the hours we put into that house. The previous owner had used some texture paint and splashed purple, pink, teal, and yellow paint over the walls. We had to sand, mud, prime and then paint. It took weeks to finish. We took so much pride turning that little house into a home. We stripped and painted the old dark brown cupboards white.....then added moulding at the top and antique handles....Poof! Our kitchen looked new! It was beautiful! Sure enough by the time we were done my shirt had beige and white paint marks all over it.

The next time I pulled that old shirt out was when we were expecting our first baby boy. We wanted to paint the nursery blue, but it took us a couple of times to get it just right. The first color we stared out with was too dark, so we sponged on a lighter color.....but now it was too busy, so we kept only the one wall multi-hued and painted the rest neutral with white trim. Finally! We had the perfect nursery for our beautiful baby boy Caeden.

When I was expecting our second boy, Tanner, we started to look at our 1200 sq. foot house and realize that our family was going to grow out of it real quick. I loved our home and it was with mixed feelings that we put it up for sale. Most of the house was looking great by that time, but we'd always put off doing much in the master bedroom. We decided that it would sell better if we made it look more stylish. Mike bought me a much desired new patchwork bedspread and eyelet lace dust ruffle for my birthday that year and I wanted the bedroom to match. On went my Painting Shirt again. We painted the bedroom in two different tones of green. A neighbor friend had taught me how to do a sponging off painting technique to get a nice finish. When our house finally did sell I cried. I was having all kinds of second thoughts about leaving my first home and the good friends in the neighborhood. There were so many memories. I had had Tanner, our second boy, by that time and it was so hard to leave the house that I'd brought two of my precious babies home to.

Mike was determined that if we were going to spend a lot of time and money fixing up a house the way we wanted it that we should just buy one that needed the work in the first place. Oh my goodness! I vowed that I would never never look at the Foreclosed market for a home again. It was such a rollercoaster ride that by the time we found our second home I was just happy to finally be in a place....even though it was a complete dump! We set up a living area that composed of bedrooms/livingroom/kitchen all in the family room in the basement. We lived crammed into that teenie space with all of our stuff in boxes for the next 6 months while we ripped out lighting, plumbing, burned sheet rock (the house had had a fire), appliances, walls, flooring.....we completely gutted the place. When we finally got to the painting stages I was so excited because it finally meant we were nearing an end of communal living and we could function like a normal family again. This time I got- chocolate brown, caramel brown (Mike always claimed I was hungry when I picked out the two colors for our frontroom/kitchen area), sea blue from the boys room, sage green & hunter green in the master bedroom, white, burgandy from the bathroom, and yellow from the family room- paint colors on my shirt. Our home isn't perfect and I'm sure it wouldn't make it in any stylish decorating magazines, but we put so much blood sweat and tears into it that we immediately loved it.

When my younger sister bought her last apartment she called me up and begged for help to paint it. Her walls had previously been painted an outlandish array of colors, up to 5 different palattes in one room! It gave me a headache just looking at it! She was 7 months pregnant and needed the help so I loaded up my paint supplies, donned my paint clothes and we spent the day laughing and goofing as we tried to get the two bedrooms painted. She didn't have a ladder and the furniture took up most of the space in her rooms so I became an acrobat as I tried to paint from the tops of dressers, bookcases.....even jumping on her bed! Splash! Splash! I had now added lemon yellow and sea foam green to my increasingly colorful shirt.

I haven't had any large painting projects for a while, but I acquired a new color to my shirt from a smaller project. I had always dreamed of taking piano lessons as a girl, but being raised by a single mom with 5 kids, it was financially out of the question. Fast foward to age 28, we ended up with an old piano that my mom had stored in her basement for years. After months of painfully listening to me try to teach myself to play my supportive husband finally agreed to pay for me to have lessons. My sweet piano teacher, when she found out that I played from a kitchen chair, gave me an old piano bench that she had lying around. My good friend, Kim, showed me how to recover the seat and then I sanded it, replaced the screws and painted it black.

Life goes on, baby boy #3, Weston, made his appearance and the house projects keep coming. Finally up to this last weekend I was once again putting on this same T-shirt and thinking about how old and ragged it's getting. I was looking at all the different colors of paint that it had acquired and I was realizing all the memories that are visably stored on that shirt. It occured to me that a shirt that I once hated and considered my ugliest article of clothing had somehow morphed into something special. Now it was on to paint the deck a beautiful redwood color......105 degrees outside, hot as hades......more memories stored in something so trivial as a splash of paint.