This is one of those days where you just want to stand outside and stretch up your arms and feel it pour all over you; where you can really feel what a blessing it is to be alive.  We got some rain yesterday and so the smells of the mountain are really deep and rich.  The sky is bright blue and it's that crisp kind of fall snap where it's not too cold to be comfortable, but it's not t-shirt and shorts weather either.  The colors even seem brighter outside.

The day started with a flood.  Not a torrential one, by any means, but nothing to be laughed off either.  I got up at 5am to go pee and brush my teeth again.  For some reason, my old lady bladder won't make it all the way through the night any more, probably from all the water I drink, especially in the evening, and once I'm up and in the bathroom, I always want to brush the morning breath taste of ass out of my mouth.  That way, I have to edge of cool if Eric wants to get all smoochy in the morning.  Two and a half hours later, the boys came pounding on the door.  Mind you, I had big designs on sleeping in.  Delena has to get up at 5:45am to be on the bus by 6:15am and I am the one who gets her going, so I'm up pretty early every day.  The weekends are my respite to just flop around and sleep as long as I want to or until I just can't stand to be in the bed any more (usually 8-9am).  I stayed up until around midnight talking with Eric, soaking in the hot tub and giggling over dumb shit with him, then sailed away on a cloud of snooze while he watched his new favorite show, Meercat Manner, or as Joey puts it, "When meercats stop being nice and start being real."  I slept the WHOLE night through until the 5am bladder call (completely unheard of) and was in a really blissy sleep place when the boys launched into their panicked chatter about the table being under about 9 feet of water.  As it turned out, when I flushed, the handle did not return to its rightful place (our toilet is subject to such fits as these, which I never remember on the 5am pee) and that somehow caused water to start spewing out of the tank.  Our dining room table is directly below the bathroom and the water from upstairs that was dripping onto the floor quickly found its way down onto dripping on the table.  There were a few inches of water standing in the floor, plus everything (kids' school papers, etc) on the table was soaked and it was dripping like mad.  I grabbed a ton of towels and we started mopping.  I congratulated my bright and intrepid young'uns for having the brain steam to come screaming into our room and by then, Eric and I were up for the day, so it promptly got underway. 

I'd cleaned the house the night before while having one of my wholly uncharacteristic phone conversations with a friend, so it looked pretty nice, which is rare as of late.  Since we started the renovation process, there's always crap laying around everywhere, which just drives me insane.  Mama does not thrive in clutter!!  I got it looking all nice and minimized and organized the crap so that it wasn't dominating the room.  I had a good smile after the flood was managed just seeing how nice everything looked.

Yesterday, since Delena missed the bus and I made the un-good-motherly decision to not drive her 45 minutes one way to school, I got her young butt busy helping with the painting.  She did such a fine job painting one whole side of the cupboard and an inside part of it as well.  She had to prime and do a few coats, so I know it was a pain for her, but she was just shining at it.  Plus, we got to chat while we were painting, which was nice.  I got the green parts of the kitchen done.  It is not, as Eric declared when he saw the can, "mental, institution green,", but is a lovely, sagey, softened green.  I was able to scrape off all of the wallpaper (my arms and oddly my legs) really feel it today.  My shoulders are particularly sore.  I'm totally taking the Dif crap back to The Home Depot and getting my money back because it really didn't do what I needed it to do.  The consensus amongst you folks is that liquid fabric softener is the way to go.  Regardless, I don't have any more wallpaper to remove. Delena will eventually do her bathroom wall, but I'll get the softener for her for that one.

Last night as I was cleaning, I got the stuff all put back where it belongs in the kitchen to see how it would look and it was just lovely.  That brings us to the wonderfulness of today after the flood.

Because our original plan was to yank down the drywall of the ceilings and expose that glorious hard wood that is up there, I didn't take much care when I was painting in the kitchen and had smeared a good bit of paint onto the ceiling edges.  Then, Eric monkeyed around with the drywall and found that because of the beams and how they were positioned, it was going to be next to impossible to pull down the drywall unless we bashed it out with a crowbar or something, which risks destroying the wood itself.  So we decided not to bother with that this renovation since we are under a time crunch.  This left me with a paint smeared ceiling in the kitchen.  Eric suggested that I paint the ceiling in that room only the same chocolate black color that the beams in the rest of the downstairs will be, but I thought it might make the kitchen look too dark and small.  Then Eric found a gallon of paint in the shed that, miracle of miracles, was the sweetest, most perfect match for the existing ceiling paint!  I primed that sucker (since the smears were darker than the ceiling) and painted over it and it's just perfect.  Sure, the repair right now is a little darker than the existing ceiling because it's not as dry and not as old, but I am confident that it will even out in time.  It's close enough that even wet, you have to really be looking to see it.

Next, I took a fat artists' brush and did the details in the kitchen, going over missed places and getting in crevices and such and I want to tell you, that fat artists' brush is my best friend.  I love it. I want to marry it.  I want to have its baby brushes.  My kitchen just looks so damned slick right now, I tell you.  I have a border called "Oaky Moss" or "Mossy Oak" or something like that to put up and it's a dead on match for my sagey, soften green, plus has fall oak leaves and, predictably, moss, along it.  I ordered and got yesterday these "wallies" to the left to put up in the kitchen.  They are prepasted and you just wet them and stick those suckers up.  Plus, on top of that, an online friend bought and is sending me those gorgeous harvest appliqués that I was dying so hard to have.  (Thanks!!)  They are here.  That should draw the woodsy and harvest theme together nicely through the kitchen and the living room and dining room.

OK, now one would think that was just too much goodness for the day, right?  But nooooo, here comes more.  I gingerly and wincingly went over to the fireplace to get out my fireplace red-barn paint and see if I was going to need to primer the white bricks before I painted over them.  This, of course, demanded a sample brick.  I cracked open my can of paint for the first time and it was positively rosey, which is FINE if you're painting roses, but I did NOT want a mauve fireplace!  I stirred it up, which did not improve its disposition much, but when I painted the first sample brick, it was the most beautiful brick color you ever put your poor brick-colored paint eyeballs on.  I literally sighed.  It was just precious.  This, of course, demanded that I paint another sample brick because the first one I chose was the smoothest one and naturally, I needed to try a rougher one.  Now, I have two coats of un-primered barn red paint on four bricks and they look just absolutely splendiferous.  It brought tears to my eyes.  I think a couple of angels might have wept quietly in the background.  I am leaving the mortar between the bricks white, which poses a bit of delicate painting required, but I'm up for the challenge.  I don't expect that bitch to take me longer than 2-3 hours to finish.  Two coats and it should be perfect.

After a LOT of deliberation, we decided to forego the much desired gaping maw fireplace and leave that godforsaken reject of the 1980's fireplace insert in there.  Although there is a damper, we don't want to risk losing a great deal of heat up the chimney and as anyone who has ever done it knows, once you break out a fireplace insert, there just ain't no going back.  You can't unring that bell.

But wait!  It gets better!  His Lord and Majesty decreed that today was the charmed day when we would actually haul the storage bins from the family room (there were many, many storage bins, I mean don't even get me started) and put them into the new shed he built, which, I might add, is nothing short of a work of art.  Our county has codes for how big an out building can be without requiring a permit, 10x12' interior space, but it does not restrict the height, so he built that bitch up 12 feet or so and painted it green so that it blends right in with the trees in our back yard (in the way back, not the fenced back).  He, Delena and I just spent almost 2 hours hauling out bins from the family room and from the Witchy Shed, which has now reverted from "Former Witchy, Currently Shit Storage" Shed to "Witchy Shed" again.  It is no longer Shit Shorte nee Witchy Shed!  I have a whole wall lined with shelves with my Witchy books and all my herbs out there and my eleventy jillion candle holders and little statues and thingiemabobs and I'm just blissy happy.  The harvest decorations are still out there because I have to finish painting the fireplace and have it dry before we can set up Halloween Town on the Hearth (the only place in the house big enough to hold it).  That also presses me to get the fireplace done today.

I was going to do the boys' ceiling today (painting it blue and putting on cloud decals), but the decals have not yet come (over 3 weeks from ebay *frown*) and Dylan has a friend over and I'd rather invest my time into re-straightening the house (lost in the fray of moving bins) and painting the fireplace. 

Eric is not sure he's into painting the beams that chocolate black (Fake Black Bean) anywhere but in the kitchen and although I do think it would look cool, I'm also considering the time crunch and thinking it can wait until another time.  Right now, I'm looking at seeing if I even want to do anything in the family room, painting the boys' ceiling, supervising Delena painting her beam and her bathroom wall, finishing up the kitchen, painting the bathroom and calling it a day.  That should have me finished by Tuesday if I really jam and leave me with a day of rest before starting the new job on Wednesday.  I am nothing if not flexible (bendy even!).

I know you're all positive riveted by me droning on and on about the redecorating (zzzz, wake up!!).  I have gotten so many good hints and suggestions from all of you and I can't begin to tell you how much that helped!  It's great to feel the end of the road coming up and to feel as though I can walk away from the project with a job well done.  It was quite an undertaking, more even than I thought it would be.  It does, however, seem as though it was harder to repaint my bathroom in my old house than it was to redo almost the entire house here.  I think part of that is that I'm in better health and physically I am much stronger. I could really feel that today when I was packing those bins way out to the back to that storage shed. 

So now I am off to put the roast and potatoes on to cook and then start painting that gawgeous fireplace.  We're almost to photo time, folks!  If I stay on this time table, that's how I'll spend Tuesday, taking and posting photos.  Wish me luck!