We were planning on getting all of the work done on our bedroom on Saturday so we could start moving furniture Saturday night. We started off good - Saturday morning we got up early to take the car in for emissions/safety testing. After dropping the car off, we stopped by Starbucks for coffee (yum! and very necessary, I'm not a morning person). Then we went home to meet a general contractor (more on that later) and spoke with him for almost 2 hours. After all that, it was basically lunch time. We didn't start painting until after lunch. We primed the baseboards and painted the walls. Mike set the shoe molding up in the basement and put a coat of paint on it. Painting took us most of the day. Then we had to pick up the car and go to the grocery store... and it was Valentine's Day... so we gave up on our plan of finishing the bedroom and just enjoyed a nice dinner at home while watching a horribly cheesy 80s movie. My kind of Valentine's Day :-)

Sunday morning we were on a mission. We really wanted/needed to sleep upstairs that night. We got up early again and started working right away. We cut the first piece of shoe molding (is it molding or moulding?) and started to nail it into place. A few mins later, I had finally gotten one nail in... Mike had bent 4 nails, but had gotten none into the shoe molding. Hmmm... the biggest problem was that we were really afraid of scratching our beautiful floors. Well, that and we've been looking for an excuse. Any excuse. Cause once you use one of these, you'll look for any possible reason to own one. So Mike looked at me, said "I think it's time... and it is my birthday next weekend..." and with that, we were out the door, in the car on the way to Lowes.

Welcome to our home nail gun! It's it pretty?? It came with a finish nailer, a brad nailer, and a stapler. And a "portable 38 pound" 6-gallon air compressor that the cat is very very afraid of. We need to install shoe molding throughout the entire house, plus we have some other projects that this will be a big help with. See?? I told you, any excuse... so thank you state tax refund. And thanks to Mike's dad for introducing us to the joys of a pneumatic nailer. Oh, and happy early birthday Mike.

With the help of our (woops, I mean Mike's...) new nail gun, we were able to cut all the shoe molding for our bedroom, attach it, caulk, and patch the nail holes in just a few hours.

Hmm, in the pictures the wall color looks kind of splotchy and yellow in places, I promise that it's not. I'm really glad we decided to repaint the walls. It's almost the exact shade as the curtains. And the cool color in the walls looks really nice with the warm wood floors. Love it. We also put the curtains up a little differently - just using the pole pocket at the top instead of putting them on rings like they were before. This made them a little shorter, which is nice. We might keep them this way for awhile and see how we like them. I was getting frustrated with the rings because they kept getting stuck and then I would never open the curtains.

I'm also glad we decided to go ahead and paint the baseboards white. We put the final coat on after we patched. We're keeping the rest of the woodwork as is, the baseboards were just in horrible shape. Check out my shoe molding around the closet doors. I should post a more detailed picture. It's almost like we know what we're doing.

We have some friends coming to visit this weekend (yay!!) so I don't know how much we'll get done with week. We've very motivated right now though to keep working on the upstairs.*

*Translation - I really just want to install more shoe molding... nail guns are fun.