The Productive Weekend

I will be the first to admit that I am not all that handy around the house. I don't have many carpentry skills, and I just generally don't get into household projects.  For some reason I was motivated to get things done this weekend.  By noon today I had accomplished more than what I have in the past 10 weekends.

Friday at work was another rough one for me.  It seems like Fridays, especially Friday afternoons, are some of the most hectic times of the week.  Friday should be the day where you can mentally check out a little bit; enjoy yourself a little bit more.  That happens sometimes, but not this week. When I finally got home I just wanted to veg out.  I resisted the urge. We went to dinner then made a quick stop at Home Depot to pick up some trim.  As we got home the sunlight was waning, but I had just enough left to get the front door painted.  Our front door was looking pretty shabby.  It needed perked up a bit.  I spray painted it; which I was worried about.  I thought it might look pretty ghetto to put spray paint on a front door.  However, I had used the same paint on our back patio furniture and it looked really nice.  I really didn't have anything to lose.  The door wasn't going to look any worse than what it already did.  Everything turned out great.  The door looks 100% better.  I should have painted it a long time ago.

I couldn't go to sleep last night at all. I don't know if the paint fumes had gotten to me or what, but I was pretty wired. I finally was able to fall asleep around 1am.  I was still able to get up this morning by 7:30.  I immediately started working on cleaning out the garage.  I put a bunch of stuff up in the attic and got rid of some other crap that we didn't need.  The garage always looks so much bigger when I clean it out... I just don't know why it never stays that way.  My next project will be putting up more shelving on the side walls.  It will give us some more storage space.

Around 9 my friend Heath showed up to help me install the chair rail in the nursery.  I had never put up trim before, so it was going to be a learning process for me.  We had some issues with the miter box we were using so we made a quick run to Home Depot again to buy a new one.  Once we had that things went pretty smoothly and we had the chair rail up in no time.  I don't think I could have done it on my own. I was really thankful Heath could help me out.  After it was all hung I spent the next hour filling in all the nail holes and smoothing out the joints.  I still want to go back over the corners again, but overall it looks great.  I am really impressed with how professional it looks.  I didn't think it would look like crap, but I also didn't expect to look as polished as it turned out.  I am proud of the final product for sure.  I am a bit of a perfectionist and it is one of the big reasons I don't like doing things around the house.  If I mess something up it will drive me insane.  I think I will be really happy with how the chair rail turns out; especially after we get the lower wall painted, and the rail painted to exactly match the rest of the trim.

I forgot to mention that putting up the chair rail was my gift to Amanda for her birthday, which is coming up in a couple days.  I am bad at picking out gifts for her.  I usually end up getting her some sort of electronic device.  Last year I got her a new digital camera.  This year I was thinking about getting her a Kindle eReader from Amazon.  Instead I did the chair rail for the main part of her gift.  Who knows, I will probably still buy her the Kindle.

So, by noon on Saturday I had the door painted, the garage all cleaned out, and a chair rail put up in the nursery.  That counts as a pretty good weekend by my standards, and we still have a full day to go.