12 sections:5 colors:2 coats

Another busy basement weekend for us.
Saturday we went to the carpet store for their "private sale." It worked out great because they had a table filled with cookies, crackers and juice boxes that came in quite handy for keeping the girls busy while I picked out carpet and linoleum colors. What a task! There are only 500 samples to choose from. It narrowed it down though when I said, "let's start with your lowest price point and work from there."

We picked out carpet for the majority of the basement and will have it go up the stairs too. Then the pantry room will have the linoleum in it. We're bummed that it won't be in by Thanksgiving so that Van and Dede can see it and sleep in the new room, but I guess that means Van will just have to make another trip down here before we move so that he can see it all finished. :)

You're probably wondering about the title of this post. That has to do with the last wall in the playroom (picture soon to follow). I finally taped and painted it. It has 12 vertical sections on it: pink, blue, orange, yellow and green. It took a very long time! Kelly helped me do the first set of paint strips so that the lines were straight and on Saturday I painted half of the stripes (two coats each.) I was pretty sick of cleaning out brushes and rollers at the end of that day. Then on Sunday, I put up the second set of tape strips so that I could paint in the remaining 6 sections. I was able to do two coats on all of those stripes except for the blue. I was literally scraping the bottom of the paint pail, but didn't have enough to cover both blue stripes with a second coat. I tried on one, and it looks bad to me, but I'm not sure how much anyone else will really scrutinize it. We'll see if my perfectionism surfaces enough to get me to go and buy a pint of blue paint just so I can redo that second coat on two little strips of wall. :)

But it looks cool and the girls like it. We also put up a dry erase board over the hole in the wall where the water gauge was. They were all over that playing teacher, drawing, writing and telling stories. I think that was a good buy.

While I was painting, Kelly was working on the ceiling in the bedroom. There were a couple of wrinkles, but the bedroom now has a very nice drop ceiling. I think we'll break down and take the easy way out with the lighting - using the panel lighting instead of recessed. We'll have to see what we find. Kelly did some lighting work this weekend too. Now we have two fixtures instead of one in the bedroom and 4 instead of one in the Illini room.

The original goal was to have everything done by Thanksgiving, but it will come down to when they can lay the carpet. I would think by mid December at the latest, everything will be done.