And It's Already 2008?!?!

It's so hard to believe that 2008 has already arrived and we're already approaching six months of homeownership. Where does the time go? With all of the hustle and bustle of the holidays (along with an almost week-long trip to Nashville), Daniel and I really didn't tackle any projects. However, we were definitely back in full swing this weekend.

To begin, we tackled some major organization issues. When we discovered the paneling and hardwood floors in the listening room, we relocated everything (past magazine issues, record players, records, CDs, movies, games, speakers, and so on) that was in the listening room to the den. Now granted, all of these items were not in one heaping mess on the floor; they were, however, in tidy little piles (more like mountains) surrounding the couch. And since it's going to take us a little bit of time to get a shelving system in place, it was definitely time to tackle the piles. It's amazing how much more spacious the whole room feels though.

Along with cleaning and organizing, we also had plans to salvage the trim around the doors (three doors + one closet = A LOT for one room), which had been painted white. In an effort to save money and keep the original trim, I had planned on stripping the paint, sanding, and refinishing the trim.

Daniel started by removing all of the nails, which took a little bit of time since he didn't want to split the wood.

Armed with rubber gloves and big can of paint stripper, I started work on applying and then scraping the trim. And for some reason, this process was not nearly as easy as I had imagined (I'm not really sure what I was expecting). Not to mention, applying paint stripper is not the same as a applying a nice even coat of paint--I really had to glop it on to get through the (at least) two layers of old paint. Even so, the paint stripper didn't get everything, and I wore out my arm attempting to scrape off the remaining paint off tje three sides of the trim with my piddly little scraper.

After a grueling two (maybe three... it did seem much longer) hours, I only had two pieces of trim with the paint stripped. Clearly, this was not going to work.

Thankfully, Daniel volunteered to make the trek to Lowe's to check out their trim prices: $1.99 for 11 feet.

Why, oh why, didn't I bother to check this out when I was their earlier in the day to buy paint stripper?