Busy bee...

I went to MO this weekend by myself for two reasons. The first one was to see a very good friend of mine that lives in Florida but was in MO for her sister's wedding. She wasn't coming to our home town because the wedding was in Springfield & she was flying in & out of St.Louis & wanted to meet with me on Sunday in St. Louis before she flew back home. I didn't want to drive 3 hours & then meet with her for a couple of hours & then drive 3 hours back home so I decided that I would surprise my mom with something that I have been wanting to do for awhile but have not gotten the chance to do it. My mom's house needs some TLC but when we're there visiting she doesn't want us to do anything to it because she wants to spend our time visiting. She works nights so I decided to leave home Friday night & arrive at her house shortly after she left for work. I arrived about 15 minutes after she had left & I got busy working. I took all her things off the walls of the living room & hallway...she had a lot of stuff...it took me two hours to take every thing down & pull out the nails. After that I had to clean the walls & do some patch work. Then I primed the paneling walls. By the time I did this it was about 4 am. I started painting a section of the wall with the "Cancun Sand" (think cream color) that I had bought but realized that I needed to prime the walls again. By this time it was 5am & all though I wasn't mentally tired my body was saying "Enough already." So I stopped painting & cleaned up my mess. By the time I was done with that & ready to go to bed it was 6:30am. I was really disappointed because I wanted to have everything done before she came home from work. So I left her a note & went to bed. I woke up at 11am & she heard me so she got up. I was afraid she might be upset with me but she was very happy about what I was doing. We had lunch & then I got back to it. By 9pm Sat. night I realized that I was not going to be able to get all that I wanted done before I had to leave Sunday morning. My original plan was to prime & paint the living room & the hallway, paint the ceilings of both, & paint the trim work of both, & then stylishly decorate :o) My wise & very gracious mother knew that I couldn't get it all done & told me not to worry about it & that I could finish it another time. We decided to focus on finishing painting the living room & one side of the hall way. I will finish the hallway, doing the ceiling, & trim work the next time I visit. I finished painting at 3:00am Sunday & went to bed at 3:30am. I woke up at 9am & quickly started working to put furniture back in place, clean, & then to decorate when I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to do all of that, plus pack a lot of stuff...she was letting me take most of the stuff on the walls & on the furniture to sell at a yard sale...and take a shower before leaving at 10:45am. So I went to plan B which was to take a shower & get ready & then instead of heading home from St. Louis I would drive back to my home town which would be another 1 & 15 minutes driving time...finish what I needed to do & then drive home. I pulled out of my mom's driveway at 9:30 with an estimated arrival time of 12:45. I got home at 1am which is not bad considering I had to drive through a lot of fog & ended up missing a turn off & driving 10 miles the wrong way before I figured it out :o( & then had to turn around. I got to bed at 1:30am & "slept in" until 7am. Rushed around to get Phoebe ready for school & then watched Emily & Audrey all day. So I'm thinking I'll go for a quiet "relaxing" weekend this coming weekend :o) I have two video clips of my mom's living room...a before & after clip however for some reason I can't get them to publish on the same post so I will include the before on this one & then post the "after" on a new post.