It Takes a Village

If you heard the podcast yesterday, you know that we're only as far along in this entire moving process as we are because a small village of folks pitched in to help! Today I want to tell you about the FIRST round of help we had.

The house we purchased was pretty much all one color on the inside - a very pretty tan. I do love it, but I also love a little contrast. So I schemed up some colors to paint a few of the walls, and for the majority of last week, that's what I did.

Well.

That and wallpaper removal. If you missed that podcast rant yesterday, let me just tell you that wallpaper scraping, I've decided, is my nemesis. I didn't even have that much to remove, but I think if there had been any more...

The backsplash area in the kitchen was covered in wallpaper. Part of it left via the wall demolition. The rest had to be scraped off. Piece by painful piece.

My friend Sandee came over to help me paint our master bedroom. I had no idea of her killer talent in painting the trim areas. We teamed up...I rolled and she trimmed. {And Ryan did the parts that were too high for both of us.} We got that whole room knocked out in one day!

{About the shirt. It was my parade shirt when I worked at the station. I couldn't exactly leave it there because my replacement and I didn't share a name. And there's not a lot you can do with a shirt like this other than wear it to paint!}

My parents came to visit and brought us dinner. {And Ryan's mom came to visit the next night but somehow I failed to get a picture!! She treated us to dinner as well!}

My friend Amber stopped by just to see the house and ended up offering to help me with the wallpaper scraping. And the next day, she came back on her way to work to bring me her DVD collection of a TV show so I could have SOMETHING playing in the background while I worked for the week. That was as much of a blessing as her trip over to help scrape wallpaper. I could not get over the crazy quietness of the house; the background noise was a blessing.

That wallpaper, by the way, NEVER ENDED.

 Troy came back every day to do more sanding and mudding and sanding and mudding.

These were the heroes of week one in our new house. I worked at the house all day every day, and Ryan worked there all night after working a full day at work. We spent pretty much every waking hour there and a handful of hours that should have been sleeping ones. Painting, scraping, cleaning carpets, patching, mudding, sanding...these were the things that comprised the first week. And truly, truly, truly, we could not have made the progress we did without these friends who gifted us their time and resources.