renovation vacation

I haven't been keeping up with my blogs over the last few months so some of you haven't heard that I got laid off from my job. It's quite a long story but basically the company that I worked for sold their camera to a competitor. I've been laid off since mid May and just this Friday I got a job offer to work at a new start-up hospital that will be opening in October. I'll start in September so I'll have another 6 weeks or so to just kick it at the pool.

In my time off thus far, I've studied and passed a specialty exam in the field of cardiology within the field of nuclear medicine in hopes to make myself more marketable. I also began renovating our bedroom by stripping down all the trim-work to it's bare wood and Eric helped this weekend by sanding it all down for me. We plan to put a nice fresh coat of white paint on it and add some crown molding as well. If your wondering why we stripped it down to only repaint it, it's because it's an oil based lead paint that was painted over varnish and it had a lot of cracks and stuff. We think that we're going to paint the walls a pea soup/asparagus green color (sounds a bit crazy but I think that it'll look nice against the white trim) and eventually reface all of the built-in's (they're not original) and replace the light fixture. I hope to get most of this done before heading back to work. I love renovating but it's so darn hard to find the motivation to do it and work 40+hrs a week so I plan to make the best out of this little hiatus and try not to get too comfortable sleeping in until 9:00 every morning and relaxing by the pool because I can't possibly "work" the whole day, right? I gotta enjoy this time off. Anyway, here are some "during" pictures.




Also, here's a pic of the table that Eric and I redid. I grew up with this table and I really wanted to keep it in the family but I managed to "bung" it up over the last six years. I decided that it needed a new lease on life. However, I had a little issue when sanding...apparently the inside of the tabletop is not solid wood (to me and my parent's surprise) so when I was sanding it, I exposed the laminate. So instead of just dealing with a slight imperfection on the table top, I opted to dig out the entire laminate insert (I recruited Eric for his muscle) and then we laid slate tile in the center. We really like it and since I've been cooking a lot more recently, we get a lot of use out of it as well! Power tools are fun!