I've been working at the Tulsa City-County Libraries, though, so I have a good excuse! I've also been busy quilting, and the kids have been home sick a LOT in the past two weeks (which means I get very, very little done).
I've been volunteering at the South Broken Arrow library for around three years now, I think. Over the summer I trained as a substitute, and I've had an absolute blast going between the two Broken Arrow libraries. They've called me a few times for some of the other ones but I'm very intimidated by Hardesty so I've turned those down. It's a huge regional library and I'm not quite confident enough of my knowledge to tackle that one, but I will once I get a little more experience.
The bad part is that my stack of books to read is now almost three feet tall. That's not a bad thing except that I'm frantically trying to catch up on my quilting. I'm about six months behind on posting customer quilt pictures, but hopefully I'll get my act together soon.
Last weekend we decided to finally tackle the utility room, which has bugged us since we moved in seven years ago.
Here's how it looked after we moved the washer and dryer out and Greg took out the baseboards. (They'd been butted together instead of installed properly, so that had to go!)
Yes, the walls really WERE that dark. They'd been painted with a flat paint that came off when rubbed with a damp paper towel, so that was pretty bad.
Greg repaired some damage and sprayed a new texture, and then Gillian and I sanded it down and she vacuumed. Greg got a drywall mud that claimed to be less dusty, and I think it actually was--more seemed to end up on the floor than in the air, which is a very good thing.
Here's Gillian, being a HUGE help:
The previous owners have done all kinds of head-scratch-worthy things, such as painting the smoke detector in place, as well as just painting the wallpaper. Sigh.
Luckily the wall paper was only on one wall and seems to be *very* well adhered, so we went ahead and put the texture on over it.
Here (below) you can see Greg taking off the trim around the door--it had been installed rather horribly and had all kinds of caulk in the corners--the top was sucked into the wall while the sides weren't, so there was about a 1/8" depth difference among the three pieces. It looks SO much better now.
And you have to notice the wallpaper that's underneath the current stuff (be sure to enlarge so you can see it in all its glory):
We've been talking about redoing parts of the kitchen (taking out the drop ceiling, among other things) but knowing that there's *another* layer of wallpaper is a little disheartening.
Back to the good stuff. Here's the final paint on the walls:
Doesn't that color look so much better than the old, dark color? It's absolutely amazing what a difference new texture and color have made in that space.
At this point I'm incredibly behind on my quilting, especially since I've spent the last 11 hours in bed, shivering and trying not to throw up. I'd *so* hoped that what the kids had was going to pass me by, but no such luck.
My family is coming here for Thanksgiving, and I need to finish ALL of my customer quilts before they get here since we're putting my sister in the quilt room. I hope I'm over this illness in the morning so that I can quilt like a mad woman over the next six days!
I hope all of you are having a great weekend, and be sure to wash your hands properly and often! There's lots of icky stuff going around.
