Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 293, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

It was grand to come out to the living room this morning and discover our house completely bathed in sunlight.  It feels like we just bought ourselves a whole new house!  I can’t believe what a difference the painting and cleaning has made.  This is awesome.  We were not planning on just how much the changing out of the blinds and the paint were going to alter the look of the house.  This was time and money well spent.

Today was a day of continued painting and a lot of it.  We got started straight away this morning and worked at it all day.  In between coats we worked on getting what parts of the house that we could ready for tomorrow.  I put in a lot of time today up in the attic.  The garage is looking much better with a lot of the stuff that was piling up in there moved up to the attic instead.  Now we can move around and find things, well some things, that we need.  The garage has been a major issue for us.  Getting stuff up to the attic is really critical.  It seems like half of our kitchen supplies remain out in the garage.

The painting went on late tonight.  We knew that leaving any for tomorrow would be a disaster.  We ended up painting until two in the morning!  But everything was done.  The entire living room is painted and there is enough time for the paint to dry before SpiceCorps DFW meets here tomorrow and that leaves the entire day for cleaning.

Medifast Status: Day 292, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

The painting of the living room began first this this morning.  We have a lot to do.  A good portion of the painting must be done from high up on a step ladder.  So Dominica has been focusing on the ground level painting while I am doing the high level painting from the ladder.

We painted most of the day interspersed with periods of cleaning.  So much to do.  We pretty much took the entire weekend off to deal with the preparations for this coming week.  Thank goodness that this turned out to be a surprise holiday weekend and I have tomorrow off from work so that I can be home to focus on this.  There is no way that we will get this done today.

From the very first coat of paint we can tell that this was a good choice.  The old paint in the living room was a taupe colour that seemed decently light with nothing to compare it to.  But now that we are painting a light cream colour over it we can really see just how dark it really was.  We thought that the blinds really made a difference in making the house brighter but now that we are applying this lighter paint to the largest room in the house it is getting far brighter still.  The difference is far more dramatic than we had anticipated.  It is going to look great.

I don’t think that it is easy to express the level to which we have made the house brighter than when we first came to look at the house fourteen months ago.  The house was painted dark, there was extremely dark wood finishings and nearly all of the windows were covered with large furniture items.  It was, needless to say, dark.  Now all of that has changed.  The house is open and airy, the paint is light, the blinds are gone, the carpets have been cleaned and everything really pops.

The new paint makes the house really scream for some colour.  We’ve decided that we are going to address that through the use of really colourful, Dutch modern styled 1960s furniture.  Dominica has been shopping for some and has some good ideas.  The first item on our list is going to be bar stools.  We are going to get the bar up and usable before moving on to addressing anything else.

We got roughly two coats of the living room done today and are in good shape to complete the room tomorrow.

Medifast Status: Day 291, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

Today begins our crazy painting weekend.  We have SpiceCorps DFW meeting at our home on Tuesday and my father is coming to visit for a week starting on Wednesday so we only have a very small window from now until we need to have everything done.  There is a ton to do too.  It is not just painting but we need to get the house cleaned up – really cleaned up.

We did a bit of preparation today in order to begin painting.  The house is going to be a real mess until the painting is completed as we need to move everything in order to do it.  We are also working on getting stuff moved up to the attic and stuff from the house moved out in to the garage.

Moving stuff around in the garage resulted in a wall of garbage stacking up against the garage door.  The garage is so full of stuff that we can barely move out there.  My office is also filling up pretty quickly.

Joe came over this evening and helped us to get set up with some of the basics for the painting – mostly helping with things like patching the walls and stuff like that.

We did not start painting tonight.  We decided that that would really start tomorrow morning.  But everything is ready at this point.  We took down the blinds today.  We talked about it and decided that we really needed to just do away with the awful vertical blinds that came with the house.  They are all broken and old and look just terrible in the front windows.  Even if we manage to open them, which we never completely have, they block a ridiculous amount of light while providing no effective insulation.  We will come up with a good replacement for them sometime soon.

What a difference taking the blinds down makes.  The house is ten times brighter.  That alone makes the house feel like a new home.  I’ve been railing against those blinds since we first moved in but even I am amazed by what a difference it made taking them down.  I am already much happier about having purchased this house.  It really looks great.

Medifast Status: Day 290, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

I got so far behind on SGL that I don’t really remember today.  Sorry.

Medifast Status: Day 289, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

After my long day yesterday I refused to get up early this morning and slept in until a quarter to eight.  Not really “sleeping in” per se but more of a normal time.  Definitely did not get up early.

I went into the office this morning.  Work was busy today, just like it has been all week, but not so busy that I had no time to relax whatsoever.  What we did have today was Hewlett-Packard in the office giving a two and a half hour presentation on the new Generation 8 Proliant servers which was really interesting.  Unfortunately that happened during my lunch break so I was in that meeting from noon until two thirty which meant no time at home to relax and visit with my family and it meant that the rest of the work day was that much busier because I lost all of that productive time, but the presentation was valuable so it was time well spent.

HP did provide lunch, of course, during the presentation.  I made sure that no one else was going to eat the food provided before getting some for myself.  It was totally cheating on my diet – it was sandwiches from Jimmy John’s.  So I really, really was not supposed to have that but this was a surprise meeting and I had been planning on being home for lunch and did not bring any food and they provided food so I didn’t want to pass it up if no one else was going to eat it.  I am really going to pay for this on my weigh in tomorrow.  This week has been horrible for my diet.

We had our regular terminate slash pest control visit today.  Being from New York we are still not used to having to do that on a regular basis.  I’m glad that we have a contract and someone that comes out all of the time.  It does not take much for your house to get overrun with insects down here.  We don’t have that many when we step outside – it isn’t like we are overcome by insects.  But the ones that we do have seem to have little issue finding their way into the house.  The ants are especially bad down here.

The afternoon was not too bad and while it was busy I did not have to stay late.  I got home and Dominica had food waiting for me.  We had had some miscommunications there.  I thought that she knew that I was eating at the office.  It was a lean dinner, though, so I went ahead and ate two meals today.  I’ve got a very rough diet fortnight coming up.  Today was quite bad.