The Path of the Paintbrush

It is Monday morning, time for another house addition update. I can't believe anyone reads these posts. And I LOVE all your ideas for organizing our mud room. I can't wait to get out the sketch paper and start drawing out some plans!

I'm not going to go through a day by day "this is what we did when" this week. The general layout of the week was, get the children down for their nap in the afternoon and paint. Put the children to bed at night, and paint. I always said I was a night person and it was fun to work with Ed, but staying up late every night (and getting up early every morning) wasn't fun by the fourth day. By Thursday night when we put on the last coat of paint, I was ready for a celebration - but chose to just fall into bed.

But all the wall painting is finished. Next is the trim, and more painting!

After long stewing about paint colors, here is the final choices. It is hard to get a photo that truly shows the real color.

Our kitchen is a deep chocolate brown. We chose one shade lighter for the "big room" with white wainscoating.


The dining room has no windows and I was scared to paint it that dark, so it is one shade lighter yet.


When you stand at one end of the room, you see three shades of brown-tan. Maybe that is weird, but I like it.


The mud room is green. I think it is too dark, but we had this paint left over from another project and just decided to use it. I wish I would have dumped in some leftover white paint to lighten it up. But with white trim and coats hanging, it might not be bad.


On Saturday Ed spent the day working on the chimney. Our five year old hauled bricks to him, moving a stack one at a time from one board to the next until they were high enough. He took a good nap after all that work!


Now it is Monday morning and Ed is already back to brick laying. We had an early start on the morning even if it is a holiday since we slept out in the tent with the children last night. The girls woke us before 6:00 with shouts of "there is a huge turtle outside our tent." Sure enough a very large turtle was digging in our garden. Large turtles usually are snapping turtles but I ran to the house for the reptile guide for positive identification. Snapping turtles are hated (among other things) for eating baby ducks.

Too bad there is no photographic evidence. I'm sure you'd love to see four pajama clad children gathered around watching me try to lure a big turtle to bite a stick and extend his neck so that Ed could decimate his head with his huge ax. We told the children we'd have snapping turtle soup for breakfast over the fire. They preferred eggs and sausage.