Home Makeover

We had a busy weekend fixing up our house, and it was well worth it. Buying the paint was the best money we've put into the house so far. Well, the lawnmower was a pretty good investment, too. Check out these awesome before/after pictures. Please look past the fact that the previous owners actually had furniture to put in the house and we don't.

The front room before:

And after:

And here is the kitchen before (the green was pretty bright in real life, but it doesn't show here):

And after:

They used the other half of the kitchen as a family room, but we turned it into the dining area:

After:

This is the table we found covered in spiders in the shed. It's not that bad, is it?

Now that we can be in these rooms without wearing sunglasses, I feel a lot better. I'll feel a whole lot better when we paint the purple room, the pink room, the purple and pink bathroom, and the blue bedroom.

This is my favorite touch. Nothing says home like painting the panels on the bathroom door to match the walls and the frame to match the bedroom.

Update

This is just a quick post to say we are still alive and doing well. We just got our internet working today after a two weeks without it. It made me realize how much we rely on it. We are in our new house and staying up too late every night trying to fix it up. I have two weeks under my belt at my new job at Nu Skin, plus I already took a trip to the employee store, where I got like $200 worth of high end skin care products and supplements. Keep an eye out for exciting future posts, mostly relating to what I mentioned above :)

Moab

Since we'll be rather poor this year, I wanted to do some inexpensive day trips and weekend trips around here instead of going on a big vacation. Brian had some comp time last week, so we went down to Moab for the first of many Utah adventures. It was great to get away and awesome to see the unique rock formations of Southern Utah. 

Here are some pictures of the first hike we went on. We hiked the "primitive loop" in the Devil's Garden area of Arches National Park. There were tons of arches on this hike, as well as some rock fins, which are what arches are made from.

We were lucky enough to get the last campsite in an area convenient to the park. Thanks Joe for the tent you gave us--we finally put it to good use. (We also found some receipts from the Manassas Walmart  from 2006. Do you want those?)

The next morning we went to see some more arches, including Delicate Arch, the famous one that's on the license plates. It was pretty cool and much bigger than we thought.

This is a cool double arch with some cool people in front of it. I bet you can't guess who took that picture.

And this is Balancing Rock. It's pretty self-explanatory.

We also saw some petroglyphs in various places. Near our campground, there was a whole cliff wall full of them.

We had a pretty fun weekend. We didn't even make it to Canyonlands National Park, but there is still lots of time this summer.