Yay! It's finally done!

Well, after looking at the peeling gray paint on our house for over 6 years now, we have finally gotten it painted. Merry Christmas to us! Here's a before pic: (I took this one after getting the new garage doors.)

And here it is today:I think it looks like a totally different house!

I had originally planned to go with more of a brown, but I liked the lighter version. It actually looks almost yellow, but I think that's good--it brightens up the place.

We had the gutters removed, because they were always clogged, even with screens over them, and they were doing more harm than good. There was some rotten wood that had to be replaced, and they had to repair some wood over the front porch where a squirrel decided to make a hole. We also had them remove the green awnings. We are going to wait until summer to see if we really need them to shade those bedrooms. If we do, I will put new fabric on them, and we will put them back up. But I really prefer the way the house looks without them. (The gutters will be hauled off this week.)

Here are pics of the back of the house:

They also painted the inside of the porch.

After replacing the screen on the porch, I will paint the boards that cover the vertical beams where the screening is attached. I think we'll also put some lattice around the bottom of the porch.

Now I'm motivated to do more stuff! But we have to wait for the funds...

Kicking off the Christmas season

I know, it's a week into December now, but with all that has been going on, we've just now gotten into the swing of things!

The school's craft fair was all day on Friday, and the Christmas program was that night, followed by the bake sale and more craft fair. I have stayed busy for a while making things to sell, and I think it went quite well! The baby bears were quite a hit with the little girls, and out of 12, I have only 1 left. And a mom wants to get it for her daughter. I will definitely be doing more of those!

The corn bags sold well too, especially the small ones that I made in pairs that can be warmed up and put in pockets to warm hands. The kids bought these as gifts for dads--I knew that dad gifts were usually in demand and hard to find at our craft fair. I will do more of these next year, especially from a variety of team fabrics.

I had lots of left-over ornaments that I sold for a quarter, along with some odds and ends, and lots of candles I got on clearance a while back. They are always good gifts. I do have a few bags that I have been trying to sell for a while, so I think I will just eBay those to get rid of them. Lee even sold the pink Alabama bag (at a discount) to a friend who is a fellow fan.

The Christmas program was very good--one of the best I've seen them do, in fact. Molly sang in the elementary choir, and her 4th grade class sang one song. Adam sang in the 7th grade choir of 12 people, and they did very well. I just wish that Adam would have stood still!

On Saturday, we went with some friends to see the Nutcracker at the Orpheum. I was looking for tickets a while back, and Ticketmaster's cheapest ones were $25 each. I stumbled across Ballet Memphis' website, and they had $5 tickets! So a friend and I got several of them. I was a little unclear about where they were, exactly, because I guess I didn't understand the layout on the screen. As it turns out, they were on the floor on the first and second row! They were way over on one side, so some of us couldn't see them if they got over on that edge of the stage, but it was incredible! If they happened to get to close to the edge and fall off, they would have landed at our feet. The people across the aisle from us paid $70 for their tickets. I took this picture from my seat:

I used a little zoom on this one:We had lunch at spaghetti warehouse before the show, and made a day of it. Molly and the two other little girls that went with us all loved it. We're going to make it a tradition from now on!
At least, as long as we can get $5 tickets!

Sunday morning was our children's Sunday School program at church. I love to see the little bitty ones singing! They were so cute. And the bigger kids did a great job on their verses and songs.

So it was a busy weekend! But lots of Christmas fun, though!

CBS Craft Fair

I've posted on my Clothed In Scarlet blog about preparing for the CBS Holiday Festival, and I've included some photos of some of the things I will be selling there.

You can see it all at http://clothedinscarlet.com