My last entry should have been titled "Wet Garlic Paint" because the green paint we've chosen for our room's trim smells rather distinctly of garlic! I didn't mind painting with it for several hours over the weekend, that's for sure.

I am pleased to say that after a grueling 14-hour session yesterday, we got the room 95% done. And it looks gorgeous! We have not moved much of the furniture back in yet, nor put the wall map back up, nor painted on the stencil designs we plan to add, but give us through next weekend and all will be done.

The day began with crawling under the house so that we could reroute a phone line and cable outlet so that they could come from a wall jack rather than just two holes drilled in the floor. Installing the wall jack required cutting wallboard and then drilling more holes and then repairing the hole and repainting our new paint job. But it looks nice now.

We had to make a quick shopping trip (too bad Krispy Kreme was on the way!) and do some shelf staining and trim painting before getting to the floor. That, of course, took the most time. The boards have pre-glued backs, so one takes off paper, puts the plank into the matching tongue/groove and shoves a little (fervently hoping the glue doesn't grab too fast before the board seats).

We laid the floor for our 12x15-foot room in about five hours so now we have a nice shiny hardwood office with a new paintjob, upgraded shelves and curtains and curtain rods, and modern overhead light. We hadn't planned on changing the latter, but the old one looked grungy and boring so we got a shiny new multi-mini-halogen light from Ikea that really adds to the newness of the whole room.

Oh yeah - just as we left the house to go shopping, we encountered two fairly large deer on our property, just a little up the hill from our yard. We startled them, but they quickly calmed down and continued grazing one some bushes so we watched them a bit and then left them to it.