I'm back...and boy have I been busy!

I haven't been around here for two weeks but I have a good excuse! :-) For a week and a half I didn't have a spare moment to even think about getting onto my compter at night while at home. With two puppies and light-colored carpet it was very necessary for us to take out the carpeting and put in hardwood floors. Neither Ryan nor I are very handy people but Ryan was convinced we could do it ourselves. I was terrified. I mean, it's our flooring for crying out loud. It's sort of a large part of our house and very visible! :-) But somehow we actually pulled it off. It was a frustrating, painful, and terrible experience but we got it all down. We finished our bedroom Wednesday night/Thursday morning and we still have to put down the trim work but this weekend has been very busy so we'll get to that shortly.

I don't have a before picture of our living room but here is what it looked like the day that we first went through the house while we were still house hunting:
And here it is once we finished the floor in the living room:
Here is a picture of our bedroom right after we first moved in last year:
And here it is now that that we've finished the floor:
So, I mentioned that we finished the floor Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I woke up Wednesday morning to get ready for work. That night after work Ryan and I started working on the floor in our bedroom at 7:00pm...we finished it promptly at 3:00am and then we had to get all of the furniture back in place before we could go to sleep. We finally crawled into bed at 4:00am Thursday morning. I slept for an hour and 45 minutes and then woke up at 5:45am to head out to do some Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving morning. I got back home at 7:15am and went back to sleep for a couple of hours and then it was time to get up and get ready for Thanksgiving. So, on a grand cummulative total of four hours of sleep Ryan and I headed over to his parents' house to spend Thanksgiving with his family. We had a very nice time and way to much food! :-) We left there about 4:00pm and Ryan went home and I headed to Jacksonville to spend the night with Debs so that we could do our annual Black Friday shopping spree. Instead of going to sleep and trying to get a little nap we looked through the sales ads and planned out our plan of attack. We left her house at 10:30pm Thursday night and didn't return until 10:45am Friday morning! We shopped for 12 hours!! There was lots of caffeine involved throughout the course of the night and we covered a lot of ground but I think we both did a good job. After we got back to her house we both took a two hour nap and after the nap I headed home.

This morning I met Karen at Starbucks at 9:30 and we headed to a craft festival! We thought we were all out of craft festivals after the one we went to on October 30th but there was one more in store for us!! We both came away with some good finds and were both very happy with our purchases.

Now I'm home watching the last regular season game for the Gators this year (and this has been one brutal year for those who love Orange and Blue) and tomorrow I'll hopefully get my house all Christmasfied. :-) I'm behind on my decorating this year but that's all because of the floor. In addition, I'm worried about how the dogs (especially Bella) are going to behave with a Christmas tree in the room so keep your fingers crossed for me! :-)

One last thing, we finished our Thanksgiving tree this week. We missed a few days of adding our leaves of things we are thankful for to the tree (and that, too, was because of the floor!). My favorite leaf on the tree was one that Libby wrote and the thing she was thankful for that day was for her birth! How cute! :-) Here is the tree on the first night of November and the finished tree on Thanksgiving: