What are your plans for the holidays?

I flew back to Texas this past week to visit my family. I’ve been shopping all day with my mom and sister to finish Christmas shopping for our huge family (my mom and dad are both 1 out of 7 siblings, huge is an understatement). I’ve also embarked on a new DIY project. My parent’s current house is about 20 years old, with only one renovation about 15 years ago when the granite floors were installed. Nothing else has been done. While sitting on the toilet, I came up with the idea of painting the bathroom walls (never TMI on this blog) but you can visit the site from where I took this idea. The one obstacle, and this is a big one, all the bathrooms are wallpapered (talk about early 90s!). So I told my dad I was going to ripe out the wallpaper and paint the upstairs bathroom, and he replied with “yeah right… you’re on Christmas break.” Either he was being totally serious, or he knew the right button to hit so that I would complete the task. Probably the latter…

So challenge accepted.

I’ve worked on the upstairs bathroom (which is conjoined by two powder rooms) for the past four days, tearing off wallpaper. Except it wasn’t as easy as YouTube makes it look… The wallpaper is glued onto drywall, which is basically raw materials made of layers and layers of paper. Can’t really peel glued paper off paper, am I right? Damn, this became a WAY bigger project than I expected. So now the process is: peel wallpaper (careful not to damage the drywall too much), spackle, smooth out the plaster, wipe down the dust, texturize the walls, sand down the texture so it matches the walls at home, primer, then paint. What did I get myself and MG into? But it’s been a learning experience, and to me that’s always worth it. I’m hitting up Home Depot like it’s my local coffee shop, and hard at work everyday toiling away, which is better for my weight because the other situation is that I’d be snacking all day. I’m happy to say that today, all the wallpaper is off and we’ve spackled two rooms.  Pics to come soon! There is one pic of MG spackling at the bottom of the collage. This spackle goes on pink, but dries white so you see where you’ve plastered.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of my time in Texas right now, according to my iPhone.

I miss my little Chubalee, but thankfully he’s having a great time with his cat sitters (thanks Winnie)! I do have a fat fat here to keep me company though. Meet Tinker, my sister’s butterball 26lb kitty. He’s a cuddle muffin, and I must smother him every chance I get.

On our free time, obviously we’re eating! Whataburger at 1am is the Texan thing to do. Mmm… honey butter chicken biscuit. Also Sonic had half off milkshakes this past weekend – we had the ultimate shake, the vanilla mint holiday shake. Yum!

We also celebrated my mama’s birthday with a delicious Whole Foods cake. Happy Birthday mommy!

2 more days until Christmas day! What are you doing until then?

Peace & Love, Jay