The Craft Room

Mother and I came up with the great idea of hiring a contractor to re-carpet and re-paint my spare room, so I called around and had one come over to give me an estimate. The man was very nice and had a lot of information to share with me about my ideas. We took measurements, talked paint & carpet colors, and came up with two plans of attack: Plan A (my preferred design) and Plan B (in case the first one was not doable). He left an hour or so later saying that he’d email me the estimate and let me know when the job could be done.

It took over a week, but finally I got his estimate. To put it mildly, let me just say that I was shocked. Stunned would be more like it. Plan B came in at $4,000.00 while Plan A (the one I really wanted) came in at close to $8,000.00! For paint! And carpet! In a very tiny room! With hardly any funky corners or odd cut-outs!

I think not.

Once again, Rob came to my rescue. He agreed with me that there was no way in h*** I would be hiring a contractor to do the work for those prices, and assured me that he & I could do the work ourselves. Well, except for the carpet. He doesn’t know how to do carpet, so we’ll just shampoo the existing carpet really well and call it good. The rest of the work is definitely do-able with minimal effort.

We even came up with a cool design for the ceiling, since I won’t be getting my Plan A design. We’ll call this Plan C, I guess. I’m happy with it; it will look very cool once we’ve finished it.

We’ve made a start at it already. He and I bought paint, painting supplies, and window blinds the other day. He got started on pulling off the trim, and I plan on taking the nails out tonight so that I can sand & paint them over the weekend.

Funny story with the blinds: we’re at the store, wandering the aisles to see what we might need to get our job done. We don’t have a cart, so he’s just carrying the blinds in his hands. We end up at the trim & molding section and he sets the blinds down so he can look at the various trim available. Not 5 minutes later, we turn around and discover that my blinds are gone! Our first thought was that a clerk had restocked them back in their “proper” place – but no, they said they hadn’t done that. So what the…? We walk up and down the aisles again, and eventually find them = in a cart, in a random aisle, just sitting there innocently with no one around. So we take the blinds back, and take the cart too.

So there!