Normal ?

It has been quite the day. I woke up early, but ended up taking a nap mid morning, which almost caused us to miss a showing...

I let Daniel sleep in because he stayed up until 2 a.m. changing out a CV joint on the Subaru. While I waited for him to get up, I enjoyed some time in the hammock with Sophie. While outside, I found a tic on Sophie {first of the season}. I immediately took her inside to remove the little sucker. In my rush to deal with the tic I left my cell phone on the hammock...

During the tic incident, Daniel got up. Then we had breakfast together and I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 10:45 a.m. and checked my email to find one follow-up email from our realtor and another requesting a showing from 11a.m. to 1p.m.

Since it was almost 11, this put me into a bit of a tailspin. To top it off, I could NOT FIND MY PHONE. We ran around getting the house ready and it dawned on me that the phone might be on the hammock. We managed to leave our house by 11:30 a.m., just as the people showed up.

Incidentally, this was a THIRD showing. A young single female {approximately our age} who was bringing her mom by. We later found out that this buyer was taking her mother to look at six {very different} houses today... I don't know if that bodes well for us. 

Yesterday we had a SECOND showing by a single male {approximately our age}. We are praying something pans out soon, as we are anxious to wrap this up.

This afternoon our garage doors were replaced - we ordered doors without windows, but they showed up with windows. We are only paying for ones without, so that worked out to our advantage.

Dinner was a quick run to Chick-fil-a followed by Lowes then the dollar movies. Afterwards we went back to Lowes {and Starbucks for me} then to our friends {Brett & Sally} to visit and pick up some stuff for Daniel to take back to Tennessee. Right now Daniel is fixing a small thing with the garage doors and I am doing his laundry. 

I am wondering when our lives will return to normal and what that kind of normal will look like...

Nothing Special

Today was a generic Friday. Daniel slept in because he hasn't been feeling that great. I accidentally grabbed his phone when I left for the Y this morning so we had the wrong phones all day.

He came home around lunch time and we just chilled all day. We ran out to catch the $1 Theater matinee of Live Free or Die Hard (the Bruce Willis movie). It was typical Die Hard movie, but we enjoyed the action... esp Daniel.

After the movie we grabbed dinner and then a stop at Lowe's - what week would be complete for us without a trip to Lowe's???

Lowe's Mega Shopping Trip

We completed our mega shopping trip to Lowe's in just under 3 hours - this includes time to shop, go through the check out and load all of our goods into 2 trucks (we borrowed a truck from a friend and took our trusty Pathfinder).

To prepare for such large expenditures of money (especially if you are married to Daniel Moore) we had to do a lot of recon work - we probably spent at least 10 hours scoping out what we needed to buy, taking inventory of what we currently own and doing a lot of measuring of rooms in our house to make sure we had the right amounts of base board and crown molding.

Though I HATE spending extra time in Lowe's than I perceive to be necessary, it does make our actual shopping trip well organized and uneventful. This is our second large trip like this and we always get lots of curious stares - after all we had 3 huge Lowe's carts for the 2 of us to lug around...

Anyways, thanks to our 10% OFF coupon, we saved roughly $200. We have made a pretty sizable investment into our house in the last 2 years (at least sizable to us). We are always blown away when we read magazine articles or books that state approximate costs of renovations - since we are doing all of the work ourselves, our budgets are always WAY LOWER than anything we have read regarding budget estimates.

The hardest part of these shopping trips is the loading and unloading. We got off easy this time as a Lowe's employee helped the 2 of us load everything. Let me tell you drywall and cement board are not light items and we had 10 of each! Unloading at home was even more difficult b/c we had to find places for everything which involved some reorganizing of our basement.

Overall it was a successful trip and we have everything we need to finish installing baseboard and crown molding in the entire main level of our house as well as everything for the master bathroom renovation.

75% Discount At Lowe's

First of all I am annoyed b/c I just wrote my whole note and I lost it!!! So here goes again...

Daniel and I have been finalzing our mega shopping list for Lowe's. We have a 10% off coupon and if you use your Lowe's card for purchases this weekend you get 0% interest for 12 months. I know that this is not the Dave Ramsey way, however we are pumping equity into our house and since we are doing all of the work ourselves we will eventually recoup the investment.

Anyways on to the story of the evening... tonight we were on our way to Barnes & Noble and decided to make a stop at a Lowe's that we normally do not go to b/c we wanted to make sure we were both happy with the tile selection for the master bathroom. While there, we swung by the bathroom section and noticed that they had the vanity and mirror we had been eyeing on sale marked down from $148 to $42!!!

We were really excited about this and decided to go ahead and make the purchase tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow b/c our normal Lowe's was selling the same thing for $84. We were soon disappointed to find out that this store did not have any of our vanities in stock, but another store across town did.

So we hightailed it across town and found both the vanity and the mirror. However they had different prices and would cost $84 and $50 instead of $42 and $25. We decided the price was still good, but Daniel stopped by customer service just to see if they would give us a deal.

The customer service guy was emphatic that all of the stores were different and that he couldnt give us the cheaper price but he agreed to call Lowe's corporate HQ just to see. After being on hold for some time, he got of the phone and incredulously told us that someone at HQ must be smoking crack b/c even though several stores had the item on back order, they said to go ahead and give us the discounted prices! So instead of paying the original price of $250 for both items, we only paid $84!!!

We only had one small problem... we were in the Altima instead of the Pathfinder b/c we were not planning on making any big purchases tonight. The box that the vanity was in would not fit in our car. We had to take everything out of the box and put the vanity bottom in the front seat, the vanity drawer in the back seat with me and the granite counter top and the mirror in the trunk! Daniel broke down the box with his pocket knife and shoved it into the back seat with me! This kind of reminded me of when I was in college and me and my siblings bought my parents a TV for Christmas one year. It would not fit in the car so we had to take it out of the box in the parking lot. It still would not fit into my car so I had to call Daniel to come pick it up in my parents mini van!!!

We need to just start driving our Pathfinder any time we have the inkling to go to Lowe's or Home Depot!