Vacation and a Visitor

If you read our blog weekly you know we missed last week to spend some time with a very important guest, Scott's mom!

Our vacation (at home) involved quality time, beach days, plenty of pool time, catching up on sleep (there were NAPS! Glorious naps!), reading (for me), shopping, and boating. We had an absolute blast and it was great to carch up, and take a week off of work to just relax with great company!

In our adventures Donna bought us the cutest sign for the lanai in a little artsy shop in Matlacha.

This weekend we eased back into work. We ended last week in a mad dash to try to get the second guest room floors done, but we just ran our of time. It was less than 24 hours before Donna would land here when we decided to spare ourselves the frustration and pressure of trying to get them down, knowing that regardless, the room wouldn't be in use for a while.

We did manage to finished painting and re-assembling our bed frame, it looks great in our room!

We also hung the macrame I made while we lived at the apartment. I love the cream rope with the green wall.

We could've jumped back in to doing the floors in the second guestroom, but decided to tackle a smaller project first. We built a shoe cabinet for the nook in the entry way.

We've accumulated a ton of scrap wood from all of our projects and I made it my mission to build this cabinet with wood we had on hand. It took some ingenuity, re-configuring, and some compromise, but we got it done!

We had the wood, paint, and most of the screws we needed on hand, we just had to buy 4 hinges, two magnetic latches, the knobs, and screws for the knobs. We bought a pack of knobs, which was cheaper than buying individually, and we'll have extras, so our total cost was under $30 (half was knobs). Not too bad! It's not quite up to Scott's standards (the exterior frame is wood, the "drawers" are mdf, he would've preferred it matched), but I think it's cute and will serve it's purpose.

I had to fill a hole where we drilled in the wrong place for a knob, so that's drying, will get sanded and painted, then it'll be ready to attach to the wall. The cabinet only has two from legs, the back is attached to the wall so it takes up as little space as possible.

In between drying time on the cabinet we finished painting the nook and adding trim. I still need to sand and paint the trim as well, but it is looking great! The wires you see are to the router and modem that we pulled down so we could paint, but they get attached in high in the nook (and have their own dedicated outlet) so you won't see them.

To say we were slow going getting back into working would be an understatement. We took many, well-deserved, breaks this weekend for Scott to fish, me to read, and the two of us to just veg out. In one of our breaks we went outside to see ten or more manatees playing in the canal. I took a ton of videos, but below are a couple of my favorites.

Tomorrow it's back to normal after 11 days off, I'm hoping I haven't completely forgotten how to work :)