The Bathroom is Done!

I have been wanting to decorate the bathroom in our house for quite a while, but for some reason never did. Well, honestly, I have come to learn that decorating my house is a little scary to me. I want it to look good, like what I see in other people's, but for some reason am scared to even try. I came up with the idea of how I wanted to do it and it took me months to actually set aside the time to do it. It sounds crazy I know. What can I say? I have been called worse!

Anyway, here is the bathroom before. This is what it looked like when we bought the house.

The people we bought the house from weren't very clean and I have never been able to get all of the dirt from the seams in that board and there were some spots on the wall where the paint had faded except for where they had something hanging so you could see squares on the wall. It just looked dirty all the time and I didn't like it. I figured if I can't get rid of the dirt, I'll just paint over it!

Here is the finished product...

I am kind of proud to say that I took these pictures myself. They are from last summer when we did some hiking at Brighton with Dad and the family. I knew I wanted to hang flowers in that room and thought that it would be really fun to take them myself.

What do you think? Not too bad for a newbie, huh?

North Carolina Part 2

We picked the middle of October to go to North Carolina for a specific reason: to go the Bank of America 500 and the NASCAR Hall of Fame. I hold Lisa and Evan (mostly Evan) soley responsible for Jared's love of cars racing around a track. He never really followed NASCAR until we went to the Indy 500 with them a couple years ago. Even though that was a Formula One race and not NASCAR, ever since then he has been all about the race world.

Lisa and Evan live in Holly Springs, which is about 3 hours from NASCAR headquarters in Charlotte. We stayed in a hotel in Charlotte the night before the race. (The hotel, might I say, was something to be desired. I picked it though, which means that they won't give me that assignment anymore!)

We got up early on Saturday morning and headed to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. We were pretty much the only people there on Saturday morning at 8:00, which worked out perfectly.

The Hall of Fame is a pretty cool looking building.The corporate headquarters are just a block away.

This is the car that Jimmie Johnson won one of his championships with.

The Hall of Fame was actually really fun for all of us. It was very interactive. You got to learn what it is like to work in all the different areas of the sport. They had activities to simulate the driver, pit crew, mechanics, and broadcasters. They also had a replica of the transport trucks they use for the cars that you could walk around. 

4 Straight! These are Jimmie Johnson's trophys that he won the last 4 years. He is the only driver in NASCAR history to win the title 4 years in row. He is close this year, maybe it will be 5!

When we were done there we grabbed some lunch and then headed to the race track. There were tons of people there and lots of stuff to look at. There were all kinds of vendors giving away samples. Each driver had a big semi trailer there that they were selling merchandise out of. Let me just say, there are some NASCAR fans that will spend their whole life savings (it seemed like!) on their driver. I couldn't believe how much money people were spending. Anyway, we found the stand where they were selling Pit Passes. $100 - EACH! We talked to the people and they all but told us it was a waste of money because you don't really get to see the drivers unless you stalk them at the bathroom and the cars are kept away from the public too. Jared was totally bummed. That was what he had been looking forward too, seeing Jimmie and getting his picture taken with the car. We wondered some more and found out that the next best thing was available. Jimmie would be doing an interview for a radio station in a couple hours and they were letting people watch. We stood in our spots for over an hour, but we had a great view. There were only about 3 people in front of us.

We had really good seats. You can see the Start/Finish line wasn't too far down from us and we were straight across from Pit Road.

When we were taking this picture, Lisa had here head tilted weird. So I told her not to do that cause she had a double chin with her head like that and that she wouldn't want that for the picture. Right as I was saying that, I look up and there is a guy sitting right behind her about 2 rows up with a major double chin. He says to me "yeah, tell me about it." It was pretty funny.

Check out our friend behind us who decided to join us in our picture.

Jimmie Johnson's crew.

One of the things that we enjoy about Lisa and Evan is that they like to people-watch as much as we do. The 4 of us could make fun of people for hours and we learned this trip that a race is a great place to do this. This guy served as our entertainment for the evening. He would stand up and toast his driver, Mark Martin, every time his car would go around. They did over 300 laps that night so this guy did a lot of standing up! The problem got to be that after he had drank a number of those beers he couldn't stand up anymore. There were like 4 guys behind him that would stand up with him, making fun of him, for quite a few laps. It was pretty hilarious!

Kevin Harvick's crew.

Jamie McMurray ended up winning the race. Jimmie came in 3rd, I think. It was a long day (we left the track at about midnight and then drove 3 hours back to the house), but we had a blast!

I'm so glad that Jared finally got to go to a race and we had so much fun with Lisa and Evan.

North Carolina Part 1

Jared and I flew out to Raleigh, North Carolina to spend a week with my cousin Lisa and her awesome family. Our trip finally came. We had been planning it all summer and we were so excited!

Ensley was too! She is Lisa and Evan's 3 year old daughter and she is stinkin' cute! She left a chocolate for us on our pillow to welcome us to our room.

We spent the first day at the beach. We had to drive about 3 hours to get there, but it was worth it. We had lunch at this riverside restaraunt and then wandered around the town looking at all the little shops.

Lisa and Evan. I love these guys!

These are their kids, Will and Ensely.

She isn't a big fan of taking pictures, can you tell?

We walked around for quite a while looking for the station for this trolley. We never found it. We finally just waved him down and, luckily, the driver let us hop on.

After the trolley ride, we headed to the beach. Neither Jared or I had ever been to North Carolina before and since we were just at the Pacific Ocean in April, we were excited to see the east coast. It was beautiful. It was really cloudy and we did have to all huddle under the umbrella for about 20 minutes for a mini-downpour, but once the rain passed, we had a really good time. No one was going to go swimming at first because of the weather, but after my fish of a husband felt how warm the water was, he couldn't resist. Jared, Evan, and Ensley went swimming while Lisa, Will, and I looked for shells.

See the storm rolling in?

She wasn't very happy when Dad left her to go play in the waves with Jared. He came back for her though.

Will was very organized with his shells. Every time he found one, he would add it to the pile.

Beach Buds!

There is so much to tell about our trip, I am going to break it up into a few posts. I'll have more to share later.