Baseboards Are Not My Friend

We are in love with our local hardware store called Sutherlands.  They have a Ladies Night once a year where everything in the store is 20% off and the store is filled with vendors trying to sell various products.  We like to stock up on items that we know we will need whenever this sale is going on.  Unlucky for me, Matt was gone on a business trip when they had this sale this past year.  This left me all by my lonesome picking up tons of tools and products.  Let me tell you, being a young girl by myself in a hardware store, I got plenty of weird looks by vendors.  On the bright side none of the vendors even bothered to talk to me since they figured ‘what could a young girl like that know about renovations?’ HA – little did they know!  That left me with my huge list of items to pick up and no distractions.

Our big buy this past year was to buy new baseboards for our entire house.  All the baseboards in our house had ~4 layers of paint that were in rough shape with globs of paint dripped on them and lots of scratches and nicks.  Since there was nothing special about the baseboards in the house, we decided to buy brand new.  *Although, at first, I fought Matt saying I wanted to save the baseboards and strip them down to the original conditions.  I quickly changed my mind when he showed me how much of a time waster that would be (not to mention lead paint!).*   So, my task was to pick up all these baseboards - I didn’t see a problem with this at first, but, oh boy, was I in for a treat.  I started to get nervous as I was picking out 12’ long baseboards into my cart with one of the store associates, thinking to myself ‘these things are awkward and heavy when I’m just picking them up one at a time, and I have to bring almost 30 into our house by myself!’  Loading them up into my truck wasn’t too bad as the store loaders helped.  Then I got into my car and started panicking: ‘Oh crap, how am I going to get these into the house!? I wish I could just leave them in my truck but I have to go to work in the morning… Call in sick? Nah.’  This was my sight: 

It was pitch black and I decided to tackle this head on.  I overzealously thought to myself ‘I can carry 4 at a time who cares that they are only more than double my height’. I completely wiped out (butt on the ground) just trying to get them into our front door...  I still had to maneuver them through the entry way, living room, and into the dining room.  Next trip I tried 3 at a time and was still wobbling all over the place.  I finally wised up and decided to tackle 2 at a time which seemed to work.  It only took me about an hour… but finally they were all sitting in our living room.  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. 

Lesson learned: all project are easier with 2 sets of hands.  I need to remember not to take Matt for granted even with such easy tasks! 

Just for fun this is the difference between the old basboards (left) and new baseboards (right):

The finished dining room project can be seen at 50 Shades of Gray - okay maybe like 4 or 5.