Shawn's New Toy

We were hoping to be really productive today. One of our major things on the to-do list was to do a little more painting. However, we realized that we had the wrong paint, so Shawn headed off to Lowe's.

He did come home with more paint. And some bags for our leaves. And a new toy.

Since before we closed on the house, we've been keeping our eye on lawnmowers. Although we've had lots of people assure us that "now is a great time to buy a lawnmower," we really hadn't been seeing any good deals. But when Shawn went to Lowe's this afternoon, he found that the mowers had finally been put on a good sale! He called to let me know about it, and I checked the reviews online. People have had a lot of good things to say about this model, and when it was all said and done, we got it for less than half price. I'd say that's a good deal. :-)

Domestic Saturday

This was our first Saturday as homeowners...and we definitely dived right in to the "domestic" activities! Well, I will admit that we did sleep in first. But then we went grocery shopping together (I don't normally do this on Saturdays, so Shawn usually doesn't go with me...but I hadn't gotten around to it yet this week). There's a Safeway less than half a mile from our house, so that's nice!

We picked up a carpet cleaner while we were at Safeway. Once we got back to the house, I actually went out to lunch with a friend of mine (at the Applebee's that's also less than half a mile from our house!), while Shawn stayed home to get started on the carpet cleaning. He said that our power actually went out for a little while, but he did already have one room done by the time I got home. As I'm typing this, we've gotten 3 of the four bedrooms done, and the downstairs family room. Our plan is to do the living room and the hallway right before we go to bed tonight, and then we'll do our master bedroom after we get up in the morning. Here's Shawn cleaning the office/guest room.

One thing that we really love about this neighborhood is our friendly neighbors! Shawn met a neighbor while he was getting the mail this afternoon (about 8 mailboxes are all together, right across the street from our house). This neighbor, Jim, let Shawn borrow his lawnmower! So Shawn mowed our lawn this afternoon. It was definitely a job that desperately needed to be done!
While Shawn mowed the lawn, I actually cleaned out the car. It's so nice to have a driveway to do things like this in instead of dealing with an apartment complex parking lot! And some neighbors that we had met a couple weeks ago (the first weekend we had the keys) drove by...and honked and waved. Such a nice feeling!

And then....we thought we'd spend a few minutes pulling some weeds. We ended up pulling out tons of weeds from our front yard flower beds! I didn't take any pictures since we were losing the sunlight, but it looks so much better! I'll take pictures tomorrow. Our next door neighbors also came over and introduced themselves while we were weeding. I had met the mom, Wendy, earlier, but her husband, Mike, and their daughter came over, too. He made the mistake of telling us that he's a contractor.....what a handy neighbor to have! :-) He's also offered to let us borrow some of his lawn stuff (like a trimmer) until we have the time and finances to buy our own!

So...that was our Saturday!