A fire, seeing a little red and other great tales of our week....

So I've been working on a little project lately. Those of you who read my post about Jakey remember that I spent the evening before his doctors appointment cleaning under my bed and re-arranging the furniture. Well it inspired me to re-decorate the bedroom. I'm leaving behind the barely pulled together look of Dan River Florals, white frames and basically a very un-inspired look that my room used to sport, to the new fabulous look of black and red.

A few things remain the same. The walls are still beige. (Baslam beige for those of you who need to know). I will be keeping the wall with "All because two people fell in love" surrounded by black and whites I"ve done of the family. The frames however will be changed to black. I've re-stained the bed black, a smelly yet satisfying task. Thanks to Susan I've found the perfect duvet cover at IKEA, red with white funky flowers. The furniture basically is all black, and I"ll be changing the light fixture to a hanging light. We're going for a more romantic look. It's coming together fabulously! I'll post some pictures soon.

Along with home improvement projects, we have recently ended the "used washing machine" era of our lives after a brain numbing encounter with the manager at USA appliance. Just a word on USA Appliance...think to yourself a dirty warehouse that at any moment you expect to see a three legged dog chasing a rat...you are thinking of USA Appliance! We, in the spirit of being frugal (aka cheap) decided upon the death of our old washer (also from USA Appliance) that we would give them another shot. This decision was also based on our cash only theories as well. Needless to say, when that washer died after 3 months, I looked Brian squarely in the eye and told him very firmly that "our" next decision on where to buy a washer was Lowes. He looked right back and said meekly..."ok honey, let's go look today". We are now the proud owners of a beautiful, working, quiet, large NEW washing machine. We were soothed from the sting of paying cash for such a purchase by telling ourselves our faithful dryer would probably last another 6 months or so. And we went on our merry way.

Two weeks later (last week) a certain smell was emitting from our dryer. "Shucks!" I thought, "we've probably only got 2 months". I kept on dryin. The next morning I had clothes in the dryer, and was reading to Jake when he looks at me and says"mommy, that smell is getting worse". I head down to the laundry room to see what's up. The first clue was that our basement was very warm. This doesn't happen when some idiot puts marble flooring in a sub-terrain hallway. the second clue was definatly the smell......burning electrical things. The laundry room to my best guess was about 350 degrees, since the warmth was about that of opening the oven when baking cookies. I open the dryer and to my great surprise find yellow and orange flames visible thru the vents in the back. I run upstairs while yelling for Brian (who was getting in the shower) the dryer is on fire! I grab the extinguisher and head down stairs. The fire alarm is going off and here comes my husband in his birthday suit wrapping up in a towel to come be my own personal fire fighter. As unhappy as I am to replace my dryer so soon after replacing the washer, the amusement I got out of the situation was well worth it!