I had the day off today. I work longer hours for nine days and have a have a “pass day” off every other week. My past days are usually Fridays, but since I had two meetings I needed to attend last Friday, I moved it to today.

Since I had the day off, I scheduled a 7:15 AM 25,000 mile car maintenance and check up for this morning at my car dealership. That all went smoothly, then I ran to the bank, the grocery store, and the hardware store to pick up paint, paint supplies, and a new flag holder.

I spent the day repainting our front door and our garage door (that goes from the living room to the garage.) 

The front door was a dark green (that looked black) on the outsude. That was the color it was when we moved in, and I’ve always hated it. Plus the color had chipped off in spots and looked awful. 

Here’s a picture of the outside of  our front door from December 2016.

The inside of the front door and the living room side of the garage door were painted alternate colors of brown, the same two colors of brown on our living room walls. (We have three walls that are coffee mocha, and the fireplace wall is a chocolate brown.) 

I forgot to take “before” pictures, but I found some (poor) pictures of the doors with their old colors (and old curtain.) 

The one on the left is the garage door. The one on the right is the front door. And, yes, I actually thought this was a great idea and looked good when I first did it. I have obviously changed my mind, since.

After I painted both doors, inside and out, I had to wait several hours for them to dry so I could close them again. Fortunately, it was a very warm, non-humid day, so the dried in about four hours.

Because I am a bit of a messy painter, despite my best efforts, I had a lot of cleanup to do, including scraping off the paint that I got on all the little window panes on the doors while painting the gridded trim.  It took me a long time, and I started pooping out, so I only finished the front door tonight (I did that one first, since that’s the one that can be seen from the road.) I will have to finish the garage door tomorrow. I was way too tired and sore to keep going.

The last project was to put up the new flag holder on the porch in front of our main entryway and move the rainbow flag. We have two front doors, but we never use the one that’s off to the left of the front of our house for two reasons: The main front door has a large stepped porch and is connected to our drive, so it is closer and more accessible when you park in our driveway. The other front door has no path leading to it, and it is incredibly difficult to open and close. However, that’s where the flag holder was when we moved in, so we have had our rainbow flag flying in front of our house, in that spot, since the day we moved in.  The only time it’s not there is when we either replace it with the American flag for certain holidays, or when we take it down because we’re having a very strong wind or rain storm.

Although it is quite visible from the street,  in that spot, in the winter and spring, once the two bushes in front of it are in full bloom in the summer, you can’t see the flag from the road, only from our front door looking to your right/left (depending on whether you’re entering or as an exiting) and that was just not working for me. 

This is the previous location of the rainbow flag, which you can see perfectly before the bushes are in full bloom.

This is how it looks from the road when the bushes are in full bloom. Hence, you see my dissatisfaction with this location.

I didn’t want to remove the other flag holder and move it, because sometimes I want the flag over there, especially during the winter holidays when we have decorations up on the front of our house. So I installed the new flag holder as my final project today, and moved the flag over.

This is what the front door looks like now with the rainbow flag moved.

Much better, don’t you agree?

This is what the inside of the door looks like now

It’s hard to see it clearly with the daylight coming through, but these are the new curtains my BF Jim sewed for me this past weekend, that match our living room drapes.

Pretty cool, huh?

So, all in all, it was a pretty freaking productive day. I am paying for it a little bit tonight, because I am incredibly sore, and extremely exhausted. I’ve been running on only scrambled eggs (breakfast,) a small bowl of zucchini (lunch,) and a  cup of chicken bouillon and some applesauce. dinner.) 

I suspect Work is going to be a bit of a challenge tomorrow, but you certainly can’t accuse me of being a lazy-bear today!