VBS New Carpet New Paint

Remember at the beginning of the year when I said our family motto was "If we're going to do something let's do it all at once"? Well it is so true. Our craziness started when I signed Maddy up for VBS at a very large church here in Dallas. Our church doesn't do a VBS (not enough manpower I think), but I loved VBS as a kid and I wanted Maddy to get to experience it. This is the same church where she will do a Mother's Day Out program for 2 days a week this fall. So it served the dual purpose of trying to gauge if she'd do well at school in the fall at this facility. I also ended up volunteering just because I was interested to see how things worked from the inside and they were short about 100 volunteers when I signed Maddy up. It was an exhausting week for both of us but Maddy had a great time! How could she not? This VBS was loaded with Bible stories, crafts, activities such as a petting zoo, a magic show (they called it "illusions"), a train ride, playground time, and a kite flying demo. (The theme was "Look Up" so they did lots of things about the sky--airplanes, hot air balloons, kites, etc.) The stories were over the life of Jesus with the main point for the kids to take away being "No Matter What...TRUST GOD!"
It was amazing how Maddy soaked everything up. The first day she came home talking about "Jesus snoring". I thought maybe they did the story of the storm and Jesus sleeping in the boat, but they had talked about Jesus getting arrested in the garden. I guess she got the disciples snoring mixed up with what Jesus was doing. Anyway, even though she had the details mixed up  she was super excited about Jesus and talked about Jesus all day. That evening we had a lady come and do an estimate on replacing our carpet. (More about that in a minute.) While the lady was sitting on the couch preparing an estimate for us, Maddy went over and got her papers and brought them to the middle of the room and said, "Shall we tell her about Jesus? We need to tell everybody about Jesus!"
Okay so now to the carpet and all that. I'm not sure what prompted Aaron to schedule an estimate for the Monday that VBS started. I thought we were just trying to investigate and see how much money we were looking at and how what we'd saved was measuring up. We had been wanting to do laminate flooring. Affordable if we did it ourselves but no way with the price she quoted us for having it installed. We also knew that it was really impractical for us to install the flooring ourselves. We did it in Ft. Collins but we had my Dad to help some and we only had about 400 sq. feet to do and it still took us forever. We had already been thinking that carpet on the stairs and in the living area was probably a better choice anyway. So when we heard the price on the carpet that's when we knew that carpet was probably what we needed to be looking at. The lady wanted us to have them come the next day or two but we said no way. We needed to paint if we were going to get new carpet so we worked it out that they would come the next Monday and we'd get the painting done in the mean time. She had the carpet samples with her of course so I suddenly found myself actually choosing carpet that was going to be in my house. I really had not expected to do that but I ended up liking a dark brown color called "Cocoa" from what was available in the carpet in our price range.
I had already been looking at paint colors because I'd planned to a bit of painting around the house over the summer (just not during VBS) so fortunately for having to paint before carpet I was prepared. We got the paint on Wednesday and started doing trim and on Thursday a friend brought over ladders, rollers, brushes etc. for us to borrow to make the job doable. Remember that all of this is going on while Maddy and I are spending all morning at VBS and coming home exhausted. 
We got all the rooms that were being carpeted completely painted by Sunday evening. The carpet guys came Monday morning and they were really fast. It took them about 5 hours to do everything, which I thought was amazing since there were only two of them. We are still working on finishing the paint in the kitchen and the craft room so I don't have a whole lot of pics to share of how the house looks becuase it is still kind of a mess. Here is one of the living room/office/play area before they moved the furniture back in:

Anyway, it was a crazy week. My allergies kicked up because of all the dust from everything so I have been pretty sick, but it's been worth it to have the house looking so great. Our carpet was absolutely awful and embarrassing so it is really nice not to have that cringing feeling inside that people must think we are absolute pigs when they come over to our house. Hopefully we get the painting finished up in the next couple of days so we can just lay around a veg out over the weekend. I'm ready for a little R&R!