We had a fabulous trip to SC, even if there was more work than fun - but it was absolutely wonderful to visit our good friends and some of our favorite places.
And the reason for our trip (besides desparately wanting to go back)… fixing up the ugliness of our house. Our renters (who were not allowed to paint in the first place) decided to paint some pretty interesting colors all around the house - not leaving any rooms unpainted. And not only that they used super glossy paint and oil based paint in some rooms. We had to sand down a lot of walls. And you should have seen the nail holes. Seriously, how many things can you hang on a wall??? One bedroom I counted 54 nail holes in. I could go on and on telling you the crazy things they did t0 (and stole from) the house. Here are some of the before and afters of our project:

The other super weird thing was what we found under the house. We went down into the crawl space to get some old tools and supplies we kept under there and found that the renters had converted the crawl space into a play room for their kids. Are you kidding me??? do they not realize what kinds of things live under the house? especially considering the swamp closeby. i would never dare let my kids play under the house. Our neighbors said the girls called it their “play house”:

Strange…
Besides working on the house we did have a lot of fun too. We spent some really good time with friends, ate some super good food we’ve been missing, and made a trip down to Charleston. We also went to the Labor Day parade in Chapin. They really do have better parades in the south. I’ll blog more on that tomorrow… I’m pretty tired today (Swine flu still holding strong!) Thanks everyone for making our trip so much fun! We love and miss you all so much!!!

