Finished! (Almost)

What a productive weekend! Saturday morning started with a trip to the paint store - We finished up the picture frame molding and then started painting. Two days later, we're so close to being finished and it looks great (if I do say so myself)! We decided at the last minute to replace our heating vents in the wall instead of just painting over them - only to find out that the new intake vent is slightly bigger than the original - DOH! Which means we need to get a small hand saw and trim one piece of molding...or, rip that piece off the wall and recut, which we're hoping to avoid. I'm so happy with how it turned out!

We did manage to fit in some fun in between our hard work - We kicked off the weekend with happy hour on Friday to celebrate my friend, Chris's 30th birthday. On Saturday we trekked out to Fairfax to go to Wal-Mart and Costco - and for dinner at Tony's Pizza (so good!). We headed over to Chuck & Kristen's Saturday night to check out the pictures from their three week trip to Africa. It was amazing how up-close they were to so many incredible animals - Great pictures!

Check out our new dining room...

Work In Progress

The DeMarco's next calling: Carpentry. Well, not quite, but over the weekend Frank & I started on our little dining project undertaking. We borrowed a miter saw to cut the picture frame molding and got it almost all up this weekend. We have a few more pieces to cut and put up, a few gaps to fill - and then it's on to painting! I have to say that I am extremely impressed with our work - And especially by the fact that we managed all of this with ZERO incidents! No spats or major mess ups (I hope I didn't just jinx us!). Here's a look of our work in progress...

Happy Valentime's Day!

Yes, I know I spelled Valentine's wrong...It used to always crack me up that Frank pronounced Valentine's as "Valentime's" but he recently (within the last year or two) started saying it correctly and I have to admit that I miss the old way!

Frank planned a weekend of Valentime's events for us - Friday night we had dinner at Kinkead's downtown, where the appetizers and desserts were delicious but the main courses just so-so. On Saturday, we had breakfast in bed where I was surprised with a beautiful diamond heart pennant necklace! Our french toast was followed by some romantic house work ;) - Since we had been gone the past two weekends, the house was in need of some cleaning! To make the day even more romantic, we made a trip to Home Depot to get supplies for the small dining room project that we're undertaking. (We're putting up picture frame molding under the chair rail and then doing some painting.) Frank planned for us to have dinner in on Saturday, so we both chipped in to make Chicken Parm - Topped off with an evening at the movies - Frank took me to see Confessions of a Shopaholic! I loved the Shopaholic book series and the movie proved to follow the original book pretty closely from what I remember. It was really cute - and Frank even admitted that it wasn't as torturous as he'd envisioned. I hope everyone else also had a Happy Valentime's Day! ;)

Surprise!

Last weekend Rachel and I made a last minute trip to Blacksburg to surprise Kristy - We all were in need of some girl QT - and it proved to do just the trick! We were only there for one night and decided to keep it low key. We raided the grocery store for snacks (while all of the young college kids were out on Saturday night stocking up on beer, our basket was full of junk food!) and stayed in to play games and talk. It had been almost two months since we'd last seen Domenic - He's growing so fast! Here are some pics of the little guy - Check out those big blue eyes!

Weekend with our Nieces

Frank & I spent the last weekend in January on Long Island to meet our new niece, Emma Grace. We spent most of our time hanging out at Danielle's house playing with Kate and holding Emma as much as we could. Emma is precious - and Kate is as cute as ever. We had a nice, relaxing weekend with the girls (and the rest of the family, too).