I should have asked for flowers.

The weekend before Mother's Day, I was heading out of town to Utah for Kelsey's bridal shower.  Before I left, Steve asked me what I wanted for Mother's Day.  I told him that I would be happy if he pressure washed the white fence and slapped up a fresh coat of white paint for the summer.  (it was looking a little grungy).  Steve asked if I would rather have my car cleaned and some weeds pulled.  NOPE.  The fence should be an easy project and boy will it look better with a fresh coat of paint.  So, we agreed.  Happy Mother's Day to me with a fence project on the horizon.  (All this was communicated by text messages -  they were not quite as animated, but you get the picture).

On Friday night, Kels and I hopped on a plane to Utah with baby Evan in tow.  I was panicked about how the plane ride would go, but was pleasently surprised as he slept the whole ride.  In fact, he snuggled in for a nice nap right as the engines started and didn't wake up until we found our luggage in good ole' SLC!  On a side note (you know how I love a good side note...) after I was gone, Steve contacted his dad about the fence project and boy was I wrong to believe this would be an easy job...

As they started pressure washing the fence, paint started flaking off.  Lots of paint.  And what comes with flakey paint?  Well, the need to scrape and sand the rest of the fence of course!  On Mother's Day, I returned to Seattle to find Steve, Bob, and Kathi (YES... she was outside with a scraper and gloves working on my fence for her mother's day.  Totally unacceptable!)  Turns out, my small, little, one day project had turned into quite the job!  They had started working on it on Sat and kept working on it on Sunday.  They kept working on Thurs of the following week (when Bob came down in the middle of the day to keep chipping away paint), and kept working on Friday and Sat until Bob had to head back home.  Steve got up early on Sunday to work on it before the U-District Street Festival and before the next week's predicted rain started.  At this point, we have a washed, sanded, scraped, scraped, brushed, scraped, and primed fence.  I have to admit, it looks way better than I had even hoped and I can only imagine how fancy it will look when it actually gets the fresh coat of paint I had been hoping for!