Sunday began with a little well-deserved sleeping in.  I got up around 7-7:30 and plopped myself down next to Kyle on the couch.  Today we were making a run to Lowes with our various gift cards that we had been given for Christmas, birthdays, and a couple that I received for being awesome from my health insurance company.  So we started our list.  We needed to get almost a dozen sheets of drywall to finish the guest room and the closet, some drywall mud, tape, a light for the closet, and I wanted to look for a mirror or medicine cabinet for our bathroom upstairs.

The weather wasn't looking all that promising, with showers in the forecast it was going to be quite a gamble to try to haul drywall from Lowes back to our house (a good 40 minute drive) without getting it soaked.  We loaded up a tarp and some ropes, just in case, and headed out.  First stop was Jana's in Jeffersonville where they make the best donuts in the world, for some breakfast.  I can honestly say we only picked up some breakfast sandwiches, no donuts this time...it was a serious test of will as they were the first thing I could smell when we stepped inside.  But, with breakfast in hand, and a full gas tank in the truck, we departed.

Of course, along the way the rain started up.

We got to Lowes and grabbed a couple of their big carts.  I was so excited to see the lack of cars in their parking lot, I almost always have an anxiety attack at Lowes with the quantity of people that are always there.  But we arrived and we probably only saw half a dozen customers the whole time.  We stopped by the drywall aisle to get that out of the way first.  Yes, it was raining, but if we didn't get the drywall we wouldn't be able to get much work done. 

Loading up drywall is my second least favorite home-improvement activity (first belongs to running drain pipes...serious pain in the butt that one).  While there, we picked up bucket # 1,002 of sheetrock mud (that calculation is a little overexaggerated, by the way), some seam tape, and another box of sheetrock screws.  We stopped over in the lighting department to grab an inexpensive wall sconce (I believe it was $17 or something like that) and then headed over to the vanity area to look for a mirror for our bathroom.  We found a nice big medicine cabinet, a little more than we were expecting to spend at $108 but what the heck.  So we headed back to where we left our cart of sheetrock to check out.

Along the way we just couldn't help but think we were forgetting something.  Trips to Lowes always take no less than an hour, and we hadn't even gotten frustrated yet...so something wasn't quite right here.  We stopped to look at router bits for Kyle's new toy that his lovely wife gave him for Christmas, and tried to find some new cartridges for our ventilators (no luck), but nope, couldn't find anything else we needed.  So we headed over to see what the damage was.  Ten sheets of drywall, mud, tape, screws, a wall sconce, medicine cabinet, oh and a couple switch plates came up to $220.  I did my happy dance a bit as I handed over our gift cards- which brought our grand total up to (drumroll please) ZERO!!  WOO HOO!

Thats right folks.  We walked out of there with our goodies with $18 left on one of our gift cards.  I couldn't help but smile as we started loading the sheetrock into the truck.  Of course, after getting the first pair into the bed, I stopped smiling...but hey, thats ok, at least I didn't spend any money on it.  We tied it all down, swaddled in layers of tarp and plastic provided by Lowes, and headed home.  Of course, by the time we got halfway there we were having some serious plastic malfunctions and had to pull over to resecure, as best we could, the protective barrier between our new wall and the persistent precipitation.  To no avail, another ten minutes down the road the plastic pulled up into all the wrong places, leaving the top sheet of our drywall exposed.  Whatever, another ten minutes to get home, there was just nothing to be done with it- it wasn't really raining all that hard afterall- more of just a heavy sprinkle.

We got home, and unloaded the drywall (yippy) into our workshop and headed into the house for some leftover chicken soup.  I was exhausted and it wasn't even noon yet.  We still had a long day of drywalling ahead of us.  But I'll get into that tomorrow.