Lumberyard and a Movie

That's probably what all of you do for a date these days, isn't it? Lumberyard, dinner, movie - pretty standard, I'd say.

Tuesday night, my dear parents came down to watch the children while Sam and I hit the local Carter's lumber looking for trim. We're replacing it in the children's bedrooms, and whatever we decide on is planned for the entire house. It's a fairly major expense overall and an important one, too, considering that this trim will be in every single room.

Although Lowe's is undoubtedly our go-to shop for late night home improvement runs, we like to support the little guy when we can. We decided to try Carter's Lumber first, just to see if we could find what we needed. They looked at us a little strangely when we walked in dressed for dinner...

... and sportin' a camera.

In the end, Carter's didn't have anything like what we wanted. Well, we tried. Sam works close to a Home Depot and he had scoped out their selection on his lunch hour. He thought there were possibly a few options to think about. So, it was off to Home Depot.

Great date so far! :)

We spent what seemed like a very long time deliberating about this and that trim. See, we're trying to choose wordwork and trim that add character to the house without making it feel completely contrived and like something just doesn't fit in. One of our biggest non-negotiables was a wider baseboard - something between 4 and 5 inches wide. The pickin's were slim. Beyond that, we're totally replacing all of the trim around the doors as well, and we needed to choose door trim that would gel with the new baseboards. Sounds simple, but it wasn't. We decided that we really needed to get a more concrete idea of what we wanted, and also some food. Wifey was getting hungry.

At Olive Garden, Sam busted out some scrap paper and we started drawing more or less what we were envisioning.

Sam was a very good sport about my camera :)

He humors me.

He even poses, too :) Isn't he a looker? Anyway, we drew it up and agreed on what we wanted. Now, making it happen? That often proves to be a different story.

At our beloved Lowe's, we decided to take advantage of the great reference books available (for sale, technically, but we just flipped through a few). Well, actually, no we didn't. We sat on the floor in an out of the way aisle and studied them like college kids. They were very useful :)

Still, after all of that, we couldn't quite make it all work with the lumber available. It eventually became clear that we were going to need a table saw to do this thing right. Sam's in the market for one now. We're also looking for crown moulding that is less than 2" wide. We were surprised that it's not readily available. The Lowe's Man recommended that we contact the cabinet department about a special order for decorative cabinet crown. That just sounds pricey, doesn't it? We're thinking we might need to head back over to Carter's and check out the crown there.

So, we didn't buy a thing - not even the book. We did head over to late showing of Julie & Julia, though. Loved the "Julia" parts, not so much the "Julie" parts. And there really was some very unnecessary crude language. We were hoping it was a good, clean fun movie. It easily could have been, but that's Hollywood for ya. Merrill Streep was great, but the overall movie was so-so in my opinion. Sam and I had a great night, though, even without buying trim. We used to joke that even our fanciest dates always ended up with a quick run to Wal-Mart. Maybe we've entered a new stage - maybe now our dates will always have that quick-run-into-Lowe's element.

As long as I'm with my man, it's all the same :)