Home improvement?

*Warning: This post is not exactly about being a parent. I mean, the kids' comfort factors in here, but it's not the main purpose of the post.*

Thanks to my incredibly bad math skills, I found out that I had a bunch of vacation days left over that I have to use by Nov. 5.

Whoopie! I thought. Let's get cracking on painting over that heinous blue-and-pink-diamond-esque-patterned wallpaper on my bedroom wall and ripping up that other-shades-of-blue-and-pink-randomly-patterned rug off my bedroom floor.

Except it's never that easy, is it?

Five days and five trips to Home Depot and Lowe's later, we've got an exposed 114-year-old wood floor that might not be able to be refurbished; painted plaster walls that look like we used a faux finish when, in fact, it's just barely hiding all the crazy crap the previous people in our house did to them; and further proof that the entire electrical system in our house needs to be rerun before the place burns down.

Yippee. Five days off.

I was almost ready to come back to work today.