I took a vacation last week, but I didn't go anywhere. I stayed home and stripped paint off the wood in my dining room for 8 hours a day. A colleague this morning e-mailed, "so you're back at work to rest?"

Exactly.

If you want to see pictures of the progress, check out my Flickr pages. We've finished the west and south walls. Those were the easy ones. I still have the windows to the sunroom and the built-in buffet. Those are going to be a pain.

I am doing something I've never done before: Taking a week off of work to work on a home project! So far it's not going as planned: I've been sleeping until noon :)

But today I finally got up at 9 a.m. and soon will hit the dining room for day two of stripping the paint off the wood trim and wainscotting.

I'm attaching lots of pictures here since lots of people want to see how the progress is going. I finished the west wall yesterday -- the same wall I've been working on during weekends and after work for the past three weeks. Today I move on to the south wall - which includes the giant archway to the living room.

I'm listening to music from my iPod as I work, alphabetically. Yesterday it was Abba, Aerosmith and Alyson Krause. As I finished up, the Allman Brothers had just begun -- Eat a Peach! So that is how I will start off today.

Also, thanks to my roomie Paula and friend Ginny, two other corners of the room are coming along nicely! Thanks girls!