My living room didn’t make it into the Top 5 of the Vintage Revivals contest.  As the winner of the popular vote, I feel a little bit like Al Gore!  😀  The Top 5 is a fun group, though, so head over there and cast your vote for the one who deserves to win the makeover.  I can’t wait to see the results!

Although I didn’t win, I got a ton of great ideas from you guys for my monster wall, and now I have “the plan.”  However, Tom refuses to discuss “the plan” with me because he’s STILL painting our bedroom – over a week after we started.  To his credit, he’s working every single day on it after work and all day on the weekends.  He’s a perfectionist and refuses to let me help for fear I’ll screw it up.  That’s a pretty rational fear right about now, so I’m just doing my job of bringing him Diet Pepsi and telling him how awesome it looks.

I have a stack of projects 10 feet tall that I’m working on this week, so maybe I’ll focus on just one and get it finished.  But, let’s not hold our breath on that one, okay?

And that’s all the news from Lake Wobegone.  What are you up to this week?

I woke up this morning to be absolutely shocked/awed/surprised/honored/humbled/super-de-duper excited that my entry in the Vintage Revivals Room Re-Do Giveaway Contest received the MOST VOTES during open voting.  I am ever so grateful for such a truly amazing group of friends and blog readers (who I totally consider my friends).  Yesterday, I tweeted this, and I mean every single letter of it:

But, I’m lucky in more ways than one.  As I’m sitting here rallying for votes to make over my living room, others have no living room at all.  Not even 10 days ago, some of our fellow Americans across the southeast lost it all to the hand of violent storms.

It wasn’t until the day after the storms that I realized just how close to home those images I was seeing on the news hit to me.  My parents, who live in Tennessee, had a funnel cloud hover over their office.  They had absolutely no idea it was there  until eyewitnesses later told them about it, so we are ever so thankful that it never touched down.  Even more terrifying, my grandparents watched out their window as a tornado completely destroyed a neighborhood only one mile away in their small Alabama town. They don’t have a safe room or a basement – just an interior hallway in which to hide.  My aunt, uncle, and cousins also live in that same town, and they, too, came out unscathed.  I don’t remember us ever feeling quite so grateful to have been narrowly spared, yet so upset that others weren’t so lucky.

I felt kind of silly asking for votes so that my room can be beautified when others have lost so much.  But, I knew that I was going to do something special after the first round of voting was completed, and that’s what helped me make peace with my “vote for me” pleas.

In order to express my gratitude for not only the health and safety of my family but also to you guys for being so supportive of me throughout the years, I am donating 50-cents for every vote received to the American Red Cross North Alabama/Tennessee Valley Region Tornado Relief Fund (the area where my family lives).  I’m certainly not rich (far from it!), but these folks need it way more than we do.  I told my 5-year-old son about my plan while we were watching the news coverage, and he said he’d like to donate money from his piggy bank, too.  So, sweet Zack is donating a penny for every vote received.  If that doesn’t make you want to cry like it does me, his best friend showed up to school on Monday with a baggie full of pennies from HIS piggy bank.  Talk about knowing that we are raising these boys right…chills.

Anyway, I confabed with Mandi @ Vintage Revivals and she said that you guys (and the fabulous readers of House of Hepworths) racked up 398 votes for my room in the contest.  Amazing!  So, between my donation, Zack’s donation, and his BFF’s donation, the North AL/TN Valley American Red Cross will be receiving $203.53 – all because of you.

There are a few more rounds to go in the contest – the judges narrow down the Top 15 to the Top 5, and then there’s another rounding of voting after that.  I hope to be in the Top 5 and be able to harass you for more votes in a few days.  But, even if I’m not, I feel like we’ve all won today.

P.S. Congrats to my blog friends and readers who are also in the Top 15!  If I don’t win, I hope one of you will.  😀