Bridget and I attended Brian and Alicia’s wedding ceremony at Oheka Castle on Saturday.  Luckily the weather cleared up just in time for them to be able to have the ceremony outside overlooking the castle gardens, which was beautiful.

Here are some pictures:

You can see all of the pictures here.

Bridget and I had the chance to stay in Oheka Castle over the last weekend for Brian and Alicia’s wedding.  The castle is the second largest private residence in the US with 109,000 square feet and 127 rooms.  It was built by Otto Kahn and was recently restored by Long Island developer Gary Melius.

Here are some pictures:

You can see all of the pictures here.

Bridget and I took the day on Friday to drive around and explorer The Hamptons, since we have never been there before and were on Long Island for Brian and Alicia’s wedding.

Here are some pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here.

Bridget and I went to Brian and Alicia’s dinner for out of town guests at Long Island’s famous Louie’s Oyster Bar & Grille. It was nice to be able to spend some time with them before the wedding.

Here are some pictures that I took:

You can see all of the pictures here.

Bridget and I met up with Jen, Steve and Madeline today at Chanticleer Gardens in Wayne.  The gardens there are beautiful… just as nice as Longwood Gardens, but on a smaller scale.  And it wasn’t too crowded which was nice as well.  A storm rolled in after we were there for a bit, but I managed to get lots of good pictures before that.

I got plenty of great pictures of the Madeline:

And I got a few pictures of some pretty flowers too:

You can see all of the pictures here.

Here are some more pictures from Raegan’s first birthday party… these are ones that my dad took at the party.

You can see them all here.

Well Bridget and I have been getting ready for the baby.  One of the projects that I have been working on the last few weekends is painting the nursery.  We decided on a Gingham pattern, with larger green stripes and smaller yellow stripes, matching the colors for our bedding.

So I painted the entire room with bright white paint, because we needed this for the base and to cover up the scuffed up “builder’s grade” paint that was sprayed onto the dry wall.  We used some very high end expensive paint from Sherwin Williams from their “Green Sure” Duration Home Interior Latex paint line. We figured that the low VOC paint is a healthier and more environmentally friendly choice to make.

I noticed that when taking the tape off that some of the paint came off as well, but I touched up those spots and moved on to taping without thinking much about it.

The taping took a long time, since there were 9″ green stripes and 1″ yellow stripes all over each wall.  Once I got that done, I painted the green with a mixture of the Duration paint and a faux finish latex, and used to sponge to get the right looking texture.

Here’s what it looked like with the vertical stripes done before getting to the horizontal stripes:

Well after getting it all painted, we discovered that the colors were slightly off.  The yellow was too bright and vibrant, and the green was more lime green in color, unlike the more sage green in the bedding.  I was taking a nap after a day of painting when Bridget woke me up and said “Honey, I think we may have painted the wrong color”.  I didn’t want to admit it at first, but after a day of looking at it I realized she was right.

We decided to paint it all over again, this time just painting all of the walls the same color, the yellow that better matches our Honey Bee pattern.  Pretty much the same color yellow as on the walls here, and again with a faux finish:

So then we will also need to use a primer first on the walls to cover up the green.  But I remember how easily the paint pealed off of the wall before, so I went up to see if this would work.  To my surprise, all of the paint came off very, very easily… just came off like contact paper that wasn’t very sticky anymore.  Glad we found out now, as this paint would have never held up for very long, and we would have been trying to touch up spots constantly.  More importantly it would have been a health hazard, since the baby would have been able to peal it off and eat it very easily.

So even though we would have loved to use to more environmentally friendly “green” paint, it just isn’t up to the task, as you can see here:

Update: Well mom took the peeled off paint back to Sherwin Williams, and they said that they had never seen anything like that happen before.  They are going to give us a full refund on the price of the paint, since it didn’t perform as it should have.  We are very thankful for them to take care of it for us.

I saw one of our bunnies in the neighbor’s yard a couple of days ago.  I was able to get some pictures of it before it hopped into the brush in the back yard.

This weekend we celebrated my niece Raegan’s first birthday.  Everyone enjoyed themselves in the pool and we got a wonderful day with the weather.

Here are some of the pictures that I got:

You can see all of the pictures here.