Weekend of Extremes

I had a great weekend and I hope you did as well. It was a weekend of extremes when I look back on it now. Not in "good" vs. "bad" type of extremes, but one that really shows a contrast on the materialistic side of life.

I spent Friday night and all day on Saturday at the ABCCM Women's Shelter with a bunch of my good friends from my BFG (Bible Fellowship Group). We really had a great time completely renovating one of the rooms there. What was so impressive was how so many things came together to provide us with the materials to redo the entire room. Nick Ragle of Sherwin-Williams here in Asheville donated most of the paint and painting supplies. Joe and Karen Schneider of The Carpet Barn donated the laminate hardwood flooring and Eddie and Rebecca Colley of the class donated a brand new matress. Even better, when two of the members of the class went to Lowes to buy a new ceiling fan, they saw a co-worker there and when they found out what we were doing, they donated a ceiling fan! With the donations and about $325.00 given by the class and a lot of people working, we were able to transform the room in just a little more than a day. It was great to watch everything come together over the two days. Denise Edwards, the organizer and real motivator on the project, caught several pictures of what happened. Thank you Denise for your tireless hard work and caring heart!

Jeremy Heiny, in orange, and Chris Angel work on getting the chair rail and floorboards in place.

Jeremy is an extremely talented and sought after trim carpenter of R. Weaver Construction and luckily he was part of our group and took care of making sure that we got that done properly.

Wow! Check out the room after the day was complete.

That picture shows the floor and all of the paint and trim work. It was so exciting to see it all come together. When we added all of the furniture and put in some new decorations that my wife ran around to just about every garage sale in Asheville seeking out, it was really impressive. You can see more pictures on Denise's Snapfish account here.

On Sunday, Laura and I experienced the other extreme. The life of luxury lived by George Vanderbilt at the Biltmore House. We had a great lunch at the Stable Cafe next to the house and did get to see some of the grounds before it started pouring the rain. Fortunately we did get season passes, so we will be going back to get some more pictures throughout the year. Here are some that we captured yesterday.

One of the lions that guard the front door to the house

View from the left side of the house

View of the house from the Lagoon

It was a lot of fun, but I am looking very foward to being able to hang out on a nice sunny afternoon on the grounds this summer again. There will certainly be more pictures to come then!