Little Updates

I've been out of touch, but the big dramatic improvements (except the long-awaited carpet) are pretty much over, and the small, incremental changes we've been making just haven't seemed blog-worthy.

For instance: last night we installed a paper towel holder, partially fixed the kitchen fluorescent light, installed the kitchen clock, and broke that weird little over-the-door fixture. (Oops. Apparently, I didn't do a very good job screwing the globe back on. In my defense, it's hard to do when the fixture is over your head and you can't see what you're doing. Was ugly anyway. Now have an incontrovertible excuse for replacing it.)

See paper towel holder to the far left and clock in center, admire general cleanliness of counter-top, and note freshly mopped floor. Will be adding another mug rack tonight!

This morning I cleaned and installed our old kitchen garbage can, put another coat of paint on the bathroom shutters, and put away some more kitchen clutter. The worst of it is, in a photograph it doesn't really look much different from the photo I posted 2 weeks ago. You'll have to trust me when I say that in person it looks much more spacious, organized, and attractive.

In the living room, we finally upgraded to an actual bed instead of the sofa bed. Yay real mattress! As you can see, we also moved in my dresser. I'm so comfortable living in the den, I'm not really sure why we should bother moving all of our chattel into the master bed once the carpet arrives. Perhaps because our bedspread clashes with the sofa? On the other hand, the blue accents on the headboard do match the tape on my "window treatments."


Here's the view of our front porch from the living room. Nice, no? Funnily enough, the driveway and sidewalks are arranged in such a way that no one ever uses our front door, however attractive it may be. The previous tenants were so comfortable with this arrangement, that when they installed the house's 1 doorbell, they chose to put it on the kitchen door instead of the front door.

Front porch as seen from living room

Front porch as seen from the street.

Matt put about half of our potted plants on the front porch, which I think makes it look wonderfully lush and verdant. I have been resisting major painting projects (like finishing the master bath), but here you can see evidence of one of my smaller jobs, painting the bathroom's interior shutters. A job, by the way, that the vengeful gods could have easily bestowed as a fitting punishment on Tantalus or Sisyphus. It's a painstaking, slow, sort of a task, and the end result looks depressingly glumpy and amateurish. They're such tight, crowded surfaces that every brushstroke leaves blobs and drops all over adjacent pieces, and when you clean those pieces up, you scrape the paint you just applied to the first surface or spread more blobs elsewhere. It's the sort of time-consuming, fiddly work only a bonsai cultivator or rubix-cube protegy could stomach.

The much-hyped carpet is to be installed Monday, by the way. Huzzah! Carpet!