To prove that we haven't gone soft, here are a few bits of incremental progress that we've made this week.
After what seems like forever, we have blinds up on all of the windows. We were waiting on the delivery of a center support bracket for that big (47-inch) picture window in the middle to finish the job and that arrived this week. Now we need to get the rest of the living room organized and start hanging some quilts!
Speaking of organization, we had been piling little-used items in the basement and after buying some cabinets and nice metal bookcases we have someplace to store this stuff. So imagine this:
inside this:
We're putting finishing touches elsewhere too. In this case we completed the toe-kick under the kitchen cabinets. It's a nice red stain that matches the front door and will match our new patio door.
Finally, we've decided where the staging area should be for our reward-muffins, a nice baking and cooling area on our cool, green counter. Looks like one of those muffins is trying to escape his fate. Guess we'll have to make an example of him to keep the others in line.
With plenty of regular life occupying our time, we haven't gotten a lot done since we last met.
One contributing factor to our lack of productivity was having to replace our patio door twice. The company that did a great job on our windows did a lousy job on the door--the smell of the exterior caulk was seeping in and nearly smoking us out of our house. Despite 90-degree temps and plenty of humidity, we had our windows open and fan blowing because any time we closed them the house would fill with the stench of Quad caulk. What surprised us more was that the company wouldn't stand by its work, so we had the lifesaver contractors who finished our basement bathroom install a new door from Home Depot.
Here's the before and after (we don't have photos of the smelly door in between). We need to stain the new wood door but have discovered that we really prefer French doors.
In other news, all but one of the vinyl and wood blinds that we showed you last time are now up throughout the house. It's made quite a difference to make this feel even more homey.
