Well, it's been--what, four months, five months? since we started redoing our guest bathroom, and I think I'm finally ready to show it off. The delay has mostly been because I couldn't figure out what to hang on the walls, and waiting for Todd to make a new door for the medicine cabinet. 90% of the job was done ages ago!
Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures from the day we took possession of the house (December 2005.)
We replaced all the wooden--wooden! in a bathroom!--fixtures almost immediately: towel bar, TP holder, and that nasty toothbrush holder under the medicine cabinet went away and never came back. Boy, were they gross. We put in nice new nickel towel hooks, towel ring and TP holder.
In January 08, we finally got around to replacing the light fixture over the sink--I don't think I have a picture of the original, but it was one of those long strips of wood with the giant bare bulbs sticking straight out of it. Very chic.
Here you can also see the notorious ducky wall paper border that I hated so. Wow, I almost sort of miss those ducks.
Ha! No, I don't!
Finally in February we moved the guest bath to the top of our long "home improvement" list, and here's what we did:
-painted all the trim a nice crisp white
-scraped off the wallpaper
-painted the walls Laura Ashley Sage
-put in a new floor, and new white quarter-round, and sealed it all up good
-painted the vanity box white
-made new doors and drawer fronts, painted them white, and added new hinges and drawer pulls
-put in a new countertop and faucet
-replaced the mirror (because we broke the old one trying to re-mount it!)
-replaced the medicine cabinet and made a new door for it
-sewed a new shower curtain (courtesy of my mother-in-law)
Now it looks quite lovely, if I do say it myself:
You can see that the medicine cabinet door has yet to be painted...I kind of like the natural wood, but I'll probably be painting it white sometime this week, along with the doors for the master bath vanity.
The floor is a little bit more yellow-brown than I thought it would be from the sample in the store, but it's still a major improvement on what was there before. And I've been trying to find the purple bathmat that goes with the towels at Kohl's but no joy yet, so it's the brown one from the master bath for now.
It's so nice to have a room that you walk into and feel good about, isn't it? We have done so much to this house, but so often all you focus on is how much there is yet to do. It's good to look back and know that we got it done and made something ugly into something pretty.Now on to finish the master bath--we've been surrounded by paint cans and rollers and tubs of spackle in there for far too long!
Today is a very special day for my mom and dad--their 40th wedding anniversary!
Although life hasn't been quite as easy as these two kids probably thought it would be--raising three children, working multiple jobs, trying to make the money stretch, and more recently dealing with cancer and their own parents' failing health--they learned to work together and support each other, and they make a great team.They created a family and a lot of happy memories. And they are very much loved by their kids, kids-in-law, and grandkids. Hope you guys find some time to remember and celebrate this weekend! Congrats and lots of love to you both!
When I was ten or eleven, I came across a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank somewhere, and read it eagerly. I don't think I knew much about World War II or the Holocaust at that age--the story of Anne's family hiding away in a secret hiding place seemed more like an exciting adventure to me at that age.
I'll never forget the feeling I had when I reached the end of the book and read the little afterword, which said very simply that the family was caught in August 1944, and that Anne had died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945--just a few weeks before it was liberated. It felt like I'd been punched in the chest and had to catch my breath.I felt like I'd lost a friend. I still feel that way. I've re-read Anne's diary several times since then, and more recently read the revised critical edition which contains bits and pieces her father omitted from the original. Reading it as an adult, I was struck by her amazing writing skill and the places her thoughts ranged to, as she sat in that tiny nest of rooms trying to be quiet all day long, day after day. What seemed like an adventure to my child's mind, I now understood as the nightmare it really was.Today would be Anne's 80th birthday, if she had survived the war years and all the years since then. But instead she died at age 15. What a tremendous life she could have had. But she did something tremendous with the life she was given, and I'm grateful for that. After reading her diary, I developed an interest in the war, the Holocaust, and Judaism that is still part of my life today. Her words started it all, and they are such a gift.
Things are going better here this week...Todd's still walking funny, but feeling quite a bit better. Unfortunately, walking funny made him throw his back out on Saturday, so he had an extra dose of pain and misery to help him take his mind off the pain and misery that was already going on downstairs. It was truly sad. But he's doing much better now.
I have been in a vile mood for a couple of weeks--I was blaming it on hormones, but that time of the month has come and gone and I'm still vile, so I don't know what to blame it on now. Every so often, it comes crashing down on me that my life isn't at all what I want it to be, but I don't know how to make it what I want it to be--and I'm not even totally sure what exactly I do want it to be. Which makes for a vile mood.
I've been listening to Garrison Keillor read his book Pontoon on my mp3 player, and that has cheered me up a little bit, which is weird, since the book is pretty much all about death and having your life turn out not at all the way you thought it would. But he hits all those themes with a light touch, and I find myself chuckling out loud as I walk at the park or weed the flowerbeds. Oh yes, I discovered that listening to a book makes the weeding go MUCH faster. I weeded for three solid hours on Sunday and never gave it a thought. I am slow, as ever, to grasp the benefits of technology.
As of today, I've lost twelve pounds, which is a drop in the bucket but still encouraging. I'm very loosely following a diet plan in a book on controlling your blood sugar, and I'm not having nearly as many late-afternoon sugar crashes, which is excellent.
I'm working on the weight-loss in part because of the blood sugar thing, and also because I was approved for breast-reduction surgery in late July, and I'd like to get some weight off beforehand. Too bad I can't get them to carve off half my stomach while they're chopping things down to size, but the insurance company probably wouldn't go for that. So I've got to try and whittle it down by my own efforts. Darn.I thought all the increased exercise would kick up my endorphins and improve my mood, but that hasn't happened yet. But if I can't feel good, I can at least try to look good. Oh, and be healthier, too, of course. I'll try and perk myself up and come on back with something more interesting next time, promise.
My poor sweetie, what a week he's had. Tuesday he had a lipoma (fatty tumor) removed from his right arm, which involved needles (six of them? eight of them? every time he mentions it, there are more needles in the story) being jabbed into his arm. (He's had the lipoma for years-- it's not serious, it was just in an inconvenient spot.)
On Wednesday, an insurance company nurse came to do a physical and take some blood, which involved another needle in his arm.
And Friday morning, he went in for the old "snip-snip," you know, the one that when you mention it, every guy within ten miles crosses his legs reflexively...and of course, more needles were involved, and not in the arm region this time.
Todd hates needles, hates 'em, hates 'em. I think he's glad this week is over with. I think he'll be even gladder when he can walk non-bowlegged, and put the frozen peas away for good. I took this picture of him when he was unconscious from the Vicodin...he'll probably be mad, but he's just so darn cute.
On Sunday, Todd made plans to play 18 holes of golf in Williamsburg with his boss and a couple of co-workers, so I went along and dropped him off at the ritzy country club golf course, and took myself off to the antique mall.
The Williamsburg antique mall is a hit-or-miss affair--I have walked out of there with treasures before, but not often, and not cheaply. This time I found something lovely AND cheap at one of the used-book vendors' booths.
The title caught my eye, but so did the author's name, because I was pretty sure she was E. B. White's wife, which she was.
I can't overstate how much I love and admire E. B. White. If he'd only ever written Charlotte's Web, that would be reason enough to adore him, but he also spent many decades writing short essays for The New Yorker, and I have two of the published collections of these, which I dip into every now and then for a breath of sanity, humanity and perfect prose.
Katharine, his wife, is a shadowy figure in the background of many of his short pieces, but in this book we get to hear her own voice. She was an editor at The New Yorker for years, and wrote fourteen garden pieces for the magazine, which her husband collected and published in this book after her death.
He wrote the foreword for the book, describing Katharine's love for gardening even at the end of her life, and the final paragraph is typical of his careful but powerful style:
As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion [the arrival of new spring bulbs to plant]--the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
I flipped through the book, curious to hear what Katharine's writing voice sounded like, and wasn't terribly surprised to be totally charmed by this random paragraph:
I have read somewhere that no Japanese child will instinctively pick a flower, not even a very young child attracted by its bright color, because the sacredness of flowers is so deeply imbued in the culture of Japan that its children understand the blossoms are there to look at, not to pluck. Be that as it may, my observation is that Occidental children do have this instinctive desire, and I feel certain that almost every American must have a favorite childhood memory of picking flowers--dandelions on a lawn, perhaps, or daisies and buttercups in a meadow, trailing arbutus on a cold New England hillside in spring, a bunch of sweet peas in a hot July garden after admonishments from an adult to cut the stems long, or, when one had reached the age of discretion and could be trusted to choose the right rose and cut its stem correctly, a rosebud for the breakfast table.
Does anyone write that well any more? Seriously? We've lost the formal tone that used to mark professional writers in magazines and newspapers, and now we're all communicating at blogger level, which is fine for us common schmoes out here, but I miss the days when reporters and writers had--the only word I can think of is "gravitas." Like Walter Cronkite, who is always the person I think of when I hear the word "gravitas."
They chose their words carefully and you felt you could trust what they said because they'd worked hard on it, re-worked it, thought about the best words that would say exactly what they meant. Now everybody's just trying to fill cable TV space, Internet space and newspaper/magazine space (for however much longer those will be around) with words, any words, no matter how stupid, obvious, ignorant or hateful.
However, that's a rant for another day. I'm looking forward to sampling this pretty book with the foxed pages and finding out why Katharine loved to garden and how she felt about garden catalogs and lawns and different kinds of roses. The paragraph I quoted above made me smile, because a sizable percentage of the photos of me in the first four or five years of my life feature me clutching flowers in my little hand or poking through the flower garden in search of something to pick. Which I do not think endeared me to my grandfather, whose garden I believe it was, but flowers still make me very happy.
I love the title of the book, too, it's so hopeful. I know I've mentioned before my love/hate relationship with gardening, and my constant search for confidence and some sort of zen attitude toward the whole thing. Time moves onward, the plants--and weeds--grow upward. I've started to glimpse the lessons in this process, but it still eludes me most of the time.
The Random Number Generator picked Ashley as the winner of the Cottage Charm Giveaway!
So congrats, Ashley, and I'll get your package mailed out this week. And thanks to everyone who entered--there were a ton of you and I hope some of you will come back and visit from time to time. Hope everyone found some new blogs to read, too--I know I did.
Okay. When they released that Pride and Prejudice movie with Keira Knightley a few years ago, I wasn't even tempted to watch it, because for me there IS no other "P&P" besides the BBC P&P with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. None other. (Don't even mention that awful Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier version from the 1940s!)
But I'm up late and Todd's asleep, and I came across that other version on Oxygen, about half over. I'm more happy than ever that I didn't fork over $8.00, or whatever movies cost in 2005, to see this thing in a theater.
I am no Keira Knightley fan, for one thing. And in this movie she looks like a starving waif, with these giant sack dresses hanging off that bony frame, and straggly hair hanging in her face and that giant jaw. What is with her jaw? It's like she's got forty extra teeth in there.
And I don't know who this mutton-faced loser is they've got playing Mr. Darcy, but he's not fit to carry Colin Firth's form-fitting breeches. How could either of these people find the other attractive?
And Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennett might have seemed like a good idea, because he does have a humorous streak, but they totally suppressed it here. He's dreadful!
And Lydia and Wickham have zero personality. None at all. They were so wonderfully awful in the BBC version.
And all the delicious tension, the wonderful conversations, the extended scenes where you could really watch the story play out and the characters play off each other--it's all gone. All the humor and joyfulness--gone. Just long silent scenes of Keira looking waifish and sad, her immense jaw trembling with suppressed emotion. Maybe the first half is funnier?
I guess people probably did look as scruffy back then as they do in this movie, with no regular baths and no washing machines, but you can almost smell the B.O. just looking at the screen.
And the worst of all--the scene at the end where Lady Catherine shows up does battle with Lizzie--it's THE best scene of the book and of the BBC version. Here, even with Judi Dench, it's nowhere near as fascinating and cathartic. I just love that scene where Lizzie tells her off. "Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?" (My favorite line of any book ever!)
Why do people always think they can improve on perfection? It almost never works.Just had to get that off my chest. I feel better now. Maybe I'll pop in my P&P DVDs for a minute to wash away the bad taste!
Today was a good day--I feel almost 100% better, I took my walk today without having to wheeze for breath, went grocery shopping, made some bookmarks, cooked dinner--life is starting to feel normal again. Boy, do I hate being sick! Boy, am I grateful for antibiotics and a healthy immune system!
Tomorrow is garden work day, if it stops raining. The weeds...the weeds...they are taking over and starting to scare me a little! I'll try and take some pictures, maybe that will make the weeding more interesting. But I doubt it.
I took myself off to the walk-in clinic this morning because I couldn't wait till Tuesday or Wednesday to see my doctor, and it looks like I've got bronchitis. So I'm on antibiotics now and hopefully can stop coughing and start feeling better quickly! I hope it will be quick, anyway...I'm starting to forget how it feels to feel well!
Seventeen years ago today, I was nauseated, nervous, a little sick. I was getting ready to walk down the aisle and marry my sweetie. (Definitely the best decision I ever made!)
Today, I'm nauseated, coughing, and more than a little sick. This fricking-fracking cold will not go away, in fact it's worse than ever.
So instead of having a nice weekend trip away like we planned, I am camping on the couch and Todd is out enjoying the pretty weather in his kayak. Harumph. I am sooooo grumpy.
I can't remember if we had an "in sickness, in health" line in our wedding vows--I hope we did, or else Todd might take advantage of the loophole and find himself a non-mucusy woman to hang with this weekend!
Fortunately, I found a nice little stash of old movies I've picked up on DVD in the past couple of months at the flea market and at garage sales. I stuck them all on the shelf and forgot about them, and found them now, just waiting for a day like today when I've got nothing else to do and can use some distraction from not feeling well.
Right now I've got An Affair to Remember playing. One of Cary Grant's more ridiculous movies. I love Deborah Kerr, though. And Cary Grant plays a character whose last name is Ferrante, which just happens to be the last name of that dude I got married to seventeen years ago. A fun coincidence!
Next in the line-up is The Third Man, The Narrow Margin, The Big Clock, and The Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains, which is pretty scratched, but I hope it will play. I love that version, they used to run it on Saturday afternoons on the local independent station when I was a kid.
Off to find some chicken soup. If you can spare a good thought, I could use it. I don't get sick very often, but when I do, it's always a lu-lu.
We had a great weekend with my brother's family, and especially getting to hang with Natalie and Marissa all day Saturday.
Books were read...
...water was spilled...
...and mopped up and spilled again...
...herbs were picked...
...and cheesy grins captured.
Everybody curled up and watched Robin Hood (the animated Disney version) on Sunday morning while it poured rain outside--very cozy.
I was really thrilled, on Saturday, to get to introduce the girls to my favorite childhood movie, The Sound of Music. Marissa wandered in and out for some of it, getting Todd to play hide-and-seek with her or read her a couple of books, but Natalie stuck it out till the end. It was hard to explain nuns and Nazis to a six-year-old (nuns = "women who want to love and worship God all the time so they live in a special place and wear special clothes"; Nazis = "bad guys who did some really bad things") and I fast-forwarded through a couple of the boring talky scenes with the Captain and the Baroness, but she loved it. I was glad. What a great memory, getting to watch it with her.Whenever the girls come to visit, the house always seems a little sad and quiet after they leave.
Love those two girlies.
I still had my cold all weekend, which is why we had a low-key Saturday watching a long movie and playing with water, and today I'm just really tired. Took a nap yesterday afternoon and slept hard all night long, and I'm still dragging a little today. Definitely on the mend, just...tired.Oh--I finally have my car back! We picked up Todd's car Thursday night. Today I went to the park and walked and got groceries, and it felt like such a luxury after three weeks of car-lessness. I'm glad life is back to normal and I can go wherever I want whenever I want!Hope everybody else's week is off to a good start, too.
This is one of the other items I found on Monday while shopping in Westerville.
There's no publication date, but I think the book is at least 100 years old, based on the condition and style, and also on the clothes the kids are wearing in this picture:
There are a few little pictures and stories like this in the book, but the real treasure is all the full-page color plates.
I think this one is my favorite:
That's about half the pictures--there are also plates of a turkey, squirrels, a calf, a foal, a donkey, a "sly cat" lurking through a barn, a goat, and then pictures of a boy herding sheep and a hunting dog coming up out of a river. Aren't they gorgeous? The book has completely fallen apart, so I will have no guilt over taking some of the pictures out and framing them. They would look so sweet in an old-fashioned nursery or child's bedroom, but since we don't have any of those in this house, I'm thinking maybe in the foyer or upstairs hallway.I love framing old postcards and pages from books. When you think about how much even the cheapest generic prints from T.J. Maxx can cost, it really can be very cost-effective to find your own art and frame it. Plus, it's completely unique!
It's May, and that means that Kim at Twice Remembered is hosting her third annual Cottage Charm Giveaway. This is my third time to participate, too, and I'm excited! I especially like doing this giveaway because it coincides with my "blogiversary" (four years!) and also because I always find new and wonderful blogs to read when I visit all the participants.
May has been a weird month for me, with no car on a regular basis, so I decided to go "shopping" in my house and then supplement that with a walk to the thrift store. And I found some terrific stuff. This time I'm doing a "baking" theme, and here's what you'll win if I draw your name from the comments list:
-a vintage cookie cutter
-a bowl scraper from King Arthur Flour
-a stack of recipe cards with some of my favorite cookie and muffin recipes
-a sweet little vintage plate to serve your baked goodies on
-a hand-embroidered table runner to place the plate on
-a red toile tin to package some baked goodies in
-a set of four mise-en-place bowls to hold your ingredients while you bake
-a nifty push-up measuring cup, especially nice for measuring things like peanut butter, mayonnaise, honey, etc.
-some tea bags so you can sip while you snack
-an apple-pie scented Yankee candle in a pretty votive holder
-a bar of cinnamon-oatmeal soap from Ellie's Handmade Soap
-aaaaand, a lovely little cookbook with recipes and gift ideas for each of the four seasons.
Whew! If I find any more treasures between now and the end of the month, I'll add them, but this seems like plenty to start with.
The rules are simple: just leave a comment on this post between now and midnight on Saturday, May 30th. Please include your e-mail address if you don't have a blog or some way for me to contact you. I'll announce the winner on the 31st.
And definitely check out all the other giveaways listed here! You could win something really wonderful, and maybe find some new friends and inspiration, too.
Still no Hyundai. I was going to take Todd to work this morning so I could go grocery shopping, but I was too tired to organize my coupons last night, and today I am coming down with the cold that Todd has been fighting for almost a week. Such a generous husband, giving me his cold. Such a sweetie!
So, stuck at home again, I hauled out some of the stuff I bought at Michael's last weekend. They were clearancing out a bunch of the home decor stuff they've had out since January, and I finally made my move and snapped some of it up.
I keep a low bench right outside the front door with various decorative items on it, and when I found a bunch of birdhouses and pitchers at Michael's, I decided to get a bunch of it and re-do my arrangement on the bench.
The bench was made for me by Todd several years ago, and I painted it a sort of maize yellow, but that doesn't go with the stuff I bought last week, so I also got a couple cans of spray paint and hauled it out in the yard and painted it today. Of course, I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here's the "after":
I'll have to see if I can find a "before" picture on the other computer later. I need to fill in a couple of gaps with more tchotchkes, but you get the basic idea. I'm hoping that little ceramic angel survives...our porch is like a long, narrow wind-tunnel and I have had more than one treasure blown off the bench and broken.
[Edited to add: I found an old shot of the front door with the bench beside it...this was right before Christmas 07. I got rid of the red chair on the other side today--I've had it for five or six years and it's looking very ratty, so it went to the curb:]
Then I took the same can of spray paint and overhauled this little table that sits between the wicker chairs on the other side of the porch:
Again, I didn't take a "before" picture--what's wrong with me?! My problem is that once I get all revved up to do a project, I have to plunge right into it and I don't want to take the time to track down my camera. This is a huge improvement on this little thrift store table, though--the legs were pale yellow, and the top was off-white with a big apple decal in the center, and a painted checkerboard pattern around the edge. Sort of folk art style. I think plain khaki looks better, esp. with the dark brown chairs. Now I need to find some small, cute plant to set on it...again, something that hopefully won't get blown away when a big storm comes through.
I am a spray paint novice, but I'm always reading other people's blogs and seeing all the wonderful transformations they create with it, and I am totally convinced now. It took about fifteen minutes to spray the bench and the table, and by the time I got deadheading all my hanging petunia plants, they were dry and ready to put back up on the porch. Very impressive.
These birdhouses have been sitting on my front door bench with a couple of baskets and a grapevine wreath, but they didn't go with the scheme any more, so I just set them on the porch steps with the grapevine wreath propped behind them and another little Michael's angel next to them:
Speaking of items that got blown over and broken, this is one of them, a very cute glazed pot I picked up at a garden store in Portsmouth. I couldn't bring myself to throw away the bits, so they've been sitting pretty much where they fell. A couple weeks ago I stuck them in the garden and pulled up a spare sedum to plant in front of them.
Here's the McCoy vase I picked up in Westerville on Monday:
I have a similar vase that I bought years ago when we were living in Ohio:
Here's the bowl I got on Monday, I still haven't found a spot for it to sit yet so it's hanging out on the kitchen counter. Someday when Todd makes shelves for our living room, I'm going to display all my pottery together.
What a gorgeous day today is, sunny and cool. I need to do some cleaning and tidying before my brother's family comes for the weekend, and plan some meals and get some groceries. I hope this cold dries up and goes away fast!
We got home from Columbus at about 11 last night...it was a great weekend! Angelo was very, very excited to make his First Communion. He was running around the yard the night before saying, "Tomorrow I get to take the blood and body of Christ!" which is not something you'd typically hear from an eight-year-old boy! And when he came back up the aisle after the communion, he had a look of pure joy on his face. I'm so happy that it was important to him to take that step in his life.
Our present to him was a sterling silver tie tack to go with his snazzy new suit and tie.
Such a cutie pie!
Here's Angelo with his dad Craig and his mom Julie:
I only got a couple of pictures at church...here's my father-in-law John with Gianna:
Look at this gorgeous boy!
Here are the kids with their mom Julie and her boyfriend Andrew. This was the first big family event since Julie and her husband Craig split up a couple of years ago, and since Andrew came into their lives, so everyone was feeling a little nervous about how it would go, but everything went really smoothly. The kids come first, for all of us, and I think that has helped. It was nice to get to spend a few days with Andrew and get to know him better.
"Can we stop smiling now?"
Todd's dad, Todd, the kiddies, me, and Todd's sisters Julie and Lisa.
We took a nice picture of Todd and his sisters later on:
So that was Saturday--we had Mass/First Communion in the morning, and then a big lunch with Angelo's dad's family. They had three cousins all celebrating their First Communion together, so it was a really special day for their family.
Sunday we took A & G out to pick up some crafts to work on together. Angelo and Todd made a wooden plane and helicopter:
(Angelo was making goofy faces, in case you can't tell)...and Gianna and I made some little bobblehead cats that we blinged up with gems and glitter:
We spent the rest of the time just hanging out, playing cornhole, kicking the soccer ball, playing on the swingset, etc. The weather was great, a little cool, but mostly sunny, so we could be outside a lot.
Look at this gorgeous picture I got of Miss Gianna:
Monday morning, everyone went off to work or school, or to catch their plane, but Todd and I didn't have to fly out till late afternoon, so we went to the used bookstore, a couple of antique shops, and had lunch at my favorite restaurant so I could have their Fruity Chicken, which is just a scoop of the world's best chicken salad served with melon, strawberries and grapes piled all around it. It used to come with a muffin, but now you have to order your muffin separately, which I did.
We used to live in Westerville, so it was fun to drive around and see how things have changed and visit a couple of the places we liked to go when we lived there. We also got hamburgers on Sunday at the best burger joint ever.
At the antique stores, I found a McCoy vase and a McCoy bowl for excellent prices, so I had them wrapped up really well in bubble wrap, and then we hit a Goodwill near the airport and found a duffle bag/knapsack so that I could put the pottery in there along with my purse and carry it on the plane. I also had to mail a couple of books and a couple other antique store finds, plus some scrapbook paper, home to myself, so I'm hoping that package will show up here tomorrow.
Since we only had a fifty-pound limit on our suitcase, we had to do some shuffling of items, and it was a good thing I mailed that extra stuff home, because we were right over the limit when we checked in. We grabbed a couple things out of the side pocket to bring the weight down to 49.9 lbs. and then we had to figure out where to cram those things into our carry-ons, too! It's a good thing we restrained ourselves on the shopping, because there was just no more room anywhere.
I unwrapped my bowl and vase this morning and they survived the trip just fine. Now I'm working my way through laundry and hoping with all my heart that we can pick up our other car tonight so I can get my regular life back!
We replaced all the wooden--wooden! in a bathroom!--fixtures almost immediately: towel bar, TP holder, and that nasty toothbrush holder under the medicine cabinet went away and never came back. Boy, were they gross. We put in nice new nickel towel hooks, towel ring and TP holder.
Here you can also see the notorious ducky wall paper border that I hated so. Wow, I almost sort of miss those ducks.
Ha! No, I don't!
You can see that the medicine cabinet door has yet to be painted...I kind of like the natural wood, but I'll probably be painting it white sometime this week, along with the doors for the master bath vanity.
The floor is a little bit more yellow-brown than I thought it would be from the sample in the store, but it's still a major improvement on what was there before. And I've been trying to find the purple bathmat that goes with the towels at Kohl's but no joy yet, so it's the brown one from the master bath for now.
It's so nice to have a room that you walk into and feel good about, isn't it? We have done so much to this house, but so often all you focus on is how much there is yet to do. It's good to look back and know that we got it done and made something ugly into something pretty.
