General

• The walls are painted.
• The floor is in.
• The trim is installed.
• The furniture is back in place.
• The bed is made.

It really is lovely. If it weren’t so dark out right now I could take pictures and show you, but as Denis pointed out it’s a lot darker in there than it used to be. (That’s kind of inevitable when you go from white walls to, well, anything not white.)

Now I just need to put the finishing touches in – like finding all of the stuff that was on the dressers and the walls (well, maybe there will be less stuff on the dressers and more stuff on the walls). And a couple of throw rugs might go a long way towards getting rid of the echo…echo…echo that the new wood floor has created. We still have to put in a closet organizer, and at some point this summer the sagging bathroom wallpaper will be replaced with paint, but at this point I’m just thrilled that we’re back in our own room!

Carrie and I took advantage of the really nice weather last weekend and put some annuals in the flower boxes on the front steps. Every time I walk outside I find that at least two or three plants are laying half out of the box, roots exposed, flowery faces looking at me pleading for help.

The idiot squirrels are digging them up. Not to eat them – which I could understand and almost forgive – no, they’re digging them up because they think there are still nuts buried in the boxes. I poked through all the dirt pretty carefully before putting the flowers in, and there were no nuts in there.

I feel like putting out a huge pile of nuts on the sidewalk with a little note begging the squirrels just to eat those and leave my poor flowers alone. As it is, I think a few of them are not going to survive this experience…the flowers, that is. I’m sure the squirrels will be fine. Hungry, because there are no nuts in the flower boxes, but fine.

Is it really May already? I’m in denial. Because if it’s already May 3rd, which is what my computer insists that it is, then time is moving faster than I thought it was. (Seriously, wasn’t Christmas just yesterday?!?) If our perception of time moves faster and faster as we get older I’m not going to able to blink soon or I’ll miss an entire year.

Maybe now that all the busyness is over things will settle down to a more normal pace? Although with a couple of weekend trips coming up, maybe not…

My bedroom walls before, and after an insane number hours of painting:

And here, here is the vile tan gold ugly, nasty and definitely not hypo-allergenic carpet we needed to tear out, and the pre-finished bamboo flooring we’re putting in it’s place:

There’s still a lot of work to do. High on that list is to actually move the furniture back into our room! But first, we have to, well, finish installing the floor. And then re-install the baseboards, locate, purchase and install quarter round molding…actually, that might be it. I think.

As is always the case with home improvement projects, this one didn’t go quite as planned. But still, overall, it was better than I expected.

Initially, I was going to leave the border up, tape it off, and paint under it. Obviously, I changed my mind, and had to tack on an extra couple of days for wallpaper removal (but the orbital sander wasn’t required, so really, that hardly counts.)

And then, I wasn’t going to paint the trim, but the baseboards had to come off the walls to install the flooring. Aside from the fact that they got a little dinged up in the process, because part of it had been covered up with carpet the last time we painted they weren’t actually all one color.

Well, once you paint the baseboards, you have to paint the door frames. And then the doors look really dingy and aren’t quite the same white so you have to paint those. In for a penny, in for a pound, the windows and frames need a fresh coat too.

So between the two coats of wall paint (that color just makes me deliriously happy – or maybe it’s the paint fumes?) and the trim I hadn’t intended to paint, I spent sixteen hours painting our room. (Spread out over several days of course!) What that meant was that we didn’t rent the giant floor stapler thingy until today. And since one of us had to watch Carrie, Denis had to do the whole process himself: staple in some boards, measure, head to the garage, cut an end piece, repeat, repeat, repeat, jigsaw the board going around the closet door frame…you get the idea.

So, next Sunday we’ll hopefully manage to finish the floor. And then it’s just a matter of moving several large, heavy pieces of furniture back in. Oh, wait, I forgot about the baseboards…

I’m so far behind in answering emails it’s not even funny. And obviously I’m behind in blogging, since the past 10 days worth of posts just finally showed up. It’s not that I don’t write them in a timely manner, it’s just the act of getting the pictures off the camera, cropping them, uploading them, and sticking them in the posts that I dread. Once I have iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, and Firefox open all at the same time, my practically new MacBook Pro starts doing the spinning-color-wheel-of-death, “go make yourself a cup of coffee, I’m busy thinking here and it’s going to be a while” thing. So I don’t like to do it unless I really, really have to. I guess I should try to figure out what that’s all about so it’s not such a dreadful task. (My gut feeling is that it’s iPhoto, as it’s a problem that’s gotten worse with time and I’m now up to 8400+ photos in my library. Sigh.) I also think I just generally need to be more efficient with my computer time…

Or maybe just sleep less.

I’m still here. I’m feeling a lot better – we even participated in Jenny’s soup swap today. The rest of the weekend was spent being mostly lazy, with a rehearsal and a trip to the bike store for a toddler-sized helmet thrown in for some variety.

I haven’t really felt much like knitting lately for some reason, but I did finish a couple of things last week. Pictures tomorrow if I can overcome the urge to do nothing all day. I really need to get back into a routine at some point soon…

1. Having a 102 degree fever for a day sucks. Still being sick several days later sucks more.
2. It’s really, really, really hard to parent a two year old when you can’t speak louder than a whisper.
3. It’s a good thing to have an abnormally well-behaved two year old.
4. On the other hand, having a two year old who has for several days in a row decided 6:30 AM is a better wake-up time than 8:00 AM? That’s not so good.
5. School cancellations are even thrilling as an adult, provided the listings contain the school you’re supposed to be rehearsing at later.
6. Having the school cancellations online is brilliant! Especially when the school you’re looking for starts with “V”. Waiting through the list being read on the radio was pure torture in high school.
7. Ordering a tricycle online in the middle of a blizzard is a rather odd thing to do, even if it was a great deal with free shipping.
8. Knitting a sock, on the other hand, is a wonderful way to pass the time during a blizzard.
9. Practicing “Cool” for an hour straight and still not playing it up to tempo is not fun.
10. A husband who make yummy soup, handles all the toddler dinnertime needs, and attends to bath and bedtime without complaint is worth his weight in gold. He deserves some serious cookies when this cold is gone…

We bought a new bedroom floor yesterday. It’s sitting in 10 very heavy boxes in our guest bedroom at the moment, and will be for a few more weeks, but it was on sale this month so we decided to get it early. It’s bamboo. It’s gorgeous. I cannot wait to install it!

That new floor is the reason we’ve been hauling all the stuff out of our room. I’ve cleaned out all my drawers and the closet, donated several bags of clothes and shoes, and I’m working on clearing off all the flat surfaces. Before we install the flooring we’re also going to paint – a pretty, medium shade of green, on the bluish end of the green spectrum. I’m so excited. We stripped the truly awful wallpaper and painted our bedroom white before we moved in, but we’ve pretty much ignored it since, 25-year-old carpeting and everything. Since we spend, what, at least a quarter of our lives in our room sleeping, it may as well be a nice place to spend time in, right?

We’ve been slowly but surely getting rid of the clutter in our house. During the week Denis took off between jobs we made a huge dent in the amount of stuff that was packed into every crevice in the basement. Since then I’ve been randomly cleaning out kitchen cabinets and drawers. It’s actually starting to become addictive to get rid of things.

Today we tacked our closet. I didn’t even take a before picture, because I’d be beyond embarrassed if anyone saw what it looked like before. It’s not done yet, but we do have three very large bags of clothes to donate, another very large bag of trash, and yet another very large bag of…shoes. My feet grew a whole size while I was pregnant, and they haven’t shrunk back yet. Since it’s been almost three years since I could wear these shoes, I think it’s time to let them go to someone who could use them.

I’m almost embarrassed to say how many pairs of shoes are in that bag, and I know there’s a box of sneakers and boots in the basement besides those. Ready? 15. Yep, I used to have 15 pairs of shoes (not including six or so pairs of sneakers and boots) that fit my feet. Now, including every type of shoe from sandals to dress shoes to boots, I have 7. Definitely a better number.

But I did find something sad. Remember my purple fuzzy feet? The ones that Murphy chewed and I spruced up? They don’t fit anymore. I guess it’s time to knit some new ones! With some suede bottoms I could end my quest for new slippers, as someone suggested in the comments of my last post.

Happily, we found quite a bit of rolled change in the bottom of the closet, which will be put towards a fancy new closet organizer so we don’t wind up with such a messy closet again!