Friday, September 30, 2005

Our First House Guest

We're sorry to disappoint all of you who were clamoring to be our first house guest, but my Mom beat you to it. She came down yesterday to take a Home Decorating class with me and stayed overnight.

I didn't want to take a photo with her still sleeping in there so no photo today. We've almost finished with the guest bedroom and bathroom except for wall art/photos. I personally think the room is very welcoming except for the faint sounds of traffic from highway. But, we do have a tricking stream sound machine if it bothers you too much. See we think of everything, we're great hosts!

We'll be taking reservations for Winter 2006 shortly!

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Painting the Kitchen Ceiling

I must give kudos to Kevin who has painted 80% of the ceilings in the house that have been painted so far. Never a word of complaint (maybe a sigh or two), but he just goes at it. Yesterday, I found out how much work painting a ceiling really is.

I took on the task of painting the kitchen, dining room and solarium ceiling, plus the 3 skylight window recesses. Straining on top of our footstool I sweated my way through the rooms. 2 hours later completely exhausted and covered in paint, I wanted to call up Kevin and thank him for painting the cathedral ceilings upstairs!

You can see that my hair had a workout too, collecting all of the stray paint that fell off of my roller.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Skeeved Out!

Most people think I am a clean-freak extraordinaire. And yes, while I like things to be clean and no, I don't like to drink tap water, I can deal with most 'gross' things. The dead bird in the master bathroom light? I thought it was a good story. The dead bugs in the kitchen blinds? Eh, just another thing to clean-up. The ants in the ivy in our backyard? I just swallowed hard and dealt with it.

But this one just skeeves me out. I was supposed to prepare the master bathroom for us to finally use today, which meant cleaning. This shouldn't have been too hard as I've already spent at least 4 hours cleaning it at various other points in its reconstruction. As I went to take the tape off of the shower drain, the cover came up and I wanted to vomit. The drain had long strings of gray hair, which I can only assume were the deceased previous owner's hair. And trust me this photo does not do it justice.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

The Reign of Bugs

I'm hoping the reign and the rain of bugs is over now, although I know that's probably a foolhardy notion. Yesterday, I prepped the kitchen ceiling for painting. To do this, I had to remove the blinds covering our ceiling skylights. I figured that they may be a little dusty, but they looked fine from the floor. Little did I know.

Once up on the 8 foot ladder I started to jiggle the levers holding up the blinds. It wasn't too difficult to slide them out of place, but I didn't expect a shower of bugs to fall on my head. Apparently they ended their short lives by clinging to the ends of the shade. Wasps, hornets, insects of various shapes and sizes, all dead, all dried and all over me. Sigh.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Buh-Bye Bushes

Last week I felt like I was somehow behind on the house. Doing all of those little things like patching and touching-up doesn't really convey the proper feeling of accomplishment that you feel when you paint a wall or can tangibly see a big difference. So I took on a task which normally falls to Kevin. I started to chop down our overgorwn bushes in the back of our house.

You can see in these photos that there is a definite 'Before' and 'After.' I don't really like to chop down living things, but these poor bushes are so overgrown they didn't have much hope other than being eyesores in the back of our property. Plus, we're hoping to put a garden in next year. Of course, we couldn't keep a tomato plant alive this year, so let's hope we have more success with a garden.

And yeah, I feel like I accomplished something tangible!