Super Cute

Christmas Decor in Photos

The tree went up!

The stockings were hung!

The mantle was set with glass and lights!

And Santa delivered!

Powder Room, After

   The ‘before” shots again, just to refresh your memory:

And the almost finished “after” shots (we still plan to darken the trim a bit…previous owners stripped off old paint and coated with poly, but the wood is lighter in here than in the rest of the house…we’ll fix that soon):

 

Framed prints came from a children’s book, Brian Wildsmith’s Birds, a garage sale find that was a tiny bit too musty to read through bu the artwork was too fun to part with…voila!  Wall art!

A Peach

“When are we getting another dog?” my son asked. 

His question seared my heart because we had lost Riley only two days before and losing a beloved companion, a dog with such presence, had left me reeling.  It wasn’t that I had not thought of having another dog; when you have a dog whose health is as precarious as Riley’s was, you consider the idea of what you will do when she finally loses her life’s battle and there was never a question, or even a doubt, about getting another dog.  But not yet.  I explained gently to my sad four-year-old that we needed to spend time thinking about the dog we had loved and lost before we could welcome a new life to our home. 

“But Mom, we are a two dog, one rabbit family.  We need to get another dog.” 

Time went by, and by some people’s standards it wasn’t much time, only weeks.  But this is what I knew for sure about Riley: She was a shelter dog.  She and her littermates were found next to a dumpster in Virginia, six weeks old, alone, without their mother.  Someone had left them with the garbage, had thrown them away, and this puppy who had once been so unwanted and unloved became one of our best friends.  In my mind, there is no better way to honor her life and the impact she made on our lives than to find another shelter dog for our family.  We understood that any new dog would not fill the hole that Riley left, but we also understood that the grief we feel over the death of a loved one can be tempered by new life, by new adventures. 

So it is in loving memory of Riley that we introduce another shelter dog to our family circle.  This is Ginger, or “Ginny”, who hails from Georgia, where her mom and littermates were due to be euthanized, but instead will all find homes in New York this holiday season.   I think Riley would approve.

Riley

Rest in peace, pretty girl.

A Few "Before" Pictures

It is always good to have a point of reference from which to see how far you have come. These are the bathroom "before":

These were taken before we bought the house, so all decorative accents are from the previous owners. The room is slightly odd-shaped, with one small section of wall that is set on a diagonal to the others, and the ceiling is quite high.

Brendan and the kids actually started the makeover project back in September, when they installed a new faucet, towel holder, and toilet paper holder. They are such good little helpers!

I hope to have my "after" pictures ready by the end of the weekend. Next up: the living room gets an overhaul. If you'll remember, it looks like this:

The wallpaper border has already come down, the thermostat has been moved (updated to programmable and removed from it's cage/lockbox), and remember, the decor belongs to the previous owners.

The fireplace has really pretty tile that we spent days scrubbing back to its former shine. We discovered the tile has a lot of light blue in it, so we're pulling the color for the living room from the tile.

The chair rail is not original and wasn't installed with supberb attention to detail: it was hung to high for any artwork to be displayed at the proper level for good viewing and the style of the trim itself does not blend well with the trim in the rest of the house. It feels like a belt cinched too tightly around the room's waist, if you can bend your imagination a little. I cannot wait to rip it out, repaint the walls, and polish the rich woodwork to a high gloss. Adding curtains and new light fixtures will really make it feel like the space we imagined when we first looked at the house.

Powder (Room) Blue

There comes a point when I just cannot clean any more. Not because I am finished, but because I simply cannot spend one more day cleaning up a mess that should not have been made in the first place.* So much repetitive cleaning means that nothing else is getting done, which feels like a complete stall of all progress. Things needed to change, so I took the most rational step I could think of: I gave up the cleaning, hung the rags out to dry, washed out the bucket and put it away. Shelving those bottles of Murphy's Oil Soap, Pine Sol, and Old English felt like a small victory in a week's worth of defeat.

And then I started attacking the first floor half bath. It wasn't quite the glorious feeling of ripping out the second floor bathtub doors using only a box cutter and a putty knife (did I not mention that escapade? Oh, it was fantastic!), but it saved my quickly sinking morale, for sure. I patched holes, rolled a bold blue paint over the country-gone-wrong sponge painting we had been left with, and suddenly the powder room went from an eyesore to something so much more us. It is still a work in progress; today I procured a new mirror and ripped out the old medicine cabinet, which required another round of spackle. Tomorrow I hope to finish the second coat of paint and hang up the window treatment. We still need some artwork for the wall opposite the vanity, either a small series or one large piece, but it is coming along and progress feels oh-so-good!

*For those keeping track, we are waiting to receive a check for nearly $700 from the duct cleaning company to cover the cleaning costs. Ridiculous that I had to fight for it, but I am proud that I didn't back down.