Bits and Pieces

I have not written for a few days because we have been busy building walls, running to Lowe's, mudding walls, running to Home Depot, sanding walls, running to Lowe's, painting walls, running to Home Depot, cleaning up, running to Lowe's.  You get the picture.  We make daily (sometimes multiple) trips to the home improvement stores buying all of the bits and pieces that we need to complete a project.  Right now we have so many pieces of projects in our house that we cannot even fit them all in the garage or one room.

I currently have two primed doors drying in the garage, sheets of drywall resting in the middle of the Florida Room, and 6 pieces of 16-foot baseboard moulding lying halfway between my living room and the Florida room.

We also have a ceiling fan/heater for the master bath that awaits installation, and a new light/fan for the master bedroom to replace the wobbling, noisy, scary ceiling fan that will not stop if we hit the wall switch for the light. (The chain to change the speed of the fan and to turn off the fan has long departed the premises.) We bought a new mirror today for the master bathroom.  The non-hygenic medicine cabinet with the chipped mirror is on my list of Most Wanted Things to Dispose Of in Monday's Garbage.  We need to repair the afore-mentioned hole in the wall that the medicine cabinet will leave, but neither of us will miss it in the end, and we may even end up with a more structurally-sound house.

We have a new central vacuum to install, but that has to wait until we have room in the garage to install it!  We also have miles of the baseboard to paint and put in, and then there are the new electrical outlets in the kitchen...  and the list grows daily.

Tonight we went to Lowe's to buy inexpensive blinds for the kitchen.  We have lived since the windows went in with nothing on them, so our house has been less-than-private.  The time for blinds was here since the kitchen faces the street.  In the picture below, the kitchen windows are the bank of three windows next to the garage. Rick installed the blinds (he's getting quite good at this!), and we will worry about shortening them to the proper length later.

Gladys with her new windows.

I took new pictures of the front of Gladys now that the trees in back are down and the new windows are in.  I will publish even more pictures when we get the new front doors installed.  Hopefully that will be this coming Monday.  Debby threw a fit, so we had to wait for the weather to behave before we can take out doors.

New paint for our master bedroom.  I cannot wait
for the new furniture to arrive.

The one thing that we are pleased with is the colors in the master bedroom.  Although pictures do not do it justice, we are happy that everything (so far) coordinates well.  We painted it an icy aqua color, just a shade lighter than the color in the duvet cover. The new bedroom furniture, coming July 10, will have a bench with a cushion that will be a deeper aqua.  We will paint the new master bathroom walls that same deeper aqua. In the end, hopefully the room will come together and will be a haven for us at the end of the long, stressful, busy days.

Our "just right" granite choice... sorry about
the flash reflection in this picture!

Once again, we are at the end of the budget.  We ordered out kitchen cabinets yesterday (River Run Dalton series in a light honey birch).  We also went to Depot Granite to choose a countertop.  We ended up with something called Colonial Gold.  The woman at the company said that they had two different lots of that granite, and that we should go out to the yard to choose which one we liked since each lot is different.  (Mother Nature does not like to duplicate herself!)  When we got to the yard, we actually found three different lots.  One was very dark brown and quite veined with a yellowish-clear part.  We did not like that at all.  One was very light and contained lots of veins of grey, and that also quickly was off our list.  The third is the one that contained a few shades of grey but lots of honey-colored areas, so that is the one that we chose.  Hm-m-m-m. One is too dark, one is too light, and the third was jus-s-s-t right. I think I read Goldilocks one too many times as a kid.

All of the big ticket items that we purchased were planned in the budget, so we are not in trouble...yet.  We need to quite spending, though, and concentrate our time in putting all of the bits and pieces together in their rightful places.  Gladys has certainly gone through a transformation in the two and a half weeks that we have been here, and once we get the rest of the painting, cabinets, doors, and baseboard in place, she will be even better.  Last year we did a lot of the infrastructure (heating, electricity, insulation).  My friend Rose reminded me then that we had to make sure that Gladys had clean underwear before we tried to put a new prom dress on her. The underwear is now clean and new, and she is now patiently standing still for her fittings for her new wardrobe of prom dresses.