Short and Sweet

I have neglected this blog for too many days, and as a result, I probably have forgotten half of what we have accomplished in the last week.

Right now I am too tired to try to remember everything, so I will try to bring you up to date through the short and sweet version.

We have continued to work on finishing the inside.  Rick has a coat of paint on all of the door casing, and with rain predicted from Friday to Monday, we will probably get them painted and ready to install. The problem is that the nailed-in baseboard is too long, so we still have to alter that before we can install the casing. That might mean another saw to buy or more baseboard if we cannot use what we will try to pull off and cut.  Sigh.  These doors continue to fight us all the way.

The last few days have been beautiful, but appointments and distractions have kept us from taking advantage of the weather and working outside.  We have, however, just about finished the living room. Our new sofas came on Monday, and on Tuesday we found a palm tree for the corner of the room.  The hunt continues for an area rug, but the placement of the tree allowed us to hang the paintings that we purchased at the Art Fair earlier this year.  The sofas are taking a while to get used to because they are both higher and longer than the old sofa.  However, they are very comfortable and give us both a place to stretch out and relax at the end of the day.

The almost-finished living room.

The old sofa was temporarily moved to the Florida Room.  We thought we would like it there, but when we had it in place, it just did not fit.  The color was dark and wrong, and the sofa reminded us of the old furniture that was crammed in the room when we first saw the house.  Neither of us liked it in the Florida Room, so we decided to take it to our favorite consignment shop in town.  The owner, Denice, was happy to get the sofa today when we took it in.  We also took in the two brass lamps that we had used in the guest room, and since the palm floor plant that I had brought from Wisconsin no longer fit anywhere, we took that in also.  We probably won't get much money for any of it, but we will get something, and all of those pieces are now out of the house.

Originally, our plan was to use the old sofa in the Florida Room and to disassemble the white Ikea chairs. Once we decided to get rid of the old sofa, we put the Ikea chairs in the room and found that we really liked them.  The living room with the new sofas is a little darker now, so I am happy that we still have seating in the light-filled Florida Room for reading and for sewing.

The Ikea chairs will give us a great place to read and to sew.
We know that we need to find an appropriate table to use
between them.

Two trips to a local fabric store also resulted in two fabrics that we thought might work for recovering the new white chair that we bought for the bedroom.  The chair that we had in that room actually was Rick's from his high school days.  To say that it is an antique probably is not an exaggeration.  The chair was dark wood while everything else in the room is white, so be bought an identical chair to the one that I recovered and use at my desk in the Florida Room.  Once again, the black-and-white fabric has to go, but today we brought home the two possible replacement fabrics.  The one that we both thought was the best did not look as good as the other fabric once we placed them both on the chair.  Go figure.  Now we have to see if we have a staple gun that we can use to recover the chair.  More on that later.

In the little time that we were outside, we tried to just scrape and then paint the soffits.  I have been dizzy a bit, so Rick does not trust me on a ladder.  His shoulders are killing him, so working overhead is torture for him.  We hoped that we could get away with a quick-and-dirty refresh, but that will not be.  After Rick scraped a few feet of the soffit, he primed it.  Later he added the final coat of paint; sadly, the results were not good. We are going to have to buy a palm sander, scrape the soffits, then sand them smooth and patch what needs patching before we can get around to painting.  Whew!  This is going to be a thankless task, so I know why Rick is doing everything in his power to avoid having to start this job.  Unfortunately, we have to finish the soffits before we can concentrate on the walls of the house.

I also continue to dig around the big stump that we must remove.  I am getting closer to getting the roots exposed so Rick can cut them and the hole deep enough to pull out the stump.  I hope that we can get that yanked out before the brush pick-up on Monday.

As usual, we have more than enough to do.  We will run out of both time and money long before we run out of jobs; however, that is pretty typical for remodeling an old house.

When Rick stopped at the gas station to fill the Camry, I ran inside to buy a lottery ticket.  The jackpot is up to $400 million.  Who knows?  If we win, we actually will have enough money to hire someone to put in new soffits.  Strangely enough, neither of us wants to move from Gladys.  We would just hire the work done to finish her and be perfectly happy to sit back and relax.  The nice thing about dreams: they are always free.