Construction Zone!

And the first big  project in the "new" house has begun.  Here is our stain comparison.

Can you guess what's going to happen here?  We're building custom bookshelves in the bedroom (happy happy dance of joy)!  They're going to start with some red oak kitchen "upper" cabinets, set onto a base on the floor, with pine bookshelves going all the way up to the ceiling, 10 feet wide.  So here are the stain colors on the two different woods, so that we can have it close to matching our current furniture.  We're using a color called "Ipswich Pine", which is of course, after bringing home 8 new colors to try, the one we already had on hand from another project.

So here's the "before" set.  The room still has contractor primer on the walls, at 12 years old.  The rest of the house was professionally (and very tastefully) painted right before we bought it, and I must confess to being pretty intimidated about doing any painting myself (as well as enjoying the fact that it didn't have to be done!)  We have a vaulted ceiling and that inset where the cedar chest and bookshelves are is the new construction zone.  The carpet will come up and the baseboards will disappear to give the cabinets a really solid base, and the shelves will be secured to the wall with cleats, and have an open back to the painted wall.

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Can I tell you how NOT fun it is to try and paint a ceiling, times 3 because it's not FLAT!
Luckily, I just had to hold the light and reload the paint roller, as the Alien is taller than me!

This took a lot more paint and time than we'd actually planned, but it's coming along nicely.   

And here's the first glimpse of the new color!  It actually turned out to be the same as the lower half of Caveman's room.  The primer and ceiling white went on just fine, but when I opened up the can of this stuff, it's like pudding!  We're having a hard time getting it smooth, and it's taking two coats to be really even.  We got all the way around the room twice with a two-gallon bucket of KILZ primer, but it's going to take at least 3 gallons to get the color on evenly.  Anybody have a guess, is it like that because it's so dark?  It's certainly thicker than the other times we've used the same brand of paint.

I will post more pictures later, but I want to go ahead and publish before I forget for another three months.....

Playing Catch-Up

Piano Recital--52 kids!!  And we survived sitting through the whole wonderful (but long) thing!  Caveman is in the white shirt facing the camera, and Dolly is in turquoise on the far right.

Yeah, yeah, it's been simply AGES since I put up a blog post.  And that's one of the reasons I procrastinated starting a blog in the first place, that I only seem to have worthwhile thoughts to post when I'm walking the dogs, and then when I get home, POOF!  They evaporate.  Well, that and the real fear that I would neglect it, and therefore feel guilty.  Mostly the guilt thing.

So what have I been doing while I wasn't blogging?  Well, I mostly did a lot of not much, but I do have some accomplishments to show off.  Here is a cute checked dress I made for the Dolly, out of fabric I've been saving since she was tiny and never seemed to get around to it.  Now that she's ELEVEN she's about to outgrow all the yardages I have on hand, so I got them out and here are the results. One checkered dress, one mother/daughter set in blue velvet, and a nightshirt and shorts out of pink plaid flannel.  I know, I can't believe I bought that, either.  You know how I feel about pink.

So what else has been up?  Two medical crises, well, ok, an allergy attack and some hip x-rays and physical therapy.  The Caveman has a narrowing of a cartilage disk in the lumbar area of his back, and it's causing a curvature.  He's enjoying all the fun and games at physical therapy, and we go back to the orthopedic surgeon in June.

The Monkeychild had a virus and an allergy at the same time, and WHOOMP! here is the reaction.  It was a very uncomfortable four days till it started to get better.  He had to undergo a whole series of prick tests for allergens (again!) and came up negative on everything.

Dolly had her birthday celebration at a local nature museum, and found a new friend in the butterfly haven.  It stuck around for over 20 minutes and had to be removed by a museum volunteer.

A few holidays, a field trip or two, and that's what we've been up to!

Twas the night before Christmas......