An Aries (Who Knows Some Stuff)
Tom and I finally had an hour to watch the first episode of the most recent season of “Downton Abbey.” Afterward, I felt inspired to go old-school and try to catch up with my personal correspondence in front of the fire. With pens. Envelopes. Stamps. Snoring dogs.
I’m trying to organize my office. I’ve had so much office-type crap stuck in so many places over the years that trying to pull it together and arrange it (and purge much of it) is daunting. I have learned:
I have too many red pens. These are just a few of them.
When a pen doesn’t write or a mechanical pencil is broken, throw it away immediately. Or you’ll end up with a wastebasket that looks like mine.
I’m obsessed with wooden pencils. I found two more boxes of them after I took this photo.
When you get free calendars, don’t stick them somewhere until you need them, because eleven years later…
Just a few shots of moving day. This is before the movers came, and now the room the dogs are in–the office/craft room–is piled high with boxes. I have a LOT to do. But the dogs are content, and that’s what matters.
First visit and exploration.
Lots for Guinness and Margot to sniff.
Pollock comes over to play with Anime.
Pixie and Penny are not so sure about this and wait for Tim to come back.
Pollock wants to play outside.
Anime running with the big dogs!
Watch out Guinness, there’s a Pixie gaining on you.
Margot has no time for shenanigans.
We do have an actual move date near week’s end; the frantic last-minute stuff has begun. But sometimes you just have to leapfrog the process and unpack a few of the things that make a place feel like home…
(Plus we needed the boxes for more…books.)
The former owner had cabinets of pecan custom made for his dining room–the room that will be our living room.
They weren’t built in, but one day while we were at the house, he asked if we wanted them. He wasn’t selling them, he was just willing to leave them, we figured probably because they were too heavy to move! I’d had other plans for that wall, but hey, it’s good furniture so we said yes, he could leave them there.
When the floor guys came, they helped Tom move the cabinets out of there, plus he took the mirror down, and that’s when we discovered that when the room was repainted at some point, they just painted around everything. They really are that heavy!
But Tom took care of that. Current appearance:
Since the middle cabinet is bonus storage space I didn’t expect to have, we gathered up all the games and puzzles from all the places they were tucked away at The Compound. Look, Lindsey, ORGANIZATION!
Bonus and unrelated shot for my family: How familiar do these look?
The not-so-slow evolution of the master bedroom.
One day Tom spent more hours at the new house than I expected considering what he’d told me he’d be doing there. In fact, he was doing a home improvement project I didn’t know about.
This is an angle showing the master bedroom right after the seller moved out.
Tom painted it very close to the same blue that’s in our current Compound bedroom as a Christmas surprise. And thanks to our hardworking flooring guys, no more carpet!
Janet, if you’re seeing this, you might remember this switch plate you gave us one year. It was on the mud porch at The Compound. There aren’t many light switches like this in the new house, so Tom put it in the bedroom where the contrast against the blue wall shows it off. =)
For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the same room. Remember this photo from a few days ago? Yes, this was some of the carpet being pulled up.
And holy crap, we time traveled to the Sixties!
A work in progress…
There may be carpet to be pulled up and new flooring to be installed, walls to be touched up or painted, an entire house to be cleaned top to bottom, and endless other jobs to be done before moving in, but the first thing Tom and I did in the new house after the seller was out was have a little fire in the fireplace. Who cares if it’s Houston and too warm this December for a fire? We have our priorities. =)
