worldly goods

I finally brought the rest of my books back from Washington. For the first time in ten years, all my books are in the same place! Looking forward to shelving the last of them as soon as the office is put back together from window trim work.

pocket doors redux

We've been working on these doors for months. They still aren't done. But, in a fit of realism, we decided that we needed to shift our priorities a bit. Finishing the antique doors we're retrofitting into pocket doors from the dining room into the office isn't the most urgent thing on our plate. Right now it's far more important that we get the stairwell banister refinished and rehung, so that the people who come to our house are safe and so that we can have overnight guests. So we elected to get the doors out of our work space (i.e. the guest room) and store them out of the way until we can get back to them to finally sand and paint them.

And where better to store them than in the 'pockets' they are intended for?


Yes, we hung the doors! Aren't they fantastic? They're really old, and really heavy, but we got hardware rated for doors even heavier, so it all works incredibly smoothly. Just imagine that the glass is clean and they're painted white!

personal triumph

I've stopped biting my fingernails. It's kind of a big deal. I've been biting them pretty much my entire life, to the degree that the nail tip was generally over half an inch below the tip of my finger. Now they look like this.

finishing touches

Little bits and pieces of the house are starting to really look finished, like normal people live here who don't rip down walls and have dumpsters in the driveway for months on end.

Don's parents have been breathlessly awaiting the chance to give us The Plant, which has been residing in their dining room for several years. The Plant originally belonged to Don's older brother, who is in the Navy and away from home for long periods of time. After one such stint, he came home to see that The Plant had gotten rather dusty. Being a logical sort of fellow, he did what he did with most things that got dusty in his home: he vacuumed it. It didn't work out so well. Eventually he asked my mother-in-law if she could resuscitate it, and the somewhat worse for wear plant relocated to my in-laws' house.

When Don and I moved in together, into a small apartment with a friend of ours, we took The Plant. Don liked it, it seemed decorative and homey, and it looked lovely in our living room. Then we got a cat. The cat was convinced that The Plant was eminently scratchable, and we came home eventually to discover that a large percentage of its leaves had been turned into fringe. The cat stayed - even though she also ate a bamboo plant down to the roots and had many other misadventures, some chronicled right here in this blog - and The Plant went back to my mother-in-law, to nurse its wounds. In the seven years since, the cat has become a little more sedate (not much), but more importantly, The Plant has grown at least a foot, putting even its bottom leaves out of reach of certain members of this household. So it has finally moved to its new home:


Welcome home, Plant. Thanks for making our house feel a little more finished.

new furniture

It's very strange to not feel guilty about walking into a furniture store or art gallery, knowing that there's no way you can buy anything because you haven't got any place to put it. We're still getting used to not walking straight past places full of beautiful things, somehow unable to shake the feeling that this whole 'finished house' thing is just temporary, and soon enough we'll be back to no walls, no floors, and certainly no furniture.

Our most recent purchase is a set of living room accessory tables. We ordered the Madison set from Costco.com (whose customer service, by the way, is excellent - I like the website as much as I like the warehouse store). They are assembled and in place - the sofa table and one end table in the appropriate places by the couch in the living room, and the other end table put to use as a phone-holding station tucked into a corner of the office. I'm very happy with them.


Worth noting: the dish on the table is a piece by Charlton Glassworks in Washington, fused glass with a copper penguin inside. It was a gift to us years ago when you could only find Charlton's work at shows and galleries in Washington State - these days you can find it all over the country!

a new hobby

Don has picked up an awesome new hobby - he is turning into a serious breakfast chef.

Every weekend morning lately I've been treated to something delicious. Pictured above is a tomato and goat cheese omelet (with herbs from our overgrown garden). Since then he's moved on to more complex things - this most recent weekend I got crepes with fresh strawberries and nutella.

This is his best hobby yet.