new furniture and not much else

We have wasted our hiatus, I'm afraid. The bathrooms aren't done, the window trim is stalled, the house is messy. Nothing doing. We enjoyed ourselves, though. The holidays were, as always, wonderful. We've been enjoying some hobbies - we are developing some games, I've been working on jewelry, and Don is into charcuterie these days (we made our own bratwurst a couple of weeks ago!). Plus, we're both working, and Don is again taking three graduate classes this semester so that he will get his Masters degree sooner. So it's not like life isn't full. But no, there has been no significant house improvement in the two months (!) since I last showed my internet face here.

We did buy some new furniture, though! Our new dining room table is being built and won't be here for another month or two, but we finally found something to go in the window nook of the living room - it was delivered this morning.



It's a long, low media unit that is sturdy enough to sit on (yes, we tested it in the store). So it will provide both seating and storage in the living room. Eventually, we're thinking about doing some fancy audio-visual wiring and moving all of our components into this unit, invisibly routed to the wall-mounted TV. But that's a ways off.

You may also notice our new(ish) rug, which I don't think I posted about here. It's lovely and soft and was a great deal even though all I intended to buy that day was a new ladle. This is why it is never a good idea to take Don shopping.

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!

living room detail

The throw blanket on the couch was a wedding gift. It's beautiful. We were almost as excited to get it out of storage as we were the couch itself.

childhood memories, and making more of them

A couple of weeks ago, we finally got what Don has been waiting for: a piano.

Specifically, the piano of his childhood. It's been sitting in his parents' dining room, unused except for whenever one of the grandchildren comes over and plunks around on it noisily. We knew from the start that when we finished the house it would come to live with us - and his parents were eager to have more space in their dining room.

Don and his dad made one futile effort to move it themselves - it didn't work. At all. So we hired piano movers, and for a very reasonable price they hup-hup-hup'd it out of Don's parents' house and into their truck, drove it ten blocks over and brought it right in our front door and over to its new home tucked next to the stairs.


Don says he'll have learned how to play it by Christmas. He has visions of himself playing while we all sing carols. I have a deep suspicion that in his vision, he's wearing a sweater. With red knitted reindeer on it.

pride and joy

We spend virtually all of our time in the living room now. It's amazingly comfortable. That couch? My new best friend. It was worth every second of the rain-soaked nighttime frenzy that was moving it (for which my father-in-law is officially a hero - not that he wasn't before).


The couch was a miraculous buy at Costco. I'd fallen in love with a couch from Restoration Hardware that cost five thousand dollars. Don never had any intention of letting me buy it, sensible man. But one day at Costco (where I do a lot of my shopping - did you know you can get a pound of goat cheese there for five dollars?), I happened upon a couch that was nearly an exact duplicate of the one I loved. And it cost $700. I snapped a picture of it on my phone and sent it to Don, with many exclamation points. There were only three left. We bought it that day, and it sat in my (very generous) in-laws' basement for months and months, as our house was still gutted at the time.

It emerged unscathed from its tenure as a basement dweller, and now we love it. The cat likes the ottoman - otherwise known as Kitty Sofa Adventure Island.


The image above is the living room from the front door. You can see Don's pride and joy, our gigantic new TV. The only reason it looks a little small in the picture is because the room - and the couch - is huge. It's 55 inches. The room is actually so big that we elected to install two ceiling fans, which have already been put to very good use in the warm spells we've been having. The couch seats seven or eight people, which means that when it's just the two of us we can comfortably stretch out and enjoy the gentle breeze from the fans as we watch Mythbusters in high definition.

Just like in the dining room, we still need a few pieces of furniture and decor - a new sofa table, a storage bench at the far end of the room, picture frames and art for the empty walls - not to mention some sort of window treatment. But it's an awesome place to relax, and we're really happy with it so far.

before and after

So yesterday, the front wall of the living room went from this:


To this:


It's all very exciting.