Home Improvements

Another weekend of home improvement. We’re really starting to get somewhere on a few of our projects. I’m very excited. As you may know, this is our first house, and given that we’ve never really stayed in one place for too long before, it never seemed worth it to put a lot of money and effort into design and decor. Then, when we bought this place, we’ve had to work hard to break out of that mindset. We’ve been in our house for almost two years now, and we seem to do designing in fits and starts. (Luckily, I’ve been told this is the right way to do it — one room at a time.) The first winter we lived here, we bought some furniture (this is what happens when you move from a one-bedroom apartment into a two story house!) and some bathroom accessories, lights and — my favorite purchase — an antique hall tree.

Then, in 2009, we faced a money crunch, and the decor thing went on the back burner. (However, I did create my garden, so that was a total win!)

But this year we’ve jumped back into the fray. A new garage door! Deck furniture and a grill! A flat-screen TV and a blue-ray player! New shelves for the kitchen cabinets! (The person who lived here before us installed these giant, cavernous all new kitchen cabinets and then failed to put any shelves in them so they’d be, you know, USEFUL.) We’ve also ordered some furniture for the other bedroom (no more shall we jokingly call it “the dressing room” because it’s where we’ve been keeping our clothes). The all-white walls that I’m sure seemed like a good idea to the previous owner and her real-estate agent are beginning to drive me bonkers, so we’re probably going to be painting. I’d like to get some of the art we own (other than our marriage contract) up on the walls. I made a new spice rack to free up cabinet space (seriously, previous owner, you may have put in a totally new kitchen, but not one with particularly useful cabinets).

We’ve reorganized the bedroom furniture and the biggest change of all has been the basement, which we’ve completely cleaned out (I thought the recycling guys might have had a heart-attack when they saw our front stoop that week), reorganized (I have 15 boxes of books) and prepared for a transformation into a rec room. We’re going to put in a big, comfy sectional couch, a second TV and entertainment center, and an entire wall of built-in bookshelves (see above, re: my books). I’m super-excited.

This weekend, I bought curtains ($4 each!), a rug ($50 on clearance), and painted a $35 dresser I bought off craigslist. I am not much of a painter, so I’m more than a little pleased by how well it all turned out. When I go online to look up stuff about painting furniture, most people seem to be obsessed with getting a “lacquer-like finish” and it makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me, because I actually like real wood furniture to look like, you know — real wood. Not laminate. I like a brush mark. I think it looks good. Am I alone here?

The garden is looking good, too. I’ve got a bunch of chili peppers, and finally some of my cherry tomatoes are ripe. I’m sure I’ll be drowning in them by next week. The squash are growing, though we’ve only had male zucchini blossoms so far. The cucumbers are still in blossoms. The basil is fantastic — I think we’ve eaten more of that than anything else. The lettuce, sadly, was a bust. I think I’ll pass on that next year.  We got one (giant) salad’s worth out of it, but then it bolted and got huge and tough and bitter.

So those are my projects. I know some of you have been tackling home improvement stuff recently as well. How’s that going?

Speaking of “home improvements” — have you noticed all the work I’ve done on the site? I’ve updated the home page with all my 2010 releases, and there’s info about my short fiction as well as ASCENDANT all over the place. Enjoy!