I Feel Calmer Already

Before:

After:

A good day’s work.

ETA: After a good night’s sleep, it occurs to me that the above pictures could be misconstrued.  My newfound calmness in the room has to do with the paint color on the walls, not the lack of children romping on my bed.  (Although, if we’re being totally honest here, that certainly helps.)

Getting Worse Before It Gets Better

The house is slowly coming together, although you couldn’t tell at all from looking at it.

I had a feeling when we made our to do list for this process that the house would get a lot worse before it started looking better.  This is one of the few rooms we hadn’t yet painted.  It didn’t really need to be painted (other than the fact that it was silly-putty-pinky-taupe blech!), but there were a number of scuffs and marks on the walls.  And the previous owner did not use washable paint, so when we tried washing the walls, we got down to bare drywall.  Lovely.

With the painting of the den and the connected hallway complete, there’s only one major project left.  Those built-ins in the picture were handmade by the handsome guy also in the picture.  Unfortunately, at the time of said making a few years ago, we were unaware that one must use a specific kind of primer to prevent knots from bleeding through the paint.  So, the whole set needs to be re-primed and painted.  (Although, ironically, the new wall paint matches the knots perfectly, so perhaps we could claim we polka-dotted them to match?  Hmmm…maybe not.)  Before they’re primed and painted, they need to be repaired in a few places where settling has created gaps and doors that don’t fit quite right.

Once we finish those shelves, however, all that’s left is touch-ups, cleaning, and packing of clutter.  Relatively fast stuff.

And with the end of this post comes the end of NaBloPoMo.  I may not have succeeded per their rules, but I have made thirty posts in the past thirty days, so I’ll call it a personal success.