Done. Sort of.

The question I get asked most frequently is, "So, are you all done with your house?"

And..I'm never quite sure how to respond. It really depends on your definition of done. People always says that once you have a house you're never actually done working on it. I'm beginning to see exactly what they mean.

I feel like we've come SO far and our house looks a billion times better than when we bought it. Then I think about all of the things we eventually want to do and I start feeling like we've only made a slight dent.

But, when you get right down to it, we really are pretty much done with the things we plan on doing right now and that is one amazing feeling. All we have left are a few baseboards to paint that are in the downward stairs area that we might have...erm.....forgot about. Then in the basement we have a few little things like getting trim for those chair rail-shelf type things, painting out little "door" to the crawl space and added a baseboard on one of the walls. Then Jayson wants to clean out the garage and the crawl space so we have more storage area....

And before that list gets any longer, let me just show you some pictures of what we've done to the main level.

Let's recap, shall we? The following pictures are what it looked like before:

I'll admit, the main level really wasn't all that unfortunate looking in the first place, unless of course you looked up. The ceiling wasn't in the best of shape, as there were all of these weird circular holes that were previously used to plumb the swamp cooler to all rooms of the house, which is really ingenious, except we now have central air. So, those holes just became a waste of space. We had to cover those up, which was possibly one of the most annoying tasks. You see, you have to patch and mud them, which takes like an hour or less. Seems simple right? Well, the thing is, the patches take like a day to dry and you have to mud the patches at least three times... so it takes at least three days to do...but really only like three hours of work. Anyway, then we had to paint the ceiling..which was probably the hardest thing we did on the house. That vaulted, super thick textured ceiling was a beast. We were up two week nights until 1 in the morning painting. We're talking three gallons of paint for just this one area of ceiling. Unfortunately I didn't get a single picture of before, so the after picture really wouldn't do much, as it now just looks like a typical white ceiling, but trust me, it looks much better than before.

Now that the really boring story of painting my ceiling is over I will show you pictures of what our lovely main level looks like now:

I will confess, when we first put that blue paint on I freaked out a little bit. It was a lot brighter than I thought it would be, but I have completely fallen in love with it (this is exactly what happened with the green wall downstairs). It couldn't be more perfect. I think it just gives it a cute little quaint-cottagey feel.

We weren't originally going to put the table in the bay window, but we put it there one day just to get it out of the way of other things and we just fell in love with it being there. It's so relaxing to be able to look out that big window while we're eating, so we just had to leave it there. It's pretty magical sitting there, eating away, and watching the snow fall from the sky at night. mmmhmmmm....


I think I may have told you this before, but I have a little bit of an obsession with doors. This is a new development since we bought the house. But seriously, I get all ga-ga now when I see a lovely door. Hence why the following picture happens to be my very favorite part of our house:

This door color is perfect. I never want to have any doors that are not this color ever ever again.

Yep, more doors. Doesn't that color look amazing against the white wall?



I still get a really giddy feeling when I walk into my house. I just plain love it. There's just something about knowing that it's ours and that it looks beautiful because we put so much of our own hard work and time into it.


Also, we discovered something magical about our house over the weekend.

We opened up our front door on Friday evening and.....

yep. We walked straight into Narnia.


Side note: (this probably should be its own post and not a side note) Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! I must confess, I'm a Christmas lover and I never obey the, "No Christmas things before Thankgiving" rule. This drives Jayson crazy, because he LOVES that rule. I totally see the logic behind the rule, it's just that I can't help but act like a kid in a candy store when I hear, see, smell, or feel Christmas. Because of this I think people think I dislike Thanksgiving, but that's totally not true at all. I actually adore the holiday. I know this is going to sound cheesey, but I adore gratitude. Seriously, I believe it's the secret to happiness. It's so hard to be sad or in a bad mood when you are thinking about all of the blessings you've had poured upon you. It's when I'm grateful that I feel truely and completely happy. I also really love Thanksgiving because it's somehow managed to escape commercialism, for the most part. Good job Thanksgiving. Plus, it doesn't hurt that I only have to work 2 1/2 days this week, but get paid for all five.

Is anyone else craving turkey and candied yams now?