What's New, Round I

So this is a motley assortment of very ugly photos, but I need to start somewhere because we've been doing SO much since we moved back about seven weeks ago. And it's dark outside now, so I can't take anything out there right now.

Sunday afternoon, I decided to tackle this mess (clarification: that's the CLOSET, not the booze):

 It's a closet in our dining room that somehow became an ideal dumping ground for paint supplies when we moved in four and a half years ago. From the ground up, that's an old rug in a trash bag, second shelf is mostly old paint and also an old towel, more paint, painting stuff (rollers, including three used (??) ones, miscellaneous crap, then the top shelf had a roasting pan, a set of dishes (boxed from when we moved from Pasadena five years ago), our wallpaper steamer and...a lot of dust.

I found three open containers of spackle: small, medium and large size. Two open and rock-hard tubes of silicon caulk. SIX paint rollers. Why?

Cleaning this closet also revealed uncapped wires in a box in the ceiling. I don't know if they're live or not, but have no reason to believe they aren't. So that's cool.

Anyway, I threw away all the stuff and got it into much better shape. Unfortunately, the following image doesn't really showcase all my work that well. You'll have to trust me; 1.5 garbage bags and half a roll of paper towels later, it's much better.

After years of driving me nuts, I finally replaced the retro 60s-era hardware on the built-ins in our hallway. Martha, ya done good (they're from her line at Home Depot). These were about $4 each, so it's not turning out to be a particularly cheap project at six in the hallway and another six in our bedroom for the built-in dresser, but it makes me happy every day to walk by non-ugly, non-retro hardware.

In the way of other updates, we had a garage sale, probably a month ago, and ditched a bunch of furniture and excess junk. And we went to the dump. Oh, the glorious dump, where you can throw away an entire full-size pickup truck load of trash for $21. I love the dump. So there's been a lot of paring down, and it has felt fantastic.

We've also done some painting, some replacing of hideous light fixtures and old outlets and some gardening. I redid my headboard (tufted, it's fab), hung curtains and plotted the kitchen remodel. The downstairs bedroom floor was refinished. The upstairs floor was refinished, too, and the bathroom is complete except for baseboard and a door covering the attic access. Todd's office upstairs is in the crosshairs for demolition and new drywall and insulation. Half the beds are mulched and the driveways got sealcoated by likely a fly-by-night operation, but that's a story for another post.

Clearly, there are a lot of overdue blog posts. But we're not going anywhere for a while, and I'm going to write them all. We're home. We finally have some traction here and stuff's getting done. It feels great.