for home and hearth and ever-giving hand

pumpkin pie made by Chef Salvatore; you can't see it well in the pic, but the banners say "Hall" and "Smiley", respectively

Thank ye the gods, O dwellers in the land,
For home and hearth and ever-giving hand.

     -- excerpted from "The Seeker in the Marshes" by Daniel Lewis Dawson

Wow, a week since the last post? Where does the time go?

Well, into the busy activity of the holidays, obviously. Not that we get too wound up in the holidays per se, and we are staunch supporters of the stay-in-your-pajamas-all-day tradition of celebration, but even a relaxed holiday is a change of routine that can turn things upside down a bit.

Uncle Sal and Miss M clearly making up for lost timeThankfully, Guy and Sister both subscribe to the same celebratory philosophy, which meant that our family Thanksgiving was delightful and fun with none of that pesky stress nonsense that no one needs anyway. We ate a ridiculous amount of food, visited and laughed and played, took naps, ate some more, watched a bunch of Friday Night Lights (which they loved, because hello, awesome), and ate some more. (Cute moment of the holiday: when they arrived Wednesday night and Miss M was eating a bit of dinner before bedtime, she asked Sister, "Where's Uncle Sal?" Sister explained he was at work and wouldn't be home until after she was in bed but he would see her the next morning. To which Miss M asked, "Why isn't he here to play with me?")

Before they left Friday, Guy very graciously helped move the guest room furniture (my old bedroom set) to the basement where it will be stored until Miss M is ready for it*. Getting the room cleared out was important to getting started on the work in that room, since we pretty much can't do anything until the room is emptied out. We don't have to completely repaint the room, thankfully, but we are going to be doing some painting, and of course putting up new furniture and decorations.

*Miss M thinks of the guest room as hers, since she sleeps there when she stays the night. She (and we) call it her room. So we were a tad concerned what the reaction would be when we started dismantling it. Sister kept her occupied in the kitchen as we started taking the bed apart, but the jig was up when Guy passed through on the way to the basement carrying the headboard and footboard. Which elicited an alarmed cry of "You broke my bed!" from Miss M and sent her scurrying to the guest room to find the other furniture already dismantled and ready to hauled downstairs. "What did you do to my room?!" she asked anxiously. But the opportunity to run and slide across the now wide-open wood floor seemed to ease her distress.

Saturday, we spent a wonderful few hours with ProcrastiGirl, enjoying a quick brunch before catching a matinee showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. The three of us seeing the newest Harry Potter installment at the theater has become something of a tradition; it'll be sad when we'll do it for the last time this summer. We enjoyed the movie, especially the animated "Three Brothers" sequence in the middle. (If you've seen it, you know why.) But I think my favorite part was a scene when Harry tells Hermione, "You're brilliant, Hermione," and she replies, "No, I'm just highly logical with an ability to see past the extraneous details." At which point, ProcrastiGirl and Sally patted each of my knees from either side as a way to say, "Yep, that's our Bitty", and then we all started whisper-giggling. I am, apparently, the Hermione.

After we said goodbye, we figured it was late enough in the day to brave the holiday weekend hordes at IKEA, who were hopefully dissipating enough to not chew our faces off like starved zombies while we gathered the numerous flat packs of furniture we'll need for the creative room. I compiled this list after many hours of careful research and measurement and...yes, I admit it, some 3-D modeling with Google Sketchup. Shut up. Okay, go ahead and mock me, but it meant that we could make a beeline for the warehouse area make a list of the aisle and bins for each of the items on our list, and load up the three pallet carts with our various flat packs, all in the space of about 45 minutes in the midst of a only-slightly-diminished-from-peak-shopping-hours swarm of people. The checkout line was long and the wait at the delivery reservation desk, too, which is why our total trip was about an hour and a half, but considering it was 20 minutes there and back, that's pretty darn efficient.

just a glimpse of the stack of boxes full of furniture waiting to be assembled...Even though we won't start the project for two more weeks, we wanted to get the IKEA trip out of the way as soon as possible since the crowds will only get worse the close we get to the holidays. And, we figured if there was a waiting list for having things delivered, we'd have plenty of time. Turns out, however, that they prefer to get deliver sooner rather than later so they don't have to store stuff, so we ended up having our stuff delivered first thing Sunday morning. Good thing the room was already emptied out! Otherwise, there wouldn't have been anywhere to put all those big, heavy boxes.

So the guest room has been emptied of old furniture, with a few odds and ends to be put away still, and there is now a big stack of furniture-to-be occupying the middle of the room. I'll make a trip to the paint store this week for the bit of paint we'll need and we may even get a head start this weekend and next. Which means...it's coming together!

Guess I'd better hurry up and finish updating the guest room and library renovations. So here, have the next installments: scraping the trim! Oooh, exciting!

Guest & Creative Room, part 3: scraping the trim

Library, part 3: scraping the trim

This is another case of the text for both being the same but the pictures are different so be sure to at least check out the two different picture galleries. (Future phase updates will have different text for each, since the projects began to diverge after this point even though they were done at the same time.)

I have the pictures done for the next couple of phases but haven't yet done the write-ups; hopefully those will be up in the next couple of days so keep an eye open.