Buy all the things

I'm so tired of buying all the things. I have shopping fatigue. This is a real thing. I am trying to make sure every possible item that we need is ordered and delivered so that when the contractor begins his part, he'll have not only the specs on everything, but the actual products available for installation.

We have lights, fans, faucets, plumbing valves, toilets, you name it, arriving via our friendly UPS man. It is almost a daily occurrence, which gets tricky here since packages aren't left outside, but instead have to have someone available to accept them. I'm starting to think he's trying to arrive just around the time we get home from work so that he doesn't have to keep taking our haul o' goods back and forth. It could just be luck, but I prefer to think of it as a benevolent act of kindness.

On the topic of buying, we bought a couch. A sectional to be exact. C's parents gave us a generous gift to help with the purchase of an appliance or some other renovation related expense. We already purchased our washer/dryer and are using lightly used hand me down appliances for our kitchen, so we started dreaming of a new couch. Our current couch is a bit of a mess and is known to leave our backs in a bit of a mess as well. I got it as a floor model back in grad school and it has moved from Colorado, to San Diego, to San Francisco, to New York. It has seen a great many places and a great many years. So when Ethan Allen sent me an e-mail advertising a much coveted sectional 20% off until the end of August, I persuaded C to go to the store and sit on all the couches with me. It was met with much approval. We have my side of the family coming into town over Christmas and also hope C's family will come stay with us for an extended period of time soon after the house is finished. We need seating, seating that won't leave a person begging for mercy or for the number to a local motel. So, after a few hours pouring over fabrics, we have a couch, or at least an order for one. I'm so excited for it in all of it's stain guarded, performance grade, velvety softness. I expect to spend a few afternoons sprawled in it's embrace as the breeze wafts through our new screened in windows. Such dreams I have.

But the reality is that we're still a ways off. The couch will arrive mid to late November and we are crossing our fingers that the house will be mostly complete, allowing tenants to move in upstairs in October.

I took a photo of the couch fabrics as a happy reminder in the weeks to come. The amber fabric and ivory fabric are accent pillows, the gray is the couch. It doesn't show very well in the photo but it has a nice texture. The small gray/green rectangle is our paint swatch. Happily the black floors and white baseboard of the show room helped me visualize how it will look with our kitchen cabinetry as the living room, dining room, and kitchen will all be open to one another.

On our 'finished list' is C's hand tilling of the back yard (see we neeeeeeeed that couch to sooth and provide a resting place for his aching muscles):

It looks so much tidier now. I am itching to get it planted up, but we need to work on our fencing a bit and some of the concrete before hand. The pretty things are always the last to go in. We'll plant next spring, but that hasn't stopped me from dreaming of lavender and cone flowers. At least I'm not dreaming of the pet cemetery we stumbled across back there. What's that? I didn't mention that while tilling C found a large stuffed duck that looked like it was buried by a dog? It was a few inches under the topsoil. We thought it was a bit odd, but not too odd to put up any red flags, after all we'd been picking out other various items from the dirt, including but not limited to : marbles, glass, nails, a hanger, a sponge, broken toys, a domino, utensils, bottles, wrappers, razor blades (multiple blades, yes), a sock, etc, etc, etc. Turns out that big stuffed duck was buried with a big dead dog. We weren't sure at first what it was seeing as how the owner of said buried dog decided that once again, duct tape was the perfect material to wrap it in, turning it into a scary mummy package of eeeek. I understand the burial of pets, what I don't understand is burying a dog 8" below the surface in a rental property that has barely enough soil to plant flowers in it let alone a large dog! But I find myself being thankful it was a dog and not a someone.

All right, shake it off, shake it off.

Here are a few small projects I've been working on. This is our new towel hanger for the basement bathroom. The wood was a scrap I found laying around from the wood paneling in the basement. I ordered the black hooks from Home Depot for around $1.25ea. I cleaned the board up a bit, I still wanted it to be a bit rustic with knots and cracks. I then drilled a few quick pilot holes and used my handy dandy bolt cutters to shorten the provided screws. This was probably the quickest project start to finish I've ever done, not to mention the cheapest.

The mirror took a bit more prep work but it turned out lovely. This will also go in the basement bathroom. We got this mirror as a hand me down from my parents. It had a few wood blocks attached to the frame which I pulled off, removed the old staples, filled in the holes and sanded down. The black paint was a sample can I picked up from Benjamin Moore, onyx, as a possible kitchen island color. I think it is a keeper.