Lacrosse

My husband loves the game. Not just a little. He has MUCH LOVE for the game. After he finished his MBA, Paul decided that he had too much time on his hands. So he decided that he should coach a local high school team.

He has been loving it. Their first game was tonight. They won -- a resounding victory. Congrats to Paul and team!

Furnished

Yes, the house is furnished. Yes, we have appliances in the kitchen. But more interesting to me right now is what is on the wall. Before the fire, we had two pictures hanging on our kitchen wall. I'm not sure if we had anything else hung on the walls downstairs. Does the bathroom mirror count?

For months and months, I admired a painting. But between this and that, and its heavy price tag, I just kept admiring it in the gallery. And admiring. And admiring. And admiring.

Finally my mom took pity on me and painted for me. I mean, us.

Reveal

We are not quite done yet. I know, it has been less than a year. But the floors have to be refinished and we have opted to wait until after lacrosse season. Since it is our decision, it would be poor form to complain. Floors notwithstanding, I think that it is months beyond time to do the big reveal. Perhaps after all of this time, it isn't really a big reveal, but nonetheless...

The front of the house is now dark gray. The shutters are black. I consider this a vast improvement over the purple with orange shutters. Admittedly though, it is now harder to describe the house to people who are coming for the first time.

The next two are different angles on the kitchen. In the first picture, you can really tell that we opened the kitchen up to the back hall. For those of you who remember the particle board cabinets that we painted white, you will recognize that this is a huge change!

We combined the parlor and the den into a single room. We also changed out the mantles. Ironically, once the walls were removed, we learned that the parlor and the den were originally connected. The mantles were probably original, but we weren't that sad to lose them to smoke damage.

In the dining room, we added a new set of french doors and a "new" vintage light.

The bottom line on all of our changes is that we couldn't be happier . . . unless maybe the house was on a huge lot, had a great big garage and was about 50% larger. But best not to get greedy!

Cheers.