Gettin' It Done in the Bedroom

Over the past couple weeks, Mr. W and I have been getting busy in the bedroom like you wouldn't believe. I know that sounds dirty. And it has been dirty. In fact, I've had paint and dust on my body just about every day...

Half of the bedroom looks pretty good. The other half looks like this.

It started when we finished the floor ten days ago. It was glorious—we had it professionally sanded, then Mr. W meticulously stained it and applied three coats of polyurethane.

And then the cat walked through it and left about 50 paw prints in the wet poly.

That may have been one of my least favorite things to tell Mr. W ever in our relationship. I thought for sure the cat would end up in the microwave. When I asked him whether the poly was toxic—because I was worried about the cat's feet—he said bluntly, "I don't care." He and Zöe have since made up...

It's funny how this whole renovation thing works. It feels like everything takes forever and then you turn some invisible corner and suddenly everything accelerates. It feels like we've accomplished more in the last couple weeks than we have in the last two months.

This is the inspiration for the entire room. A picture our friend Sweet Pete painted a long time ago.

One of the most exciting milestones has been the assembly of the closet.

Since March, Mr. W and I have been coexisting in one tiny closet that's also holding a sizable collection of stuff to sell at a garage sale. To have some breathing room and be able to organize all of our haute, haute couture has been a dream come true.

I pretty much want to lock myself in the closet and just lie on the floor, marveling at its beauty.

We still have a little work to do in there. Mr. W has to install molding along the floor and build some more shelves for me in the corner. But oh even in its unfinished state, it's magical. Stepping inside each morning to put on my grubby renovation outfits feels just like the shopping scene in Pretty Woman.

On top of the closet progress, Mr. W put his mad carpentry skills to work to build a set of shelves in the new entryway of the bedroom. Saturday afternoon while he painted the add-on exterior, I spent a couple hours arranging books and pictures and knickknacks. Heaven. Seriously, if you ever need a bookshelf arranged, call me. I'll come to your house and style it while you sit on the couch drinking lemonade, barking at me about how the color scheme is all wrong and I need to move that one vase to the left two inches.

We really are on the home stretch in the bedroom. Well, except for the fact that Mr. W plans to build us a king-sized platform bed. But that's phase 2. Or maybe phase 63 at the rate all this remodeling nonsense seems to go.

Blowing the Doors Off

I'm going to try to keep this brief. Between work, life coaching, traveling to Canada and Santa Ynez, trying to participate in the occasional social activity, and managing the upkeep of multiple properties, this girl hasn't had a whole lot of time to blog. However, she has had time to paint and organize stuff at the future wine country abode.

Before Mr. W left for Vancouver, we decided to take the doors off this closet in the new house's hallway and paint it the same soft grey we chose for the walls. I couldn't be happier with the choice. It looked like this before we moved in:

Now it's filled with books and games and pictures and DVDs:

I think it'll add a little interest for visitors when they venture from the dinner table to the bathroom...

I also decided to remove two of the bedrooms' closet doors last weekend. My parents were visiting—celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary. Don't you want to applaud that? It is seriously impressive that people can stay together that long. I look forward to celebrating five decades with Mr. W someday. Anyway, with their helpful hands at the ready, I was able to remove and repaint 8 doors. And laugh hysterically as my dad flapped around like a wild man when he walked into a cobweb inside one of the closets...

 

Now instead of the old garish yellow doors, I have nice clean white ones.

Bye bye buttercup.

In the spirit of door removal, I also decided to take apart some of the kitchen cupboards. Here's the before (before we moved in, that is):

And here's how it looks now:

It's kind of amazing how much more this one little change opens up the whole kitchen. I can't wait until we gut the whole thing and have some other open shelving for our ridiculous mass of cookbooks. (The picture above represents about 1/4 of the collection...)

I'm sure I'll have the house just the way I want it by the time we're ready to start remodeling. I guess that'll allow Mr. W to have more of a say in how things go and not feel so much like I'm designing the whole house without him. And I'm sure that'll move us a step or two closer to that five-decades-of-marriage goal...