Where the F did the last 8 months go??

When you’re a kid, every day of the year moves like a hot and muggy summer afternoon: excruciatingly slow. I’d love to go back to my younger self and explain how eventually, as an adult, days bleed into weeks bleed into months, and all of a sudden before we’ve really noticed it the seasons have shifted again (my 12-year-old self would definitely ignore my 27-year-old self). A week doesn’t feel like a lifetime any more—it doesn’t feel like much of anything, in fact. Maybe it just feels like living. I only feel the passage of time when I stop long enough on my evening commute to see, suddenly and for the first time, that the leaves on the birch saplings in the marsh have turned bright yellow, seemingly overnight.

What I’m trying to say is, so much time has passed in the life of this small blog, and yet it feels like so little time as well.

So I’ll attempt to recap a bit, as best as I can.

Our house actually feels like a home again for the first time in more than a year. It took a long time to get here. A lot of pinching and saving and waiting waiting waiting, but we’ve pretty much done it. It’s functional—“holy crap I have a dishwasher??” is a thought that runs through my head regularly—and it’s slowly becoming beautiful, too.



The addition we've built has made the house so much more usable—the layout is perfect, with the centralized kitchen becoming the literal heart of the home. I can’t imagine life without our second bathroom now (first world problems, I know, I know), and having the washer and dryer on the first floor is amazing (I will never miss those days of lugging wet clothes from the washer in the basement to the dryer on the first floor).

I don’t always stop to really take stock of what we’ve accomplished here in less than 2 ½ years. It’s astounding, really, when you look back.

That photo above is of our mudroom, which last I showed hadn't been tiled yet. We chose a simple beige ceramic tile and it turned out to be the perfect choice.

Since this is the door that Lucy uses to go in and out of the backyard, and it's where we keep her food dish, it needed to be able to stand up to pretty much anything. It looks really nice and luckily it hides drool and kibble messes pretty well, to boot.

The paint color is called Silver Sage, and it's actually my favorite color in the house. So much light streams in through the french doors; it actually brightens up the kitchen and the living room as well.

The view below is taken from the doorway that leads to the living room, looking towards the bathroom. The kitchen is on the left, and beyond that you can see to the dining room.

 

On the wall is a framed print of an Alice in Wonderland book page. It migrated here from its old spot in the living room. Every room needs a little touch of Alice, I say.

Last I showed the new bathroom, it too hadn't had flooring put in yet and was pretty unfinished in general. Now it's probably the room that's the closest to being completely done:



Before building this, we only had one little, cramped bathroom upstairs. It's so much nicer having a spacious bathroom on the main floor, especially when guests are over!

We added in a double-wide shower that is just amazing. We sprung for the raindrop showerhead and it was worth every cent.

 

Yes, I am that psyched that I just posted a photo of the inside of my shower, but whatevs. I know everyone could just die from the excitement.

 

Next to the jumbo shower, and even more exciting, is the most amazing, beautiful, glorious, awe-inspiring, fantabulous part of the entire renovation, in my most humble opinion:

 

 

LOOK! Laundry! On the first floor! A washer and a dryer next to each other! It's a thing of beauty.

I am 1000% positive that I will never turn to Branden at any point in my life and say, "Hey, you know what I wish I could do because it was so much fun and I miss it terribly? I wish I could lug laundry down to the spidery old basement to be washed, then struggle to haul the wet load up the stairs, to a completely different floor of the house, to load into the dryer." Yup, I'm all set with that forever.

Aside from some little stuff like artwork on the walls, the bathroom is done-zo.

It's pretty great crossing one room off the list. Eventually we'd like to upgrade the vanity in here, since we didn't realize how much room we'd have to spare when the addition was being built. But that can happen down the road and it's wayyy low on the priority list. As in, might not even be on the list.

In other news, the kitchen is finished and beautiful and amazing and I often end up just standing in it looking around in disbelief. But that's a whole other post for a whole other day. And I swear that day won't be eight months from now. Pinky promise.