As if. SuperGuy found this sun thingie…somewhere. He made this mahogony-ish base for it. It is SO not going in the main living area of the Love Nest. I told him to paint the base teal, and it could go in our beachy guest room. Nope, he can’t paint the base…the wood is too nice…

Well, it’s not staying here on the mantle. I’m just sayin’  and I don’t want it out in the main area either. I’m planning on winning this argument.

Oh, and yes, there is only one of the boys and his lovely girlfriend on the mantle. If any of the other 4 boys are upset, I plan on changing out the photo regularly, you know, unless one of the boys ticks me off…then they go to the bottom of the stack… Eventually we’re going to get a large photo blown up and put over the mantle. We just haven’t done it yet. Though this silly sun is making me move picking out that photo and getting it blown up and printed way up on my to do list!

• New House Rule
• Where do we go from here?
• Yet Another End of an Era
• Decorating with Photos
• Road Trip-Cadillac Ranch Version

So, you know the New Love Nest? Well, we back up to some guy’s land. Land that the city got rights to to put in a sewer system, but ending up stripping the land completely. Really who does that in a liberal, conserve-the-land type town??

So SuperGuy got permission from the guy who owns the land to reforest it. He ordered trees…well, slips of trees, from the Missouri Conservation Department. They came this week. 300 of them…

We planted them along the creek and all along the stripped out area. Unfortunately we still have about 150 more trees to plant…

It was hard work!

This is the big path of stripped out land the city left in their wake… Yes, we have a lot of trees to plant…

This is lovely part of the sewer system that is above ground… Well, that is getting hidden with cedars…and I don’t mean slips of cedars, I mean real live hide-me-now cedars.

It really annoys me when developers/cities strip out way more than needed when they do a project…and leave it like that. Hopefully it will all look really nice…in about, what? 5-10 years???   (if we get the other 150 trees planted this week…)

• Glad We’re Not on a Flood Plain
• Unidentified Purple Flower
• Rambling Road Trip Thoughts
• Moving On
• Good Morning!

Yep, the horrible screen-saver-blue room at the Love Nest? It’s gone. Bit the dust.

Note to self…be conveniently gone the next time we have a brightly colored room to repaint into a soft cream color. Just saying.

Two coats of primer…and still the blue showed through.

So we painted it a nice, warm cream color. Going to go with a beachy theme in that room with a few pops of teal as accents. Some beach photos on the walls. It’s going to be lovely. No, I didn’t take photos of the finished paint job because I’m waiting to get the bedspread on the bed and pretty the room up a bit. I have a cute worn blue teal wooden chair we’re going to put in there, and I think I’ll paint a bed table teal.

Anyway, the best part of the two day paint job? The end of it…

A nice quiet champagne celebration for two by the fire.

• Who Do You Think Will Win
• Stages of Life
• Best of Intentions
• Tiffany Blue
• It’s All in the Details

Ah, I am beyond annoyed at myself. You know my beautiful milk glass lamp?

The one I love and adore?

Yes, well what’s wrong with this picture? In the midst of moving furniture around in the Love Nest…I knocked the top of the antique lamp. It went crashing to the floor. After I screamed and cried and picked up the pieces…I went out on ebay to try to find a matching globe for the lamp. No luck so far. Also hit 2 antique malls. No luck. I’m heartbroken and totally annoyed that I’d be so clumsy. It is my absolute favorite milk glass piece that I own.  I need to go hide this lamp so it’s not such an in your face reminder… 

• Sh! Don’t Tell
• Milk Glass Antique Finds
• Great Joy at The Love Nest
• Not a Perfect Match
• An Adorable Find

So, I have this cute lighted box at the Love Nest on my beloved gate leg table.

But I have to pull the table out to plug it in and unplug it. So…

I bought this remote control plugin adapter thingie. (technical term for it, I swear )

Now when I sit down on the couch, I just pick up this remote and click the light on.

Yes, I know, it wouldn’t hurt me to get up off my …. and go over and plug the light in. I tell myself that it’s better for the table to not be moved out from the wall and pushed back when I plug and unplug the light. I’m nice to my furniture like that.

• The Couch is GONE! The Couch is GONE!
• Full Circle
• I Never Want to See This Again.
• A couch by any other name…
• The Magnificent Sideboard

Really, you’d think I wouldn’t be so excited about this…

Yes, it looks ugly…and wonderful…well at least to me. We finally had the skylights removed in my office. You remember them? The ones that leak all the time no matter what we did to them? Like when hurricane Ike practically took out my office?  I no longer have to do this when I think it’s going to rain:

So happy!

Of course, SuperGuy isn’t as happy as I am…’cause he’s going to have to now redo the ceiling and paint it.

Oh, and Kate? Just for you…after I wrestled with updating my WordPress install…for two days…I added some more smilies! This one is my new fav

also like:

• males
• Think Good Thoughts
• just a note
• Really Happy Person-Recheck
• Desperate Times

Yes, folks, The Love Nest is moving. After 3 years of apartment life over in Columbia…We’ve kind of hit our limit. Not that we didn’t love our little Love Nest over there. Though the insulation was non-existent. We’re also tired of the 3 flights of stairs. So we decided to start looking for a nice little house over there. Well, we found one, and barring any problems with inspections, we’re scheduled to move into the house the first week of December! (Knock on wood)

It’s a cute little 3 bedroom/2 bath house.  Guess which room gets painted first??? Yes, the “screen saver blue” room has to go. (SuperGuy’s name for it.) The house backs up to some land the town owns, so hopefully it won’t get developed behind us. It has a nice little gas fireplace too, see that?

It has the fridge already, so we really just need to get a washer/dryer and we’re set to go. I’m stupidly excited about having a garage. Very tired of parking way down the parking lot at the apartment.

Annie, if you’re reading this, it’s on the east side of town, off the Lake of the Woods exit. South. Fairly near your parents.

It’s about 15-20 minutes closer to St. Louis, which is nice for the commute back and forth. It’s about 5 minutes from SuperGuy’s work, so that is nice too. SuperGuy is working about 8-10 days a month over in Columbia, so it will be nice to have a home over there too.

The best part? The house payment is less than what we pay in rent for our apartment… The housing market over there is so depressed right now. Plus we’ll be building up equity, instead of just throwing rent away each month…and did I mention it has a garage? …and no three flights of stairs to get into it??

So you’ll get to follow along as we decorate the house. I’m sure I’ll have moving stories galore.

Oh, and The Impish One? If you’d like to collect some friends/roommates for the first weekend in December, we’ll throw money at you to help us move! Or food. Or both!

• The Love Nest
• Moving Day
• I Never Want to See This Again.
• Is This Normal?
• Moving On

I am such a sucker for survivors. Like this pretty cracked milk glass piece…with its tiny crack.

Like these tiny portulaca plants and petunias. They are annuals here in the midwest. But they determinedly  sprouted up this year. The weird thing? The portulaca were from TWO summers ago!!  In a hanging planter on the balcony rail that I wanted SuperGuy to tear down and get rid of. But I couldn’t stand to lose these spunky plants. So I dug them up and put them in a few pots in the backyard. Didn’t really think they’d make it.

But look! they are going to bloom! Wonder if they’ll come back again next year? I guess they didn’t read the gardening book on how they are annuals in our climate. Will get pretty macro shots of the blooms soon.

Drop by tomorrow, I’ll actually have some photos of ME at the wedding. Who knew??

• Portulaca Paradise
• Spunky Survivors
• Pretty Purple Petunias
• The First Survivor
• Plethora of Portulaca

Well, we did actually get a new front door. Unfortunately, similar to the lock…we’re not having very good luck with it.

As soon as the contractor left, we noticed you could see daylight coming through at the top and bottom of the door opening.

So we called the contractor who said, “oh, yeah, the kit was missing some of the weather stripping thingies. I’ll get them from the door manufacturer and come back.”

It’s also a double door and the “dummy” door doesn’t fit very securely. Yes, they’ll need to fix that too.

Sigh. Did I mention I’m so not good with this remodeling stuff?

The windows in the door are beautiful though. They let so much light into our front hallway. Love that.

I need to pull out my macro and take a closeup of that glass. Bet it would make a good texture overlay for photos…

There is enough character and/or wavey-ness to the glass that you can’t see inside either. Even with the lights on inside at night. I won’t tell you how we tested that theory…

Now I’m in paint chip heck, trying to pick out the perfect red color to paint the door. The painter is supposed to be here the end of the week. He’s also going to paint our stairwell inside that needs scaffolding to be painted. SuperGuy just isn’t into scaffolding painting. (He’s afraid of heights!!)

Well, I’m back to staring at paint chips. . .

• The Story of a Door Lock
• My Love Affair with Pretty Doors
• How I Know It’s Spring
• Signs of the Times
• Life in Focus-Seeing is Believing

So with the new front door, we needed to get a new door lock. So….we did….

Yes, it’s going to be one of those stories…

We go to the hardware store that shall remain nameless (Home Depot) on Saturday while the contractor was putting in the new front door. We talked to the Hardware Store Helper Guy, and he talked us into a Baldwin lock. “The Best” These have a smartkey system where you can rekey them yourself whenever you want to. You know, like say…when one of the boys loses their keys and has no clue where they are…

This is Baldwin’s prestige line. Okay. We’ll pay more for them. We have a double door, so we wanted the  matching “fake” handle for the second door. The Hardware Store Helper Guy said he’d call and order that part on Monday. Fast forward to Sunday morning. SuperGuy goes to rekey the front door to an existing key we have. He messes it up. (why, oh, why do males refuse to carefully read instructions??? ) It locks up the front door lock.

So, SuperGuy pulls the lockset completely out of the door and takes it up to Home Depot where Hardware Store Helper Guy uses their secret-double-probation-key-redoer thingie. They set the lock to our existing keys. SuperGuy comes home and puts the lock back in the door. (He forgets the extra keys he was supposed to have made for the boys and my parents, but I digress…)

Fast forward to Monday. Hardware Store Helper Guy calls. “They don’t make a fake handle for that model you bought. You’ll have to buy another whole set $$$ and just use the handle off of it.” For real??? THEN he says, oh, and I found out the model you bought isn’t made by the Baldwin $$ well made door lock company. It’s made by Black & Decker and just marketed under Baldwin. (So we overpaid for a “good lock” which, well, isn’t one.)

So we can pull the door lock and handle and return it. Buy a new one. Get it rekeyed. Reinstall it. Or go with one door handle.

Why, oh, why is remodeling stuff always like this???

Note to my beloved sons. I did not lock you out of the house. We just need to get you new keys…you know, when we decide what we’re actually going to do about the front door lock.

• Forgotten Chores
• The Actual Door
• My Love Affair with Pretty Doors
• A Bird in The Hand
• The Past