My House: One Year

It was just one year ago that I settled on the 110-year old farm house that has become my home. I don’t know why Connor didn’t take down that tacky satellite dish when he was up on the roof chewing the gutters.

There are still a lot of things I want to do to the house and they are, in no particular order:

• Paint the kitchen and do something about the brown cabinets. They are actually wood, and I could paint them, but I haven’t given too much thought about a colour.
• Paint the upstairs hall. I bought frames to hang along the length of the wall, but then became paralyzed about what to put in them. I bought a fun little booklet in London called “I Bought a Liberty Scarf” reprinted from the 1930’s, and thought I might frame the pages of that.
• Make a garden. When I went to do this a few weeks ago, I found that some bright spark had put down black weedproof fabric on the front and back of the “lawn”. It’s about two inches below the surface and I’d have to pull up everything to get the fabric up. Can’t fathom why it was done. I am container gardening now, so at least I’ll have a garden.
• Get rid of the closet in my room. They blocked off one end of my bedroom to use as a closet, which is great. But what isn’t great is the six feet of dead space that it created. There’s a hanging shelf/rod system that runs the length of the closet, but the closet is only two feet wide, and so I can’t get into either end of it, which means a lot of wasted space. I need some more thought on how to deal with it. I have an idea but it’s a little strange.
• Frame in the kitchen door between the living/dining room and the kitchen. Right now, there’s one long wall with no break, so if I frame the doorway, I can paint the kitchen a different colour than the living/dining room.

I know that there are a million never-ending things I can do, but this is the short list.

One thing that isn’t on my house list, but that I do regularly, is repair Connor’s babies. He is very attached to Pink Baby, but “someone” and I am not naming names {Halas} has chewed his arms, legs and ears. So every few weeks, or after “someone” has visited, I spend a few minutes with my sewing kit, stitching arms back on, pulling together sides, repairing ears, etc. I can tell the difference between Pink Baby and Army, both pink stuffed pigs. Army doesn’t have any arms and Pink Baby has one.Every night, when I get on the phone and call my Mum, Connor goes upstairs, gets Pink Baby and comes back downstairs. Funnily, I never see him take Pink Baby upstairs.