It sort of looks like people live here

Here's what we grew at our house (it's like our own personal chia pet):

We've been hard at work populating the kitchen.  Look!

We spent some time working on the downstairs last week; some final painting and trim-painting are finally completed, and we like how it looks.  Last night we picked up the dropcloths and finally saw the new room.  We really like it, tho we hate the floor and it is going to be covered with something, anything else soon.

The brown paper is coming off the fireplace soon too, but we have just a few final painting tasks in the office first.  Keep you posted.


The boys put together some bookcases for us and we began to put them up; today we will screw them into the wall (since the Christmas tree fell down in Red Bank I've believed strongly in screwing everything into the wall!) and maybe put some books on them.  These guys are experts at Ikea bookcases; they had them up in about 8 minutes per bookcase.

Then we were dithering about what to put down over the moving parquet in the dining room, so we had to remove all the boxes of books.  I'd stacked them up along one wall in there, and somehow they'd taken over.  So we moved them into the living room, and now it looks like this:

So those are the books.  Here's what the living room looks like when we pretend it isn't half-full of books.  Sort of normal-looking, right?

We have to figure out what kind of furniture we want to have in this space; more on that in a later post.  This works for now.  Anyway, the dining room is pristine, see?

Please note that the concussion-inducing chandelier is still in place.  Wave bye-bye.  It's leaving soon.

But doesn't the kitchen look nice?!

Final moving activities taking place today, so more pics to come.  And one note: we got our first real mail yesterday, a lovely card from darling Katie, who claims to actually read this blog (if you see this, THANK YOU!).  What fun to get our own nice mail at our own house!