Home Improvement But NO ONE CARES

It is probably because it is the very end of the year (and beginning of a new year) and people are all wrapped up in holiday nonsense (confession: I have been wrapped up in this, too), but it is making me a tiny bit sad that our house is looking so much nicer than it ever has and yet only two potential buyers have come to look at it.

Hopefully things will improve in the futuristic sounding New Year of 2013 (assuming we don't all die in some kind of terrible fiscal cliff apocalypse and zombies don't begin to roam the earth lusting for brains or whatever). 

Until then, more random facts about my house and how it is improving!

First, let me say that the de-cluttering continues, slowly.  We put a LOT of items into storage, including most of our books (I haven't counted our books because I don't think I can count that high.  Do we have under three thousand?  Over four thousand?  Only two thousand?  I REFUSE TO FIND OUT!).  And yet... somehow there is still all kinds of crap that we continue to uncover.

For example, the other day I decided to look through a basket of unused yarn.  The basket is a beautiful one that my mother-in-law gave me years ago, an item I have never found a good purpose for, exactly.  The yarn was just some leftovers from crocheting or knitting projects; eventually I can probably find a use for that, even if it's just a giant blanket of some type that I make out of leftovers.  Underneath, though, I found two items that I had forgotten and that I definitely did not need:

1. a plastic bag full of leftover latch hook yarn pieces from a long-ago-finished Winnie The Pooh latch hook kit I made for my son when he was very little.  Pooh can stay; the latch hook yarn from over a decade ago, not so much.

2. a bottle of hand sanitizer with a 1999 expiration date.  That's right; I had hand sanitizer in my house that expired before this millenium started.  And I didn't even know it!  I guess the upside is that all these years later I can recycle the bottle instead of throwing it away.

I also found a small treasure trove of useful items for knitting/crocheting projects, like safety pins and yarn markers (THREE different kinds of yarn markers!).  I will have to choose one of the zillion bags that I keep finding and designate it as a permanent knitting/crocheting supply bag.  Then these things will be useful instead of lost-things-I-can't-find-when-I-need-them.

Along with the constant low-level decluttering, we have two new major improvements in our house this week.  One is that Austin has nearly finished painting our bedroom.  When we moved in nine and a half years ago, the walls were slightly-dingy-white with random dings on them.  (Every time I looked at one particular ding without my glasses on I experienced a slight terror that it might be a giant bug, but thankfully it never was.)  We chose a paint color - pumpkin spice - and Austin has painted three of the four walls.

 The remaining dingy white wall:

(Austin was concerned not just about the clutter on the dresser but about what one of the items in the clutter was.  Can you spot the item?)

Here is what three of the room's walls look like now:

Here is a random picture of Apollo in the room, behind the curtain, just because:

The other change has been the re-re-doing of the entryway floor.  The floor that we had for years was annoying giant grey tiles with pink accents (ugh) and it was crumbling in places.  We were going to replace it with the same tile as in the kid's bathroom, but then our handyman friend Steve offered to do it cheaper with some tiles he already had - the only catch being that it was two different (but complementary) colors.  The tiles in the closet wouldn't be the same.  Okay, fine, let's do that.

So Steve came in and re-did the floor, but then was short one tile to make the main part of the entry all the same.  So he ordered more and we waited several weeks.  Then they came in and were a different dye lot and we just wound up starting all over again with some other stuff Austin and Steve picked out at Menard's.

And... the result is much better than the two-tone idea would have been, and it looks great!

Here is a photo of our entryway, now that it has been re-done TWICE:

 Given enough time, I would like to re-paint that door a color that is not the boring gray (the same gray the first tiles were).  But we'll see.