The little details count

One day I (Alan) awoke to find a kitty sleeping on the island - bad kitty, you are not allowed there! Well technically he wasn't "on" the island. I'm pretty sure he thought that made it OK because as soon as he saw me he started purring. This is one of those times I told Jymm I was pretty sure the cats take after her side of the family.

Many days later I wanted to blog about how we were finally finishing off the paint job and decoration in our living room, but wouldn't you know it - I couldn't find any good pictures of the un-decorated state. But if you ignore the cute kitty (hard, I know) you can probably see some of the disarray in the background. Our open Ikea bookshelves were great in our old apartment, but didn't make such a good centerpiece in our new living room - plus they were a "junk magnet". After swearing to never buy another new piece of furniture again, we finally broke down and bought a nice Ikea solid wood bookshelf to replace it (don't worry, it was on sale).

Nothing is ever that simple, at least when I'm around - I pointed out that it would be silly to put up the bookshelf just to move it later to finish the paintjob behind it. So first, we painted the walls to cover up the construction done way back before we even moved in, which opened up the kitchen into the living-room. We've been living with bare Sheetrock ever since - sometimes cleverly covered up, as in the bookshelf example above.

So painting a wall - simple right? But our real choice was to paint the entire room, or try to find the matching paint color. It was painted just before we bought the home, so it seemed silly to redo the room, and that gave me the idea we might be able to find the same color at our local Home Depot. Jymm loves looking at paint chips, so this was the perfect job for her. She brought home a whole bunch of samples - one of which was a perfect match - yay!

So once again we pulled out the painting clothes, threw some drop cloths down, and got to it. When we finished painting this part of the wall we were so excited with how it looked that we kept going! The header the contractors put in to replace the wall was still bare, and there was another section of wall they'd had to replace. In actuality we probably spent about two hours of our weekend on this project, but it made a huge difference in how finished the room feels, as does the new bookshelf.