Dad's Visit and More!

Over the weekend Dan and I were happy to play host to my dad for a visit! Naturally, being the engineer that he is, he spent a lot of time inspecting the house and shining a flashlight into all sorts of nooks and crannies. As usually happens when anyone takes a closer look, there were some things about the house that baffled him. . . hopefully this will not lead to him tossing and turning in the night trying to sort out the mysteries of our place!

Fortunately, we had some fun with Dad while he was visiting, too. We didn't get any pictures of his house inspections, but we did get some photos from our drive through Lancaster County!

Dan and I had a lovely weekend visiting. . . and got a much-needed break from house projects. We have made small progress on a few things since my last post. For starters, I finally got around to getting things a bit cleared away and organized in the basement. We had everything neatly put away until we had the leak during Irene, which resulted in us throwing things as quickly as possible away from the water and leaving our basement looking like this:

I spent just a couple hours on Saturday getting the basement stuff sorted and vacuuming, making it possible for us to walk through without tripping. We can finally see open space!


In more significant news, our new carpet for the stairs will be delivered and installed this Saturday--hooray! In preparation, Dan got the stairwell primed and the trim painted so we don't have to worry about dripping paint on the new carpet. As he was getting ready to put the color on the walls, we learned a valuable lesson about painting: you really do have to get samples and see them in your house before you commit. Way back in September, we were picking a neutral whitish color for the walls and picked out one in the store. In every other instance of choosing paint colors, I have brought samples home and tested them, but we figured that, with it being so close to white, we would be safe and went ahead and bought a gallon. Unfortunately, in our stairwell it looks much more beige than we planned! Oops!

Tonight we are looking at paint chips I picked up today to pick the white that will be the color for our stairwell, upstairs hallway, and probably also one neutral wall in our kitchen. Who knew that white could come in so many different shades? (And these were only about 25% of them!)

In more news, this morning we had someone come to give us an estimate for scraping and painting our outside windows. That will pretty much wrap up all the big projects until spring, unless we decide to also get the brick repointed (we're still deciding whether that's a priority for our budget right now). I'm looking forward to temporarily putting the big projects behind us (unless something unexpected comes up, of course!) and setting in for winter and the holidays!