So it’s been a while…

since we’ve updated LBL. Sorry about that. Football and finals and feasts in faraway places means that not much work on the house has been accomplished. However, some new additions have made a huge impact on the hominess of the house.

Rob’s sister Babz was generous enough to donate some furniture to the cause, including a queen-sized bed, a coffee table, and a buffet. The bed fits nicely into the master bedroom and presents Katie’s Master’s quilt extremely well. One side effect of this new bed is that the back bedroom, or ‘Spare-oom’ as Katie’s brother dubbed it, gets the bed that was previously in the master, making it a bonafide guest room. To those of you that have visited here, the days of futons in the middle of the living room are over! It’s ok to come back now! It certainly makes the house feel more ‘grown-up’.

While browsing through the hardware store, we noticed some brightly colored glass and investigated. It was a display of modular pendant light fixtures. It turns out that there were some glass shades that happened to fit neatly in with the color scheme that we were considering. So we bought a single pendant to put over the sink in the kitchen with the thought that we’d see how we liked it and then decide whether to come back for a three-pendant version for the dining room. It turned out that it was just what we had been waiting for! We returned to the store and picked up the light for the dining room. No disappointment there either. It looks amazing in the dining room which has been one of the more depressing rooms in the house. Not so anymore.

None of the lights would have been acquired if the counters hadn’t finally been installed! Thanks to everybody that voted back in August. Diana Pearl looks great, the whole kitchen actually looks like one and, even though there’s no running water, there’s finally a sink where there should be one! Hopefully the plumber will have time in the next couple of days to come out and hook everything up. The very fine-looking faucet is from IKEA and has a very invisible (when screwed properly in) aerator from Germany. One that is almost impossible to find on this side of the Atlantic. We know this because Rob was fooling with it and lost control of it. It then fell into the sink, which has no drains, into the cupboard, and through the hole that the water line comes through, coming to rest decidedly out of sight and reach. After many angry words and frantic searches through stores and the internet, Katie got the idea to try vacuuming it out. This process required duct-taping the household vacuum tube to the shopvac tube and then randomly jabbing it around under the cupboard. Miraculously, it worked! The aerator is safely installed and Rob has learned a valuable lesson.

A few steps closer to a finished kitchen. We still can’t really wash dishes, but we’re a lot closer than we were yesterday!