What Does Your House Look Like?

Continuing on in our 'five senses' posts...

This house had us at "hello".

 (Move-in day 4 years ago)

The character, the age, the craftsmanship, the charm - a front porch! so many windows! crown moulding and big ol' baseboards! beadboard! stained glass windows! leaded glass french doors! hobbit doors! curved plaster walls!  We fell in love. We're still in love:

(Juno in one of the many hobbit closets. Despite her terrified expression, 
she wandered in there on her own!)

One of the afternoon treats in this house are the travelling prisms of light from the stained glass windows. Tough to capture well on camera, but here's an example:

Now you're more likely to find dog toys that roll themselves into corners, drips from a water bowl tracked across the kitchen, a few dishes on the counter or in the sink, a basket of laundry that hasn't made it upstairs yet, a coffee cup or two on the counter, books on more than one horizontal surface, good memories posted on the fridge, a dog napping on the couch, a throw blanket waiting in the remaining available chair, keys, glasses, and phones near the door, some shoes stacked in the mudroom, towels out for muddy paws, a few to-do lists scribbled into different notebooks on the counters, a newspaper or magazine dog-eared on the bar, a stack of flyers marked with post-its...and amazing sunsets out the window...

You're welcome to come by. Just watch your step - there's a lot of "living" going on in this house.

What Does Your House Sound Like?

Have you ever listened to your home? I mean really listened and really heard it? If you closed your eyes and heard those sounds, could you place each one?

We have a few sounds in this house that, once we're gone from here, will take me back.

There's the thump of the refrigerator motor, the thud of the front porch when someone's at the door, the creak on the ninth stair, and the pop of the siding when the sun shines.

There's the whir of the vents, the whine on the garage door when we push to open it, and the two spots where the floor creaks more than anywhere else.

As we get closer to moving day, we sure are getting sentimental about this old house.

I may even turn this into a 'five senses' series - a quint-fecta.

(Five senses images all found here)

You know, for posterity.

Bear with me?

Bare Walls

We debated about leaving our pictures, art, mirrors, etc. up until the week we move, but ultimately decided to take them down to pack each room as a 'whole' this week.

So our walls are bare. The walls that make our house our home.

(Image from here)

(Image from here)

I did have the foresight to take photos of every nook, cranny, corner, and wall just to remember how we lived in this house. And I'm so glad that I did, because boy does the living space look bare - with 22 days of living still left to go.

Oh well, it's the memories that made this house our home, and they get to come with us.

"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Jeans Weather

Today was a 'jeans' day! I haven't had a pair of jeans on all summer - it's just been so warm this year. It felt like welcoming back an old friend. 

Fall, are you here to stay? We'd be glad to have you.

 

Girls Night In

Hope you all had a wonderful Labour Day weekend!  

We managed to make some huge packing progress this weekend!

In packing up our 'media cabinet' (which for us is a handful of DVDs, a temperamental DVD player, a stack of VHS tapes, and a VCR that 'plays' and 'fast forwards' but doesn't rewind - so we do it by hand), we realized that we definitely have the ingredients for the next Girls Night In!

We have copies of these fine movie gems:

1. Titanic (split into two volumes - on VHS no less!)
2. When Harry Met Sally 
3. You've Got Mail
4. The Notebook
5. The Bridges of Madison County
6. Away We Go

We also have ice cream. But the kleenex is packed.

I guess Girls Night In will just have to wait until we're in the new house.

Anyone want to bring the VCR? 

(Image found here)

Long Weekend Plans

We discovered the wonders of floorplanner.com this week, so will be rendering a digital plan of our own this weekend (something less detailed than the one below) to use come move-time.

(Image from floorplanner.com)

We may tape one just to the front door or decide to put one on each level to help our movers figure out what goes where on moving day. We've labelled each box and piece of furniture, so we'll correspond the floor plan labels to the labels we've already slapped on what we've packed.

On that note, plenty of packing is ahead of us this long weekend.  The goal is to finish our top floor (everything but our bedroom and bathroom essentials) and move on to the basement to pack up the office, tv room, laundry room, and 'man/work' room.  If there's time, and if the weather's good, we hope to also put a good dent in clearing out the garage and shed as well as the front and back yards.

Here's an 'in progress' shot of packing up our closet/what one bedroom looks like at the moment:

Back next week with a progress report after this weekend's efforts, the packing 'process' post we promised (some tricks and shortcuts we've come up with that are making this pack-up smoother than in the past), and an 'our book' update.

And this is it - the last long weekend of summer, friends!

(Juno likes long weekends)

What have you got planned?

Whatever it is, we hope you enjoy it!

Can You 'Spot' Them?

Do you see it?  Those purple spots around Juno's left shoulder?

Let's take a blurrier closer look:

What is that?  Paint?  Some weird purple skin infection?  No, my friends.  That is red wine.  Drops of red wine on our dog.  Oops.

Well at least she can't reach around to have a taste.  Nothing short of a bath is going to get this out.  Good thing we haven't packed our bathing suits just yet (she's a bit heavy to lift into the tub, so we bathe her in the shower in our suits).

Bookshelf update!

I'm happy to report that I adored Secret Daughter.  It was sooo good!  My only disappointment is that this is the author's first book, so I'll have to wait a while for something new.  But so good...read it.

I also finished The Help.  It was good, but not great.  I did stick to my goal of finishing the book before the movie came out.

Still on the bookshelf are The Happiness Project and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.  I'm still waiting for my 'hold' email to come in from the library on the latter.  So that might be next......

but after the ones I've started in the meantime! - The Truth About Delilah Blue and Inside of a Dog. I also spotted a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road on a recent trip to the used bookstore, so I picked that up for my shelf too.

I definitely don't have a shortage of good characters to keep me company as we edge into fall.

(Juno and her fall blanket)

How about you? What literary company are you keeping? Any new favourites? Or revisited classics?

An 'our book' update will also be coming soon.