Major update, or "Sorry it's been forever!"

So, um, yeah, we bought a house. Almost (yikes!) two years ago now. We spent the first month after we took possession working frantically to get some "de-beigeing" done before we moved in. It was beige, beige, beige... beige carpet, beige wallpaper, beige drapes, beige paint on the trim... beige. (That's a pretty funny looking word when you repeat it enough times, but I think that's true of almost any word.) See the lovely beige music room to the left, and the lovely beige living room to the right.

Once the wallpaper was off, and the carpet was up (revealing nice oak floors), we could see hints of what the house used to look like. We had already chosen the colours for the music room and living room, and were somewhat surprised to see that the original wall colours were quite similar, but reversed. Here are some pictures of the music room and the living room just before the first winter solstice party in the new house. It's a small house, but it's looking pretty good.

We both like to read, and we have a lot of books, so we needed a good set of bookshelves. We decided to make one wall of the dining room all bookshelves, using a design of my own that minimizes materials (and costs) while providing sturdy, custom-sized shelves to fit any space. Here are a couple of shots of the dining room with the bookshelves visible. We also re-covered the floors in the back half of the house, painted the bedrooms and kitchen and dining room, and a bunch of other stuff we don't have pictures of (like new lighting throughout).

The house looks a lot different when the lights are low and it's full of musicians! It's great to have a space just right for good friends, good whisky, good music, and good times. Hooray, Little House In The Ghetto!

I don't have any pictures yet, but the latest job on the house was the front porch. We cleaned it out (maybe the biggest job, as there had been a lot stored in there since we moved), took up the old carpet, cleaned and sanded and painted the floor (a Sedona-style almost-orangey red), built a daybed (Mexican blue), set up a table and chairs, and hung up our Mexican hammock chairs. The last job is some Mexican-themed lighting, but we're not done with that yet.

The next major phase of renovations is the creation of bedroom and entrance closets, together with finally refinishing the hardwood floors in the bedrooms, entrance, music room, and living room. We'll tackle that once the winter holidays are over. In the meantime, I'm back working on the boat. (Remember the boat? There's a blog about the boat...)

Needless to say, the poor neglected boat was a bit dusty when I got 'round to working on it again. I cleaned it out and tackled various chores in and around the cockpit - a pair of lockers forward, which have some complicated and fiddly bits, levelling the bilges and installing a garboard drain and bilge pump (not quite done this yet), fitting two sets of locker lids (one set built from scratch), and putting in floorboards.

I'll leave off this post with a couple of photos from last night showing the floorboards installed; they're removable, which is good, because I still have some work to do underneath. In the picture looking forward you can see the two small lockers on either side of the CP case; I'm almost finished the coaming that keeps water out of the lockers. The angled shot looking aft gives a good view of the hatches allowing access to the under-seat lockers.

So that's about it for now - I'll try to update the blog more often now that I'm working on the boat regularly. It's been a long wait but I'm going to push hard to get as much work done as I can this year. Cheers!