Consumed with the house

Uh, this is a "blog," right? And that can cover just about anything and everything. This post is going to go over some of the things going on with the new house. As much for the family as anyone.

We have been so consumed with house stuff that we've been neglecting just about everything else, including friends and family, etc.

Plus, the recent cruise. Plus, our recent battles with colds. It's been a very hectic year already.

The main thing left for the builder to do is to finish the fourth floor. The TREX decking is still waiting for the pooling to be eliminated from the roof. The tile floor inside is supposed to be done this week.

The rest of the place is basically finished. Now it's up to us to furnish it. It's a shame that a lot of the stuff that you already have just doesn't cut it in a new home. Well, it COULD, of course. But there are so many more photo- or picture-ready walls in this house, we don't have near enough framed pictures to fill them up. As to furniture, we've been steadily eliminating it over the last few years, paring it down. We've given several large pieces to the Houston Area Women's Center, our charity of choice lately. They love us.

As for other furnishings...

We picked up a couple of rugs at "The Dump" the other day. All sales final. They specialize in furniture and rugs/carpets. One is a gorgeous hand-knotted Tabriz Persian for the living room. The salesman at The Dump tells us that we're going to spend HOURS looking closely at this carpet, and it's true. Each time we sit down on it, we see different stuff we hadn't seen before. It's wierd. It's also a great size for Yoga, for two. Of course, we feel like we got a very good deal. I've seen some Persian rugs similar to what we bought for around 10 TIMES what we paid for ours.

The other rug, for the dining room, is machine-made and half the price of the Persian. Now, of course, we're discovering all sorts of other places where a runner or a rug might be nice. Now we're thinking about re-covering the dining chairs again, perhaps in black...perhaps stain the entire table black...the possibilities are endless. We hate to cover up the bamboo floors, but ya gotta have something on them, especially considering my foot situation.

Finally got the ceiling fan in the living room installed. It's one of the very first "extras" we ordered (way back in August of '06), but it was one of the last things the builder put in. It's a Casablanca "Stealth" model. This fan has an elaborate control box with energy-saving settings, and when you change speeds or functions, it sings to you. This is frankly getting out of hand. Our new washing machine and dryer both sing various tunes depending upon the status of the clothes inside, our coffeemaker buzzes at different speeds in its attempt to communicate with us, and now the ceiling fan is chiming and singing. Everything's got a micro-chip in it these days. I'm getting a micro-chip on my shoulder.

David also built a wood fence in the back yard for privacy, which was unexpected. I was looking forward to draping the chain-link fence with a fragrant jasmine, but, hey, I guess I could put a trellis in front of the fence. Still to come will be the gravel/rock for the yard. Not going to grow grass and spend lots of time and energy maintaining it. We'll do rock around the house and put containers on top of it. So that's still to come also...

The threshhold is finally installed on 2! It sat there in the corner for two weeks before the carpenter finally got around to installing it. These guys do what they say they will, it just takes them forEVER.

We picked up several picture frames the other day and are finally getting around to framing some of the pen-and-ink drawings we picked up in Guanajuato, Mexico last summer. We're also going to frame the two prints by Bonno, finally. Wifey has this idea to print out some of our digital portraits and colorize them a la Andy Warhol, and frame those. Should be interesting.

The rooftop deck is still a problem, but it's just about the last problem now. Instead of one pool not draining, after they tried to "fix" that, we now have four pools not draining. Gotta get that fixed before we can bring in the Trex roofing material. Can't have a housewarming party until we get the deck installed. I was hoping to have a party before Christmas, then for New Years...now we're shooting for the Spring Equinox, but it's looking more like Memorial Day or the freakin' 4th of July!