Birthday and Sundry!

On Tuesday Joe turned

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(30 exclamation marks)

Yep. 30. He so old.

I am ashamed to say that I didn't take any pictures of the things we did. Much of the day was pretty uneventful, so I'll use that as my excuse. He went to work in the morning, and as soon as he left I jumped up to work all day on his super duper present so that it would be a surprise. Want to see it? Want to??

Tah-dah! Okay, I know it doesn't look like much. This is one of those moments where I regret not having taken a before picture. But this is the interior of the "shanty," as we fondly call the garage/shed building in our back/side yard. And it was a devastating mess. The tools on the pegboard were in a giant, horrific pile on the workbench, mixed in with trash and spare wood and sawdust and other scraps. It was scary. So with the help of my lovely mother, I cleaned it all out, built a shelf for the workbench, installed the peg board and organized all the craziness into a delightful tool area. It took a loooong time but I think he likes it. I know I do. Such pride.
....sometimes, I just walk out there and gaze upon it.

Sigh. So beautiful.

When he came home from work my brother was here with those giant balloons. Together we walked him out to the shanty (which my brother had sneakily decorated with a GIGANTIC red bow moments before) and revealed the work area. Joe was duly impressed. Then the three of us left to dinner at Happy Sumo with his parents and mine (which was basically his birthday party, and which I documented not a whit) and the parents gave Joe their gifts. Mom's included some additions to my tool-y land present:

Joe loves pink.

Just kidding. It was the only color left. But...he also is okay with pink.

After dinner Spencer came back home with us to plaaayyy... THIS.

Which was Spencer's present to Joe. It's a Star Wars roll playing adventure! I probably shouldn't even show you this for fear of discovery. But there it is....WE ARE NERDS. Yes, even Joe. I'm sure this is a staggering revelation (ha...ha........) He loves Star Wars and we have already spent over 6 hours playing this game. We both love it. Good job, Spencer.

We spent the entire evening/night on his birth date playing that game until waaaayyy too late for a group of working folk, and that was that! We were going to have a celebration with friends but we might end up being too lazy (?? to have fun? Yeah...) I think he enjoyed himself that day and he is, of course, entirely unfazed by his unbelievable oldness.

In other more minor news, I have some updated pictures from around the house. Cause it's been SO LONG since the last ones. Mwahaha.

Here's my lovely office again. I guess I just like to show it off.

But I hid the cords under my desk (yay!) and we moved the ottoman from the living room in here (under the window) becauuuuuse....

New tables!

 My cousin Kate was selling her matching coffee and sofa tables that I have loved since I first saw them. I actually planned on staining/painting the last coffee table we had in here to mimic the style (though I ended up staining the top and painting the legs, rather than the other way around, because it was a lot easier). And I really liked our old table, but the color was slightly wrong, the table top was a bit small for our liking and it was sort of wiggly (though we could have fixed that. We just didn't.) So when she told me she was going to put hers up on KSL but was waiting to see if I wanted them first I was super excited. And I took them, obviously. And I love them.

We moved the rug out of there, which is a weird change. I didn't like it with the tables for some reason. I don't really like having just plain wood floors either, but it was bugging me so much to have the rug so I'll just have to deal with it...somehow. (dramatic voice)

The dogs approve. Or they don't care. I'm gonna go with the latter.

 The sofa table replaced the ottoman in front of the window. Sawyer's favorite sleepy spot is gone (although he still uses it in the office). The only sad part about this is that we no longer pull into the driveway and see his sickeningly adorable face resting on the windowsill, watching us.

It's getting to the point where we've changed things up in this room so much that I can't tell if we're making it better or worse. But I love the tables, and I love the floor, and everything else I also love. So I guess we're doing okay. :)

 And that's that in Gallowaylandia. Birthdays, shanties, nerd confessions and tables. I do so love our silly little life :)

Office Space

A momentous thing (for us) happened over the last week. A glorious, wondrous, delightful thing. It involves our office. And paint. And floors. But let me begin...(cue dramatic voice)...at the BEGINNING.

I'm sure you all remember every detail of our cozy little shared office room, but in case you didn't, here is the heavily filtered version of things before all my wall decor started falling off, WHICH, by the way, I don't understand. The tape method is usually so secure.

I didn't really mind my corner, actually. It was kind of crazy but it was warm and crafty. However, most of the stuff on the walls was there because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. That wall was my junk drawer. The majority of the art was meaningless stuff that I'd printed out to fill up empty spaces. It was all nice, but it wasn't what I wished of my writing/playing/relaxing space.

Joe has a desk in there too, but we do not speak of it.

Another key factor to this room was that it was the only one left with orange-brown-peach paint. The walls, ceiling and sometimes the baseboards in our living room, bedroom and hallway had all been that weird peach. We didn't mind at first, but over time we began to loathe it more and more. The office started to fill me with inexplicable, squinty-eyed fury.

So we finally got off our lazy bums and changed it!

preparing for the paint

this is the more accurate example of the peach paint

 Around the time that we moved the furniture to the middle of the room and covered half of it in drop cloths, we decided, "Hey, why not rip out the carpet in hopes that there are hardwood floors underneath?" It had worked in the living room, which is a good enough reason to suspect it would work everywhere else.

Directly under the carpet was this magic:

GAZE UPON THE WONDER

 Which I swear to you I actually considered for about two seconds before realizing that was the worst idea in the world.

We got a bit worried thinking that this was it. This was the floor, and we'd destroyed the carpet and now we'd have to live with clown vomit linoleum because we're poor and hasty.

But it turned out not to be linoleum at all. It was some weird, thick carpet underlay stuff that was conveniently rip-able. And in fact....

Underneath it lay dusty hardwood flooring! Unfinished and in remarkably good shape, mostly.

VICTORY

There was a little bit of water damage under the window, which you can kind of see in the next picture, but I think it's pretty shallow and we should be able to get it fixed up whenever we finish the floors in the future. Other than that we were really pleased with what was hiding under the beautiful multi-colored monstrosity.

You can kind of see, too, that someone once stained the edges around the room. With actual wood stain, on purpose. Still trying to understand why.

With the carpet taken care of, we resumed painting the room. Just white. Lovely, bright, boring white.

second coat

The last of the peach IN THE WHOLE HOUSE. It's a mark of how glad I was to be rid of it that I remembered to take a picture of the occasion.

 Here's the office put back together the next morning! Bright and happy.

With special guest, angsty Buffy Summers! 

Gus loves the new wood floors. 

 And last Thursday I figured out my art and got it all hung up. The top right painting is a place filler, but everything else was picked out because I loved it or it makes me happy (except the bulletin board. That's just convenient.)

And Joe hung his own art on his side, so there's proof that he uses this room too.

I love it in here now, especially during the day when the sun streams in. 

 So... did I make it worse? Anyone think the peach was better? I'm so happy with the changes, it feels a lot more purposeful and interesting to me now. The reduced clutter on the walls is helpful too. I'm going to do something to hide the cords behind my desk but other than that and some organization of craft stuff on the wall behind my desk, this room is all set.  I'm so glad we finally put in the effort to get this done!