The Announcement

There is an announcement I must make, and it has nothing to do with babies. So don't freak out.

Joe's parents have been given a delightful opportunity to move to the east coast (!) so Joe's dad can work at the University of Connecticut and they will have a lovely house in a beautiful area and there will be so many TREES and I am a little bit jealous of that. It will be a change to get used to since Joe and I see them quite frequently here. We're sad to see them go but how exciting for them! Connecticut!

A side result of them moving is that they will be leaving the house in which they currently live. Since they plan on moving back west after retirement, they are not necessarily looking to sell their house and so...

We're moving!

Yep. We've collectively decided that the best option for everyone would be for Joe and I to take over their house in Springville for the next several years, which is very generous of them and a great opportunity for us. It's pretty exciting in almost every aspect.

The sad part, of course, is that we'll be moving out of our current little blue house, which we both adore to pieces. We've worked really hard to infuse this tiny house with the Essence of Us and the timing is both sad and satisfactory. We've just finished updating the very last room that didn't feel like "us" but we will also be officially out of the house on exactly our two year Housiversary. That has a certain poetic rightness to it, don't you think?

We have permission to paint and decorate, so we will have a new adventure in making the house that Joe lived in during high school and college into the house that Joe and Tara live in together. Weird, and fun! We will find the Essence of Us wherever we go.

The happy part in the blue house saga is that it's staying in the family. My brother (and favorite sibling) Spencer will be moving in, which is really relieving for me because I know he loves this house almost as much as I do (maybe as much? ...Maybe more??) and he will take great care of it. He loves to garden and I have great hopes that he will do lovely things with the garden and yard, much better things than Joe and I (who are not always on top of yard work) have been able to do. This makes leaving the little blue house so much easier! Spencer will be closer and I'll be able to see the house again often (haha. That sounds so silly. I just love this house!)

Anyway that's the announcement. We're moving out at the end of this month, so only a couple more weeks to go! I am eventually going to clean the whole house and take pictures of every room as they are now. It's fun (for me, at least) to see how it's all come together since we moved in two years ago. Hopefully we'll have as much fun with the rest of the places we call home in the future. :)

 

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!

A-door-able Springtime!

Get it?! Because there will be doors in this post. Ha!

Winter was a doldrumy time around the Galloway household. Something about the dull grey skies, the lack of greenery, and having to wear sweaters even when sunshine occasionally exists makes the thought of doing any kind of project really unappealing. But spring's been peeking her pretty little head around the corner, so Joe and I went on a kind of mad dash of projects over the last few weeks. We were building, sanding, measuring fiends!

And now is the time when I show off all we have done.

First, our back door used to not be a door. We had one in our kitchen that closed off the laundry/cat room, but the door that led outside was just a storm door that didn't keep in much warmth or...security. So last summer (fall? ehhn) we found a guy selling cool older doors on KSL, and one of them happened to look almost identical to the one in our kitchen. The only difference was that the window was a little bigger. BUMMER.
Just kidding. That's a totally awesome problem to have. I love light!
So we bought the door and brought it home and got all gung-ho to change it out...and then it sat in our shanty for months and months. And more months. Untiiiillll....

Joe got to know his circular saw! That doorway in incredibly wonky, which is to say none of the corners are square. So he had a great time cutting down the sides and ends of the door, holding it up, realizing it didn't fit, doing it all again with new measurements, finding this side or that was still too long....
I should say he had a great time at first. But after the fourth or fifth time remeasuring and re-slicing-off-a-tiny-sliver-of-door he would have probably been okay with just being done.

The shanty makes a brief but glamorous appearance.

 And while he was doing that, I was doing....this!

Our original living room coffee table was taken for free from our neighbor's curb. Literally, the house next door. You can only understand how shamefully cheap that feels when you do it yourself, hoping all along that they aren't watching you drag their old, crayon-marked beast into your front door.
It was a great table but it had never been properly finished, so every time we "cleaned" it we'd take off the dust and what appeared to be several layers of the paint. It was also much bulkier than I would have liked. So when we found this table on...you guessed it...KSL, we snatched it up and I immediately took it outside for a sanding. The original wood stain was an okay color but it was covered in paint splotches and scratches and just really needed to be refinished.

I sanded it down to the bare wood on the top for staining, but just did a light sanding on the legs as I planned on painting those.

Also I cheated and didn't touch the bottom of the top piece at all. And then painted all over that sucker around the legs. So the bottom is ugly. Just don't look.

And here's the finished table in our living room! It's the same height and 3 inches longer than our last table, but a good 5 inches less wide. I was surprised by how much wimpier it looked when we first made the switch but it's grown on me. 

Huh. Lots of pattern going on in that room, Tara. 

Our next project was to replace the console under our TV with something a little more substantial to fill out the wall. I took pictures of this process....somewhere....

But I don't know where they are. So instead you get the finished product and you can imagine that we just magicked it there like Harry and Ginny would have. Or Ron and Hermione, if you're more in that camp. 

Oh man. I love it. 

And THEN...we built a fence. A REAL ONE! We needed a better garden fence to keep Magnus out, so that we could grow more than peppers and tomatoes this year and hopefully avoid any further chicken casualties. 

It also safely corrals our yard junk.

And then we thought, hey, a yard that looked nice would be lovely. So we built a dog run too, to keep the dogs from tearing any more holes in our once picturesque backyard. Fortunately our yard was a decent enough size that we were able to give them a fairly roomy dog run and still have a lot of backyard left over. And we still let them out daily to get their zoomies out, so they're suffering no loss. Not that they feel that way....

Dear diary. The fence continues to vex me. The authorities persist in taunting me with
their lack of response to my incredibly sad puppy face. This is my 800th attempt
 to reach them by squeezing through the wooden slats, to no avail. I will not give up. 

 I almost cropped out the nasty, nasty looking yard, but I figured it would be a good example of why we made the run. The rest of the yard is worse. But we shall make it beautiful this summer! BEAUTIFUL!

We do not understand this undue cruelty.  We are betrayed.

We are so pleased with how adorable it is, especially in the corner by the plum tree where it meets the garden. So quaint! I can't wait until the leaves all come in and it is fresh and summery. And the fence will be painted white, so that'll be extra domestic. 

Aaaaand the last project, which we completed just last weekend, are these dog doors that lead from the house, into the shanty, and thence to the dog run. This way they can get out whenever they want and it is SO NICE. Dog doors for gigantic dogs (ahem, Magnus) are really expensive, so Joe just built some of his own using 2x4s and plastic sheets that are normally used for the mats under your office chairs. It worked out really well and the dogs picked up on it immediately, so we're very pleased.

From the house into the shanty...

...and from the shanty to the yard!

We put a trim frame on the dog door inside the house, and will paint it and make it look nice. We tried to do a similar thing in the shanty, as you can see from the photo above, but we had a somewhat disastrous experience with the wood glue and then ran out of trim. So that was fun. Now it looks really special but...who cares! It functions.

Next on the list is planting the garden, putting in bushes and flowers in the front and back yards, and painting the office and rehanging all the pictures in a gallery wall above my desk. We'd also like to do something about the carpet in there, but there's a weirdly colorful linoleum or something underneath so it might take some creativity. Other projects in the "maybe soon" list are painting the concrete floor in the laundry room, painting the kitchen cabinets and walls, building a kitchen table, and putting shelves in our shelf-less office closet. So basically we could just keep going forever. But we love doing it and it's always so nice to sit and admire our hard work afterward :)

In some last minute, unrelated news, I am working on a couple of books right now. As in writing them. It is really fun and exciting to finally be working on the thing that I've always wanted to do. I get a little discouraged sometimes, wondering why I took so long to try it and feeling a bit behind, but after seeing what I can accomplish I feel pretty confident that I will only improve and will learn all the tricks to becoming a bonafide author. And I'm telling you because that's what I do to keep myself accountable. If any of my work is someday on bookstore shelves (or e-reader shelves, as the case may be) then you can look back at this as the moment I decided I would make it happen. So you should probably feel pretty special about that ;)

Here's a quote!

"Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort."

Franklin D. Roosevelt.