Looking backward: We're in a mad rush to get the house ready for a bunch of realtors who are having a meeting here on Wednesday (and seeing our house before it goes on the market). More on that in a minute. In getting ready, I came upon a bunch of old photos and decided to let myself go down a rabbit hole of old passport photos. The other day I found these, which you may or may not have seen in an Instagram post. I thought that was the entire group. Boy I was wrong.
Then today I found another jackpot. Passport and ID photos, and old IDs too.
Considering we lived overseas for less than five years, our kids sure had a lot of ID photos!
Probably my favorite ID photo of all time is Mary's very first passport photo (above, in the striped shirt). That's because it was taken the morning after her "I don't want to go to Paris" nervous breakdown at Champ's restaurant in Milwaukee. (If you don't know the story, she was in kindergarten, we bought tickets to go to Paris for spring break—our first overseas trip ever—and excitedly announced it to the kids at dinner, at which point Mary had a full-on breakdown where she kept screaming over and over and OVER "But I don't want to go to Paris!") She apparently got her anxiety out of her system. The next morning she happily went with the rest of us to AAA to get her passport photo taken, and for the rest of the planning for that trip to Paris, for the entirety of the trip in Paris, and for the rest of her life, she's been a fearless and avid traveler. Life lesson: a little nervous breakdown goes a long way!
Looking inward (inward into our house, that is): I mentioned we're in a mad rush to get ready for realtors. (And then the house goes on the market on February 18.) It's a long story, but I'll let these photos tell our story of a plumbing stack that had to be replaced. (This is our dining room ceiling, encased in a plastic bubble to cut down on the dust that's about to come from the drywall.)
This is what happened to the ceiling. Sad, I know. But even sadder was that once inside the ceiling, the plumber thought he'd have to make a soffit on the ceiling to accommodate the pipes. Needless to say, THAT would have been a disaster. To his credit, he worked really hard to avoid that awful outcome.
We also have a bite taken out of our family room wall, from floor to ceiling.
And the laundry room wall too. Two weeks ago it started with an innocent (but big) plumbing job that was supposed to take a day and a half. Two weeks (and one basement sewage backup) later, there's nothing innocent about it, but the job is finished, the plumbing inspector just signed off on it, and now we'll see if our drywaller can get it done and painted by Wednesday morning. He's a go-getter, so I'm taking him at his word that he can do it.
Looking forward: I've never (that I can recall) tried to renovate furniture. But the finish on the tops of our bedroom pieces had worn off over time and looked terrible. So I sanded the tops down and stained them and I feel like going forward we have new furniture.
The tops used to be cherry, but I switched them to black to match the knobs.
I'm not saying they're going to win any awards, but I for one am really pleased with how these turned out.
No comments:
Post a Comment