Lap of Luxury

Happy Monday, Team. We hope everyone had a great weekend. But we hope you weren't as busy as us. We were busy bodies.

During a trip to Home Depot on Saturday morning, Sue had an urge. She felt like painting. So we picked out a new color for the guest room. The thing was/is that Nick, Sue's lab-mate from grad school (not cousin Nick from Boston), is coming to stay with us tonight, since he's interviewing for internship at Brown. We hope he does very well(!), and as a result of his visit, we *had* to complete the room by bedtime last night.

We would have made short work of it, except that we sanded and painted the walls first. Then, when we moved onto the woodwork, paint started peeling off in large chunks.


That meant a great deal more prep work than we had expected... scraping and chipping the paint away, sanding to flatten it out, cleaning up the chips and dust, inhaling a lot of the dust, then painting. (We're going to test these chips to see if they were lead-based or have a lead-based layer underneath.)

It was sort of funny that, as we chipped away the dirty white paint on the window frames and floor boards, the color beneath was very close to the color Sue had chosen for the walls. It's peach, or tan-with-orange, or something... Kiva Glow. Anyway, we got it done! Nick will be sleeping in the lap of luxury.




There was one other part of the project which took a bit of doing - re-sizing the radiator cover. We're not sure if we tossed the old radiator cover for that room in the rush of moving in back in the summer, or if it ever had one, but we had been using the cover from the dining room. It's for a larger radiator.

The radiator in the guest room definitely needs a cover. Alec's futon fits snugly in the corner (see bottom), but might get crispy if it rested directly on the radiator itself. Also, it's nice as a bedside table. Anyway, we wanted to shrink it by nine inches. It turned out to be a pretty well-made contraption, and taking it apart was the hardest part.






I think we need a work table and some curtains.

And a few other little nooks and crannies: It snowed another four or five inches on Saturday night, taking us to about 2 1/2 feet this winter. That reminds me, hope you're having fun in Caribbean breezes, ma! We're both thrilled to be voyaging to visit warmer-state relatives on Friday, but we hope the weather doesn't interfere. Forecast is apparently calling for snow Thursday and a high of 14 on Friday. Yikes. We met Jim, Anka's husband, for the first extended time this weekend, and now we're Jim fans. Lots of birds came to play and eat and chirp at our new bird feeders over the weekend - a pair of cardinals, a bunch of finches, and the brown bird posse (plus a couple fat squirrels). The junction box that powers our drying machine released a massive spark and smelled like burning plastic when we started the dryer on Sunday morning, so we need our trusty electrician to come back. We did get our car battery replaced with positive results on Friday; rolling Grover to the shop was an adventure. Our refinancing was inked on Friday after work. The Eagles beat the Giants?! Lou and Sally, I guess it's as they say - any given Sunday.