Comfortable in the snow

It’s been a little while since we had a house-related entry here.  We’ve been enjoying our living spaces in their returned-to-living-spaces mode, which has been quite an enjoyable experience.  Our cats (Sidney and Sammie) seem to be really loving the space now.  They used to sit with us in the old living room, but they never really took to it like they are now.  Sammie has a few favorite places to nap in the room, and Sidney enjoys curling up with us, or a blanket, or a blanket and us at the same time.  We’ve found it quite relaxing to be in here, too, just sitting and talking, or reading, or watching some TV, or playing with the xbox, or whatever.  Jenny enjoys doing her crocheting in the wingback chair.  I enjoy reading the paper in the rocking chair, or on the floor where I can spread the whole thing out everywhere. 

This past weekend we cleaned-up the majority of the Christmas decorations.  We still have to take our tiny tree on the table down and put it away, which will probably happen this coming weekend.  We also had picture hanging day this past weekend, and I got the lighthouse pictures of Michigan from my parents, a wedding blessing from the Pope, and our crucifix all hung.  We have a big space over the love seat where the big painting of the Round Island Lighthouse and the European street scene will be hung, after we get them back from the frame shop.  That’s another story entirely–it is costing us more than the paintings cost to have them framed, mostly due to their size.  We also have a few other things to hang in here, but we’ll need to get them framed or find appropriate places for them. 

I promptly came down with a bit of a cold Saturday night, which I’m attributing to the curtain rod that came crashing down on me when the roll-up blind spring mechanism exploded on me in the front bedroom, covering me with some really old, nasty dust.  Now I’m just hoping that it makes its exit quickly. 

That reminds me–I need to look into some new roll-up blinds for at least the front bedroom, with the expectation that we’ll probably replace all of them over time.  All of the windows here in the house had roll-up blinds at some point, though some of them hadn’t been used in years when I bought the house.  Some of those (like the ones in the dining room) were taken down when we did our work in there a few years ago, and they went to roll-up blind heaven.  Some of them (like one on the downstairs hall window near the stairs, the purpose of which I’ve never quite determined) have still not been used and are still in place.  They are nothing remarkable, and I actually don’t care for them for the bedroom–they are complete black-out blinds, and I like to get some sunlight in while still maintaining some privacy.  The solution will probably be semi-opaque roll-up blinds.  What I’d really love to do would be to get some of those blinds that can deploy over the whole window or just a part of it.  A lot of these old houses had separate blinds, curtains or shutters on the upper and lower portions of the sash, and the bedrooms would often have the lower sash blinds/shutters/whatever closed for privacy, but have the upper ones open for light (and ventilation in the summer).  I can find no evidence of the pretty wooden shutters inside the windows here that some of the other houses in the area have, which is a bit of a bummer–I always liked that look.  If I can’t find evidence of them, though, then they wouldn’t ever feel right if I put them in, so we’ll go with the blinds or something.

So yeah, we’re relaxing.  We need to store-up energy and ideas for when we tackle the middle bedroom, which we’ll probably start sometime this spring. 

jonathan