art!!

My adorable sister got me the BEST wedding present..... A custom painted piece of art from a good Pensacola friend of ours, Sarah Soule Webb! I adore it, she did a photo from our honeymoon-- a picture of the Duomo in Florence Italy (see my pictures below from the same vantage point!) I most likely will get a dark rustic wood frame, but thought I'd tease around with the idea of a lighter wood frame... what do you think??? Here are both below.

Lighter frame:

Darker frame:

What do you think? This is our front door 'foyer', very small but you can see the painting when you are sitting in our living room.

Tada Table!

So last weekend I was inspired....despite Holland (and Cover) both giving me a TV mount for our bedroom (see previous post)... the quotes for us to mount our TV and speakers, which were wider than the space available, would be ~$500!!! So I decided it would be best to just bite the bullet and get a TV-table. And I was so lucky! I walked into Hannah's Antiques downtown Birmingham and found this fabulous table... It is an old singer sewing table that is castiron with white marble on top. See below my transformation! I painted the legs a grey color to go with my Duh theme.. my favorite store in Pensacola Don't you love it??

murder

If I get murdered today and my body shows up somewhere despicable, it was the gutter cleaner.... I somehow always fall prey to those poor souls who are so desperate as to walk door to door looking for handywork jobs. Somehow they always seem to put an ad on my mailbox or door just when I am really ready to give up and pay someone, anyone, to do it for me. And both times I have actually called these people (before was a painter), they seem bitter and defensive and actually act like they are being put out by my requests for simple things. I smartly didn't choose that painter from back in July... but today I fell for the gutter cleaner's ploy. I should have known when I called the cell given on the slip of paper, and when he answered all pissy and asked 'who was calling' in a very pissy way... I should have known when he asked if, instead of a check, he could follow me to an ATM afterwards so he could get cash...(I declined, I'm no fool.) He told me that part of the job was that he'd blow off all the gradu from the walkways/deck etc. when he was done. However, as you can see....off he goes without so much as a puff on my poor back deck that I spent all Saturday sweeping! So I see him drive off. Crazy demanding me actually gives him a couple of minutes to see if maybe he just needed to get gas or something. I finally call and he is totally caught off guard that I would want it blown off, and acts like he will do me some big favor by coming back to finish his job. That I paid him $88 for! yuk. No wonder he is laid off from his 'software job' he had before... [I don't want to spread hate, but seriously if something happens to me his business card is taped up inside our cabinet door, tell the popo.]

Ewwww!!

About two weeks after moving in we started to get price quotes for a painter. One of the painters initially looked at the hallway paint job and was flabbergasted at how bad it was, especially on the ceiling. We kindof forgot about it - and didn't think about it again until the painter actually was going to start. We looked up, and what do you know but the 'bad paint job' was now obviously black MOLD growing on the paint! Yuk! I swiped my finger on it, and what do you know, it came off! Multiple opinions later from air conditioner people and handymen, and we found the culprit: the attic/ceiling fan! While very retro and theoretically an awesome way to cool the house if our windows weren't painted shut, this bad boy was contributing to much moisture in the hall and the resultant mold!! Jimmy got all handyman on me and got some insulation for up in the attic. Crisis averted. And now as you see - no MOLD!!! woohoo. We also got some special mold-prevention paint for this room.

Painting done!!!

so sad little skirdykat Piper!

Finally! After two weeks of living with CJ and Marco, books strewn everywhere (notice the old dining room color), and the terrorization of Piper, we have a complete house! Here are some of the pics of the new colors, though the majority of the house is the same spectrum so looks the same!