Closeted

Even though I finished my "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" quilt and pillowcases weeks ago, it only just yesterday made it on to its designated bed in our guest room.

That's because we've been building a closet in this bedroom that formerly had no closet. 

The closet doors still need painting, and they need knobs attached.  (As it is, we have to open the doors from the bottom, which is decidedly inconvenient.)  But the room is painted, and I'm glad to have the mess cleaned up.

This turned into a much more painful project than we hoped in the beginning.  We needed to do some drywall repair because we'd had to cut a hole in the wall for a plumbing repair. 

So I called a drywall guy who did only drywall.  He told me he wouldn't do the trim, but Mike thought he could do that.  So, okay, we say.  Go ahead.  Only the job he did on the drywall was so crappy that we needed someone more skilled in carpentry than Mike to do the trim work.  So then we called the guy who did the finish carpentry in our kitchen.  In about two hours, he finished what would have taken Mike two weeks to finish (two weeks and lots of swearing).  Then, we had to paint the room.  So, all in all, we expected this to take about a week, and it ended up taking about eight weeks.  All this time, stuff has been sitting everywhere. 

Our guest room is a funny little room.  Not just because it didn't have a closet, but because it's a very long and narrow room. 

As you can see, it's so narrow, there's barely room to walk around the bed.  We considered putting the closet on the far wall, but then there would have been almost no usable wall space in the room.  I'm happy we gave it a little more thought and put it where it is.  It looks like it's always been there to me.

Our house is a funny little house all around.  Mike and I needed to move fast when we started looking for a new place.  It's a long story why we needed to move.  I'll just say that our formerly private lot was about to be thoroughly encroached on by the building of a very high density neighborhood.  We wanted to be gone long before ground was broken on that little project.  So Mike stayed up into the wee hours one night looking at homes on the internet.  He printed out certain ones, and we split up, giving our individual yays or nays on the various properties.  If we saw one that met our needs, we'd bring the other one to see it.

I was the first one to look at our home.  There were so many funny little rooms and things I didn't like that initially I rejected it.  There was a single-car garage.  The closet in the master bedroom was tiny.  But it had a nice big shop for Mike, and an RV pad with full hook-ups.  It was completely private.  For everything I didn't like about it, there was something important that I did like.  As I lay in bed one night, I went through solutions to the problems I thought the house had, and we ended up here with an imperfect house on a perfect piece of property.  We've put a good deal of money into the house in improvements and repairs.  Some things have been fixed.  Other things we live with.  The bedroom with no closet has a closet now, but it's still a long narrow room.  I can live with that.  You can come visit and sleep under the tulips if you can live with it too!

This being Father's Day, Erik and Mae came up and I fixed Eggs Benedict for Mike.  It's our Father's Day tradition.  Erik and Mae left around noon, and Mike was able to hang my petunia pots.  When I planted them they looked like this.

They've been hanging in the greenhouse and they've grown spectacularly into these.

It's good to take care of the resident father on Father's Day . . . even if he's somebody else's father. 

I hope you're all enjoying your Father's Day too.