A Wall is Born

The view from the family room up to the kitchen taken before I moved in, surprisingly lacked flow and more important, there wasn't a good resting place for my antique hutch.

Now the next step. Wall filled in, side pocket where card table and chairs will be stored.

Margin of time to gnash teeth when we find that the original owners didn't prep the wall before applying paper. Not good. We paint over paper. Apparently so have a lot of other people.

Now it's done. Wall finished, hutch in its rightful place. The wall is just wide enough with a couple of inches to spare.

The hutch is happy.

The good, The Bad and The Other

The good news is that while I'm in the midst of a kitchen reno/mayhem, my carpenter son is good company.
More good company is provided by my daughter who is painting two walls in the nearby theatre part of the family room.

The bad news is that this is a small house with nowhere left to retreat to, aside from the basement and it lacks any semblance of comfort or charm let alone a chair of any kind.

This is the current state of the dining room.
Let's see you find a place to sit while munching your granola.
You get a glimpse of the adjoining living room, looking relatively unscathed. Getting to it safely is the problem.


This is a fuzzy view of the family room. You'll thank me for fuzzy.

I love the company and everything is shaping up exactly as I planned.

So the good does out-weigh the bad by far.

But I am looking forward to a place to sit.

How I Cope With Winter

I never met a room I didn't want to alter in some way and in order to accomplish this desire I produced a carpenter or two in my child pool and one of them lives in my town.

How's that for careful planning?



My kitchen is an example of added-by-the-builder-as-an-afterthought and needs all the help it can get. Consider this--it has only one wall and a whole bunch of traffic areas merging in this one space.

This area looks down onto the family room and it doesn't work. It's just plain cluttered and inefficient.

I agree this isn't the time for a woman living on a strict budget to go crazy but I see this a mental health project. What better way to coast through a miserable long winter?
Sure, some people ski and skate and toboggan, but my bones are possibly brittle although I have no intention of finding out by trying those above-mentioned sports.

Stevie, my main man/son in the carpentry department stepped in (did he have a choice?) and here is where we are at present.


Of course I had a plan--what else is there to do when one is munching breakfast cereal and staring at very little?

This is the beginning of a sleek, efficient space.See the bump-out? they are such a great addition and keeps the counters clear.


The juices and sawdust are flowing and winter is so much less annoying.

Stand by for the finished result.