The living room’s mostly done. There’s new paint on the ceiling and all four walls, our furniture is mostly in, it just needs some smaller accessories and art on the walls. Frank and his dad pulled out more shrub stumps from the crazy-overgrown junk from in front of our house and I planted a zebra grass in one spot and about 60 tulip and daffodil bulbs.
Over our kitchen sink there used to be a light fixture. At some point in the distant past, the previous owners decided they didn’t want it, or need it, and took it out, taped up the wire ends, and duct-taped the light box. The switch remained in the wall, and much to my delight, when I installed a mini-pendant lamp there with a funky red shade, it all worked! Yes, you’ve heard it here first — I’ve moved on from dimmer switches to entire light fixtures.
I discovered at Lowe’s today that they sell special conversion kits for recessed lights wherein you can change them into mini-pendants without any rewiring. I am intrigued by this, as our master bath’s main lighting is two recessed lights (the previous owners were obsessed with recessed lights…. there are no fewer than 29 recessed lights throughout the house, just counting off the top of my head. No, 30. I forgot one in the kitchen.) I am generally not against recessed lights as a rule, but in a bathroom, as your main lighting, they are not entirely flattering. I would love to do sconces at each side of the medicine cabinet, but with floor-to-ceiling tile in that bathroom the effort would not be a simple one. So, making the two recessed lights into pendant lights could make the light in there much more useful for things like makeup application (because I do that OH so often…. ). The position of the recessed lights would make so the pendant lights would hang just to each side of the medicine cabinet — it could work. I must measure.
We’ve come up with another potential fix to make the kitchen more tolerable — replace all the beat-up, warped, and broken hinges and drawer sliders so that the cabinets actually work, install some pull-out shelving in the lower cabinets, and a blind corner shelving thing for the crap corner cabinets that I hate. And replace the cooktop because I loathe it with the fire of a thousand suns. I’ll still have to look at beige, beige and more beige for the next few years, but at least I will be able to open a drawer without starting to speak in tongues.
34 recessed lights. I forgot about the three over the tubs & shower stall, and another one in the downstairs bathroom.
So — random news. My brother may be moving down here. Yay! And to ease the transition and save him some money and whatnot, he’ll probably live with us for at least a couple months. He’s strongly considering going back to school for graphic or media design or something like that, and wants to do that in NYC, which isn’t far from us.
Also, my friend Amanda is still pregnant. However, that situation is supposed to change any day now. I’m so excited for her and her husband! And I am going to visit them after the arrival and will play postpartum doula for a couple days to just generally make their lives easier and as uncomplicated as possible while I’m there.
The in-laws left today for a month in the Czech Republic. And now I must end this post, because writing that made me remember that I promised my mother in-law I would email their rental car company to let them know that their first flight was delayed and they were going to miss their connecting flight from Amsterdam. Good night!!
Ramblings of a pseudo intellectual 