Fun Monday #5

Today's Fun Monday is being hosted by Blue Momma at Life in the Fish Bowl. And this is what she wants us to do:


I want you to show me your......projects. More to the point, I want to see your unfinished projects. I have so many that I really need some reassurance that I'm not the only one. Home improvement projects are what I have in mind, but it you don't have any of those show me any kind of project - needlework, cooking, scrapbooking, etc. You can even show me your spouse if they qualify as a work in process. And please, I WANT PICTURES!!!! You can talk if you want, but you don't have to. I know since you are all bloggers talk is bound to happen, but I most definitely want to see photos of those unfinished projects.

Great. Just when I've committed to not writing book length posts for Fun Monday, too. I have projects galore afoot because, as I've said before, my house is trying to kill me. We've owned it a year and a half and have made a lot of progress, but...


This place gives The Money Pit a whole new meaning. Here is a sampling of home projects we are a) in the middle of, b) working up the courage for or c) too scared to think of for long (but will somehow have to).

I've complained about my fireplace before. We're trying to decide on tile and haven't had much luck. I'm about to scrap everything and start all over again.



There are two of these windows along the staircase. For the most part they're in great shape, but a few of the smaller pieces need to be replaced. And they need cleaning, as they are old house double paned and are hard to get to. You can see the broken pieces here (especially the half moon piece on the bottom right side).




This used to be a transom window over the front door, but someone de-transomed it. I'd like to restore it to the way it used to be. Eventually. On a way more global note, if you look around the window you'll see a lot of really lovely molding that needs to be stripped. The entire house is full of very interesting details that are all covered by (fifteen coats apparently) of white paint.




This is the hole in the downstairs family room ceiling. I badgered the Film Geek to take out the existing fixture so we could hang an Ikea chandelier I've had for a year. But...once he was in there he ran into one problem after another, culminating with the fact that the new hole is now way too large for the fixture. So we're replacing the existing fixture (which is fine, really) and we'll hang the chandelier in the entry hall.



This is the humiliated chandelier that started all the ruckus in the first place. It's combined wired and candles and I really wanted it over the dining room table, but I'm not willing to tear out an entire plaster wall to get it there. Eventually it will find a home that isn't covered in dog hair.




This is the big, bad scary monster that sends both the FG and I to our corners with our thumbs in our mouths. This is shot from the entry hall and shows the staircase going up. There's a lot of scraping that needs to be done in the top right hand corner and then it all needs painting. But first we need to fix a spot on the roof that's letting small amounts of water in.

The staircase curves and the ceiling is really high and there isn't enough money in the world to get me on a ladder up there. This'll be the one we hire out...eventually.

(The window at the top of the stairs is the match to the one mentioned earlier, by the way. It also has some small broken pieces).



My major project in the planning stage is landscaping the front yard. I didn't do a blessed thing last year because I was so overwhelmed by the whole thing. But this next Spring I'm planning a massive attack even though I'm still scared half to death.

The problem is that I don't know what I'm doing. But I'd better learn quick.


This is the front of the house. (Which will hopefully be painted in the next year or so. Uh oh. I'm back in a fetal position again).



This is one side yard. The other side is about the same size. (Oh yeah, we also have to extend the fence line to the privacy fence on the left). The middle area is ours, but when we moved in we only fenced the part right by the house. The middle is a huge day lily patch and I didn't want the dogs to destroy it, so for now it's just left open. But our neighbors put up a privacy fence so we're going to extend ours to theirs. And landscape it. (Rocking in corner crying for my mama by this point).




I hope Blue Momma feels better that she isn't alone in her project overload. Because I all of a sudden have a migraine.

I need my teddy bear.