Now that the front yard is (mostly) done, Tom and I have decided to move on to bigger and better projects around the house. While the house is full of projects we'd love to tackle, it just isn't feasible to do them all right now, considering both our time and money situation. We've decided to start with the little stuff and ease our way into the larger projects....
So, we've ripped out the shrubs in the front yard. That wasn't too hard. Hopefully once we get more top soil and some grass seed down, the front yard will start to look a little nicer. At this point in the summer, I don't think its such a good idea to spend any money on plants or flowers....I'll just wait until next spring, and hopefully by then we'll have more money to spend on sprucing up the exterior. Until then, now that we have the outside taken care of as much as we feel like, there are two projects we're tackling at the same time...
We stopped by Home Depot earlier this evening to pick up some materials for our next two projects... building a shelf in the office closet to house my big honking printer and striping the wallpaper and painting the room in the basement.
The first project doesn't really need much explanation. I have a rather large printer that I don't have desk space for like I used to at my apartment. Since it has a rather nifty wireless feature built in, I shoved it in the closet and ran the power cable outside the door. The setup seems to work pretty well, all I have to do is turn around in my chair, open the closet door, and theres my document, ready and waiting for me. Unfortunately, since the printer is rather bulky, its difficult to maneuver around in the closet if there is ever anything else I need to get out of there. For now, the thing has been balanced precariously on top of two large boxes, one full of stationary, the other, computer parts. It sucked the day I had to dig out some stationary (that happened to be in the box on the bottom of the stack) to write my friend Martha a letter. So, Tom's building me a fabulous shelf to set my printer on, leaving plenty of room for other things in the closet.
The other project, is possibly a little frivolous at the moment, but I'm really liking this whole "make this house our own" idea. There is a small room in the basement that the previous owner turned into a craft room. There was this ridiculously loud blue paisley patterned wallpaper covering the entire room that just gave me a headache every time I looked at it. Since we're run out of room in both our office and living room, Tom and I have decided to turn the room in the basement in to the library or reading room. We plan on filling that room full of book cases, to house our hundreds and hundreds of books, or should I say our ever expanding book collection. Since our couch has finally arrived, the futon will reside in the room in the basement as well. The only problem is, I don't think I could stand being in that room for longer than a few minutes with that wallpaper down there...
That's when I decided to redo the room. Tom thinks I'm crazy, since he didn't seem to pay much attention to the wallpaper, and my sister thought it was kind of cool.... but no matter how many book cases we get, we just won't be able to cover up enough of that wallpaper. So, that means I'll be spending the next couple of days peeling off chunks of wallpaper off the drywall down in the basement. Then theres the exciting job of patching and priming the walls with drywall primer. Once we have the color picked out (because I haven't picked one yet, even though I absolutely know we have to paint the room) then its fifty million coats of paint.... and then the room will be done. I can't wait....
Anyone have any good suggestions on colors? Its a smallish room with one tiny window in it, so I don't want anything too dark. But, I'm not too much into pastels (exactly why the kitchen color will be changing shortly) so I'm at a bit of a loss for ideas at the moment. Leave your suggestions in a comment, please....