Painted Turtle

That's the name of the new paint in our den!  Earlier we took out the carpet and put in hardwood floor, but we had to finish the walls before I could put my new desk together.  I had been using the dining room table as my desk, but I was having a party, so I needed somewhere to put all my stuff.  Hence, a day of sanding, painting, and moulding!  This also got the giant IKEA box holding my desk out of the living room.  Nothing like guests to motivate a bout of house work!  :)

It's not quite done yet, as usual.  The door that leads into the storage area needs to be redone.  It sticks out too much because they translocated our old closet door to this room, but didn't remove the old moulding.  So we're leaving it for a later date.  In this picture you can see that the old paint is a lighter green than the new paint.  The darker green looks really good with the floor color.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

We actually did this before the whole shower leak thing, but I've been a little behind in clearing pictures off my camera.  It's surprisingly difficult to buy plants.  We went to the nursery a couple weeks ago to find some evergreens to plant in front of our house.  We used to have these gigantic bushy things that collapsed under three feet of snow during Snowmageddon a couple years ago.  We removed those and built a very nice brick retaining wall but didn't have anything to retain.  :)

My husband wanted evergreens and I wanted something triangular that would grow about four feet.  We saw some really nice dwarf spruces, but they apparently don't do well unless they have access to full sun, which we don't have in our front yard because of our big maple tree.  We were getting pretty conflicting messages from the nursery people, so we came home to do some research.  (One of the reasons we should invest in a SmartPhone, I guess.) 

Anyway, long story short, there aren't very many trees that fulfill the requirements of our space, but luckily, the holly bush is one of them!  So I sang Christmas songs in my head the whole time we planted them.  "Have a holly jolly Christmas..."  "The holly and the ivy..."  (We hate ivy, though.) 


Since holly berries won't come out until winter, we spruced up the area with a couple flower things I liked from Home Depot.  No idea what they're called, but they're colorful!

Fixed!

Our subcontractor came over yesterday and confirmed that the crack in the tile was causing the leak into the kitchen.  There were apparently two reasons for this.  One, the grout was a non-flexible kind of grout and two, the cement board was only nailed to the wood underneath instead of screwed in, which allowed for more flexing of the tile.  So he regrouted the cracked areas, screwed in the cement board, and even repainted the kitchen ceiling!  (I know that shouldn't be a surprise, but I wasn't expecting it at all.  What does that say about the low expectations we have for contractors?  That's why we like this guy so much!)

Water is not always good

So we discovered a leak.  There's a water stain with mold on the ceiling of our new kitchen.

The most likely culprit for this leak is the new bathroom.  After a bit of investigation, we discovered a crack in the tile of the shower ledge.

We're not sure why this crack is here, but it seems to be getting bigger.  The subcontractor is coming Saturday to take a look at it and hopefully fix it.  We are crossing our fingers that it's not such a big problem that we have to take down the shower walls and remove tile and cement board.  My husband is afraid that the water has leaked behind the cement board and has swollen the wood underneath, which would probably mean that the whole area has to be redone.  Grrrr...