I found the camera cable!

I stopped taking pictures a while ago because I thought I'd completely lost the cable that hooked the camera to the computer, allowing me to release the photos from the bowels of my camera into the wild.  Why just create a worse blockage by making more photos?
Well, in an effort to de-frustrate myself I put up a shelf in the office and put some stuff on it, and underneath that stuff the camera case (containing said cable) emerged!
I haven't blogged much lately, partly because I've been very busy, but partly because of my frustration of not wanting to have to type the thousand words that the pictures would show, wanting to just show them instead!
SO!
Here is our house right before the craziness started:

Yes, there is a house behind those trees!


Right after we moved in we hired three different groups of people to 
1) take down some of those trees - most of which were diseased and sick
2) repair the exterior rain flashing stuff and repair the handrails on the porches
3) paint the exterior


There was one wild Friday when all three groups were here at once.  The day they took down the trees there were easily eight trucks parked on the street in front of our house in addition to the huge dump truck in the driveway, and a flurry of activity.  First the tree to the left of the front door came down:

And then the trees to the right: 

The temperature in the rooms behind the trees immediately shot up the minute the trees came down.  Good thing I hadn't taken down those nasty vertical blinds yet, but their days are numbered.  You can see on that right hand roof line how they started to paint the trim before the trees came down.  The guy in the green shirt is the carpenter, who found he couldn't just replace a couple of risers on the front steps because the whole thing was all corroded and falling apart... He had to replace everything from that front porch down, the whole step system.

The painting really helped perk the house up, and I really like the contrasting brown on the porches.  This is what it looks like today:

Vast improvement, eh?!  Why yes, thank you, it is!  
Next year we'll plant a few new trees, kind of at the lower edge of the grass line, which will give us some pretty landscaping, a little more privacy from the street.  I'm just happy there are no longer trees that look like they're trying to break into the house.


Interior construction has been going on too...
Most impressive is the new cubby wall, right as you walk in from the garage.  There were a couple things wrong with this house when we bought it, one of which was I really wanted a mud room.  There is a wide hallway there, and now it is sort of a mud-hall.  I now have a BEEEYOOOTEEEFUL wall of cubbies for family members and guests to hang coats, drop backpacks, and store shoes.  I am so tickled with how it turned out - except for one thing.  It's totally beautiful wood, I had to put some shelf liner on the lower cubbies so people's wet shoes wouldn't damage the wood.  DON'T HURT THE PRETTY WOOD!!

Notice the sweet little bench part where I sit when I'm putting on/taking off shoes...  These have reduced clutter around my house dramatically.  We found space for these by cutting into the bedroom closet on the other side of the wall.  We originally planned to put in IKEA cabinets in the bedroom on the opposite side, to line the wall in there with them, but turns out I didn't get the right measurements to the contractors/carpenters, so that didn't work.  And it would have not utilized the space so well, and cut into the room somewhat.  So this last week I told the carpenter to make me a utility room closet in there, 2/3rds shelves and 1/3 hanging closet, with dry erase doors.   That's a month out, now.  Had I figured that out originally, my utility room/sewing room/computer room/ on the other side of the cubby wall would be complete.  As it is now, there is still a big pile of stuff on the floor (where the cable was previously buried) waiting to be unpacked and put away into the closet that hasn't been built yet.  Photos will follow.


The completely unfinished basement has been framed in.  My storage area is currently storing stuff!  I did not have to drag Christmas, box by box, backward, out of the eves this year!  Do you have any idea how liberating that was?


More to follow...  Someday...