Living/Dining room before and after!

Hi Dad! also...blue and yellow next to each other!?

After a long break, I'm back to blogging. What have I been up to for the last 5 months? There's been a lot of working on the house. I fell into the trap of "I can't put up pictures of this before and after until the after is really done!" and as I have been discovering (all you people who have already done a lot of house-things, whether you own or not, are laughing at me) is that things are never DONE. And I fell further into the writer's trap of "I can't post anything until I get that first house blog done). Dang. That was a deep tiger pit of a trap. Anyhow! Here is my first official post about stuff I'm doing to the house because now I'm a homeowner and inflict that kind of thing on ever. PAINT! When I moved in, the house was pretty awful awful colors. I maintain that the previous owner certainly had STRONG sense of color, but I don't think he perceived color at all in the same way I do. Plus, the dining room drywall was a little destroyed due to some termite smiting.

Clearly, there was going to be a lot of repainting (i.e. the whole house.)  It was just so...not restful.  As much as I like Cal and Cal colors, it's not something I want in my dining room.

Thus I pulled a Tom Sawyer and desperately tried to convince all my friends that painting is SO MUCH FUN, and to come over and help me in return for beer, sandwiches, and pretzels.  Clearly this was a thin and sketchy offer on the fun angle, but after a few days of work my living room become much more soothing!

Granted, some of this is just that much more soothing because the mess is gone! It didn't take five months to do this painting, but it was only this last weekend where I was able to get curtains and was hence able to call this room "done".  Curtains are freaking expensive!  I did pull a crazy Asian girl homeowner thing though, and when I found a set of discontinued curtains on MEGA SALE, for the living room, I went back to two different locations to find enough matching and on sale curtains for the bedrooms.  Maybe it involved forcibly grabbing the display curtains while no one was looking a bit of work to find enough for a matching set but hey, DISCOUNTED!! and MATCHING! (boring boring white.  but the white is working for me.)

Whew, all right.  Now I feel like I can continue blogging like a normal person again, and not just about the house.  But stay tuned for more about the house. :)