d_aulnoy is a delight to go shopping with. She is really good at explaining *why* vintage shopping is interesting for her, and only loitering when there's something worth loitering over. We spent yesterday wandering down Portobello Road, stopping for purple cauliflower, velvet dresses, and a family friend's clothing store. We ran into B, because London is ( Read more... )

I finally pried myself from bed this morning when I heard a loud squawk coming, every few minutes, from somewhere near by. By that moment, it had paused. No further sound heard, I went on with the beginnings of morning. C. settled down to work in his office - and it shortly became quite clear what the source of the squawking was. There was a bird ( Read more... )

We've been in the house for a year-and-a-half or so. We bought the sofa in July.

Yesterday, at long last, the sofa came! It's deeper than I remembered and not as long, but it's comfortable and makes the room look bigger. Choosing a pale neutral was wise; it goes very nicely with the other things the room currently has.

Now if only there was ( Read more... )

We knew the outdoor faucet on the back of the house wasn't particularly good, but we didn't realize the magnitude of its awkwardness until yesterday. It seemed like a good idea to borrow the neighbor's power washer (he offered) to clean the patio before building the wood shed to house wood for the wood stove. We borrowed it. We had a hose, but it ( Read more... )

"Only" a year+ after moving into this house, we've finally ordered a sofa! We've been working on choosing a sofa for ages; the ending of July sales were enough to finally push us into making a decision. C.'s parents are coming this weekend, so we're likely to spend some of it thinking about the house ( Read more... )

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I've decided that we don't need to buy any living room furniture. We can construct it all out of our growing collection of enormous cardboard appliance boxes. Then I can paint it all in bright, cheery colors.

Some of the coldest moments of my life have been in England. In the places I grew up and in Canada, I expect it to be cold outside in the winter, and so I bundle up appropriately. Indoors tends to be well-heated, at least eventually. In England, underheated and underinsulated libraries, in winter, are icy cold. Not moving because reading, I'm far ( Read more... )

I finally found the misplaced bag of pegs necessary to finish putting the shelves on the bookcases. This enabled a happy hour of roughly sorting books into genres and onto the right cases. (Alphabetical order comes later.) I was finished long before I thought i would be, because - somewhat shockingly - I have enough bookshelves ( Read more... )

I grew up without televisions. It wasn't an intentional policy decision on the part of our parents - they just never got around to buying one. On one hand, this meant I was culturally ignorant in copious ways, when so much of conversation between classes revolved around shows. On the other hand, this may not be unrelated to why I've always been in ( Read more... )