Adding Flair to the Stairs

Next in the "before-and-after" series is the stairway! Today's project included painting the banisters. We had taken the one banister down while we painted the walls and moved furniture upstairs, and we finally got it put back up the other day. As you can see, the stairway also looks a lot better with the new carpet and lighter paint. In these pictures our new carpet doesn't look a whole lot different than the original carpet, but it is MUCH better--it's a nice warm color and doesn't have stains everywhere. And it is SO soft.

I don't have a "before" picture of our coat closet, but basically it was just a square hole in the wall covered by a ghetto curtain. (The people who owned this condo before us used curtains as closet doors.) Greg did a great job putting in a real door on the coat closet, and my other project today was installing some decorative accent molding above the coat closet door, the linen closet door, and our bedroom closet door. There was a noticeable gap between the tops of all three of these doors and their doorways, so the molding gives them a nice finished look. So things are coming along here. We're still waiting for our couch to arrive, but hopefully it will come this week!

Clowns and Country Music

Today was a rather bizarre day at the Lincoln Home. I have given tours to a lot of class clowns, but never to a real clown--until today. Chatterbox, an official Shriner's clown (unfortunately not in costume), came to the Lincoln Home this afternoon. When he ran up to me, got right in my face, and said, "Hey, you're pretty!" I knew it was going to be an interesting tour. It would have kind of creeped me out except for the fact that he was an older gentleman who actually turned out to be really nice. In addition to Chatterbox, today's tours of the Lincoln Home included . . . country music! Nothing says Abraham Lincoln and 1860 like country music, right? The Lincolns are getting some new wallpaper in their front stairway, so that area of the home is closed off to visitors. While the plastic barriers put up by the wallpaper workers keeps the dust and steam out of the other rooms in the house, it doesn't exactly block out the sound of their radio. Maybe if they had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir "Songs of the Civil War" CD playing it would have been all right, but the country music kind of killed the ambiance.

Because of the wallpaper project, a top hat and walking stick that were originally displayed on a hall tree in the front entryway of the home are now sitting in a more prominent spot in the Lincoln's sitting room. The other day I had a tour group of 5th graders from inner-city St. Louis. They were mostly African American kids, and for 5th graders they were actually pretty well-behaved. Upon seeing the walking stick in the sitting room, one of the teachers asked if Lincoln had a walking problem or if the walking stick was more of an accessory. I explained that having a walking stick was stylish back then--it would have been part of Lincoln's look. A funny kid right in front of me said, "So, you mean Abraham Lincoln was pimpin'?" That made me laugh. All I could say was, "Yeah, I guess you could say that." According to the slang dictionary, "pimpin'" means "to make an accessory look good," so I guess you could say that was a legitimate question. The Lincoln Home is a strange and funny place.

The Master Bath

Here are some more results of our work here at the condo. The bathroom off of the master bedroom was pretty scary when we moved in, but removing the wallpaper border, painting it a nice shade of green, getting a new shower curtain, adding a medicine cabinet, installing a new towel rack, and hanging some pictures made a world of difference!

Here is the new-and-improved bathroom:

Slowly but Surely

Fixing up a house is a lot of work! But it is very rewarding, and it's fun to see it transform into your own place. Our condo is coming along slowly but surely. We have gotten most of our stuff put away, but we're still working on a few things. When Greg has a little break from school and work we'll try to get our downstairs bathroom finished--it needs new tile, a new toilet, and a new sink, but it's really nice to have two other bathrooms to use while we're waiting to finish that one. We are also waiting for our awesome new couch to arrive sometime next week--and then I think it will really feel like home. I'll post pictures as we finish up the different rooms in the house. Then once we're all done, Greg and I will walk through with the video camera so you can get a better view of the place. It is the perfect house for us.

Here are the before and after shots of the guest bathroom:













It looks much more inviting now, right? This is our farm-themed bathroom. I absolutely love the yellow paint in there--it really brightens it up and makes it feel nice and big. At some point we will get a new toilet in there, but the one we have is good for now.

Next we have the guest room (aka the sports room):

I didn't have any good pictures of this room from before we moved in, but it was pretty scary. The wall that now has the shelves on it was covered in some crazy wallpaper. As you can see, Lily has adopted the futon as her play area. We still have a bit of cleaning up to do in the guest room, but it's coming along nicely. It's great to have room to put all of our stuff around! So, the condo is keeping us busy, but we are making a lot of progress. Soon I will have pictures of the rest of the house.

Kids

I love kids. But they have to be 4th grade and under. Just kidding--but seriously, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders (and younger kids too) are SO cute!!! We're inching back into bus season here at the Lincoln Home, and after several horrible tours with 8th graders, it's a breath of fresh air to have some cute 2nd graders on a tour. Younger kids are so excited to be learning new things, and they all think that Abraham Lincoln is completely awesome. After the 4th grade, however, they become too cool to learn about such unimportant things. 5th graders can go either way--some are interested and some aren't, but by 6th grade they could all care less. Back in the day when I planned to become a teacher, I wanted to teach high school. But I have since realized that it's probably good I didn't pursue that path. The majority of middle/high school kids that come to the Lincoln Home are not very nice--in fact, most of them are terrible. And they are all a lot bigger than me. But little kids can turn a long day into a great day. Today I had some of the CUTEST 3rd and 4th graders ever from Indiana. As we were going into the house, one little guy said, "I have been dreaming of coming here for like a thousand years!" If only all of our visitors felt that way :-)