More Progress

Here is our living room with fireplace and dining room area (notice you can see the pink wall in the kitchen!) when we first bought the condo. It felt pretty dark and enclosed with the brown walls, and when we added the lighter paint, it really opened up the rooms. The "after" pictures below give you a better idea of how the living/dining room area is laid out.

In the first picture you can't really see the tile work Greg did around the base of the fireplace, but it is awesome (I'll take a close-up when it's finished)! The clutter on the fireplace includes the materials we will use to finish the fireplace tile (we just need to do edges and grout) and the main floor bathroom tile, so that will all be cleaned up soon. You can also see our wonderful new couch--thank you for the great Christmas present, Mom and Dad Taylor! It is so comfy, and it makes the condo feel a lot more like home.

Then we have our nice dining area. The red walls in the kitchen are much more pleasant to look at than the pink ones. (Pictures of the kitchen will be coming soon). The animal children (especially Lily) also love our new couch, and we've had fun watching TV and movies in our new living room. We had boxes piled high on the dining room table for a while, but now we can actually eat there, which is good. Things are really coming together. Now we just need to get some doors for the laundry area, finish the downstairs bathroom, clean up a little more, and we'll be done!

A Visit from Abe Lincoln

Lindy, Nate, Camden, Riley, and Sidney sent us the nicest Valentine's Day/President's Day present--a mini Abraham Lincoln! This morning Mr. Lincoln said he wanted to come to work with me, since I work at his house. We had a very fun day, and Mr. Lincoln was happy to see his house looking so nice. He was also surprised at how many people come to visit his home each day. I told him it's because of all the important things he did while he was President. The real Abraham Lincoln didn't get to visit his house in Springfield while he was President, so it was fun that Mini-Abe could be there today. Here are some of our adventures:

It was a really beautiful day today--still a little cold, but nice and sunny. We started out in the neighborhood, and Mr. Lincoln was happy to see so many of his neighbors' homes still there. He was kind of scared of the large pigeon-eating hawk flying around, but I told him I would keep him safe. The hawk was indeed spotted again today eating another pigeon. Hopefully all remaining pigeons will vacate the area.

Mini-Abe was really stylin', or pimpin' as the kids would say, with his purple vest and white cravat. He was happy to pose for some pictures in front of his house and couldn't believe that his name is still on the door. When he asked if we could go in the front door, I told him that he was getting some new wallpaper in the entryway, so we'd have to use the back door.


We went inside so Mr. Lincoln could take a break. He said it was great to be back in his old bedroom with the awesome wallpaper that he missed while he was at the White House. Greg was a little shocked when he saw that Mini-Abe was actually on the real bed in the Lincolns' bedroom, but when you're friends with the curator, life is good. Besides, look how happy Mini-Abe is.

Mr. Lincoln wondered if his horse, Ol' Bob was still in the backyard and was happy to learn that Ol' Bob lived a good, long life in Springfield. He was also slightly shocked to learn that visitors take pictures by his outhouse, but when I explained the differences between plumbing then and now, he understood why an outhouse would draw attention. All-in-all Mr. Lincoln and I had a great day. He was really happy to be back at his house and thinks that the National Park Service is doing a good job of taking care of it. He said to tell the Barretts thank you for sending him home!

Pigeon Legs

A hawk has moved into the Lincoln neighborhood. And his favorite food is pigeons! We have spotted the hawk on numerous occasions chomping on a pigeon--but something pretty funny happened the other day. The hawk had caught a pigeon, taken it up into a tree in front of the Dean House, eaten part of it, and left the rest there in the tree to snack on at a later time. There were pigeon feathers scattered all throughout the Dean House yard. That afternoon Ranger David had a group of cute little 4th grade girls at the Dean House waiting to head over to the Lincoln Home. When they went out the front door of the Dean House, one of the girls excitedly exclaimed, "Ooooh, look at all of the pretty feathers!" The other girls were delighted. Then one of them pointed up at the tree and said, "Oh, and look--there's the bird!" But then one of them looked more closely and screamed, "No, that's not a bird--that's a bird leg!" Needless to say there was quite a chorus of screams. Poor David ended up having to explain the whole circle of life to the girls. The pigeon leg really was just hanging there from the tree though. It was pretty gross.

This afternoon an unscheduled group of 30 Chinese students showed up, and since it was getting close to closing time, they weren't able to tour the Lincoln Home. So they decided to just walk around the neighborhood and take pictures of the house. A few minutes later we got a call at the Visitor Center saying that there were Chinese people climbing all over the front of the Lincoln Home. What the heck? So I had to run down to the neighborhood, and sure enough--they were everywhere. I told their leader that they needed to come out of the fenced-off area and back down to the sidewalk to take their pictures. But once those Chinese students spotted me in my ranger hat, I knew I was in trouble. They surrounded me, cameras ready, and all of them wanted their picture with me. For the next 20 minutes all I heard was, "Police lady! I take picture with you!" I know it's a stereotype that Asian people love to take pictures, but it is SO true!! :-) What do Chinese people do with all of their photos I wonder. Photo albums maybe? If that is the case, I must be in a lot of Chinese photo albums.

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.