You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2008.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit this, but since we moved in a year and a half ago, we’ve been eating here:
It’s true. We are couch eaters. Please note that we don’t even allow ourselves the dignity of TV trays. Oh, no. We hunch over the coffee table like a couple of pigs at the trough, with the dogs staring at us much like they are in this picture. Well, heck, if we are going to go this far we might as well tell you that it isn’t even a proper coffee table. It’s a bench that we pretend is a coffee table. We have no pride. Or shame. Or whatever it is that we need more of to fix our dinner habits.
But now that we have a kid, we decided that we should start acting a little less like college students. Maybe it was time for us to get an actual…table?
So Michael made us one.
This is an adaptation of a Gustav Stickley design for a library table, shown here as it was displayed in his 1904 furniture catalog:
His was made from fumed oak, of course. Ours is douglas fir with mahogany pegs. And actually it isn’t meant for the dining room. It’s really the kitchen table. But the kitchen has enough problems right now, so in the dining room it will stay for the moment.
Here’s a side view:
We are delighted with it and were able to use it for a dinner party soon after its completion. Of course, because it belongs to us, it usually looks like this:
Which means, you guessed it, we still eat here:
Some people just ain’t meant to be fancy. Maybe we’ll try and learn some proper manners before Annabel starts eating real food.
But don’t count on it.
Two years.
That’s how long we’ve been doing this. Building a house, we mean. Not writing this entry. Although, if you consider that a blog is really an ongoing conversation then this entry has been influenced by all the previous blog entries and thus we really have been writing this entry for two years.
That much philosophical thinking hurts. Let’s move along, shall we?
Right. Two years. It was two years ago that we started up this blog and chopped down the first trees for this housebuilding adventure.
Lately we’ve been feeling like we aren’t accomplishing anything. The baby has really slowed down operations. And we all know that those operations weren’t exactly moving at light speed anyway, so it has been a bit disheartening to realize that we are slowing down even further.
Thus it was rather cheering when we looked in the archives to see what we were up to last year at this time. That’s how we learned that in January 2007, we still had a table saw in the living room, no walls in the downstairs, and no functioning bathroom sink. We were using the guest room as a living room, had no flooring anywhere but the kitchen and bedroom, and had just begun thinking about kitchen cabinets. (Go ahead, ask us how the kitchen is coming. And then stand back whilst the Fight Over the Kitchen, Round 357 starts up.) Life was dusty, chaotic, dusty, inconvenient, dusty, and borderline dangerous. And did we mention dusty?
In short? We’ve come a really long way in a year. We discussed our goals for 2008 this morning and while it’s a daunting list (upstairs trim, woodstove installed, downstairs half bathroom, FINISH THE KITCHEN) it is nothing compared to what was facing us last year.
Progress. We have made progress. How fantastic. Happy blogiversary to us, indeed.
