A Time to Remodel

One of the main reasons I haven't been doing much baking or blogging these days is that 90% of my free time has gone into remodeling our house.

We bought a house built in 1917 and have slowly been trying to reverse the years of poor care and maintenance.

For today, I'll begin with the first room we redid.  John's office was an upstairs bedroom that very obviously belonged to a girl in love with Pink and Purple:

Not only was the room pink AND purple, it was shiny.  And they painted over the light switch and outlet covers and the switches and outlets themselves.  This room was the first room we painted and we soon realized that it was the start of many, many weekends and nights spent painting.

One bonus for all of the main rooms?  It came with beautiful, knotty pine ceilings.  The drawback?  The previous owners got paint all over them.  So we've had to slowly sand out the mistakes, re-stain and re-polyurethane each spot.

But all for a good cause:

After 2 days of painting, we have a nice, neutral soothing room in Gentle Rain (basically a dove gray), that suits John very nicely.

This room will be revisited after we get the art on the walls and the new floor down.  I don't really want to highlight the awful berber carpet we have going on right now.