Home improvements

As I've mentioned before, I spent a good part of the summer painting our house. The biggest job by far was our living space. My inspiration for the new decor came when my parents bought us a rug for Christmas. I've always like clean, modern lines, and the rug helped set the tone for what I wanted to do. I painted the room the same color that I've been painting the rest of the house: it's a light gray with blue undertones. Another impetus for change was our inheritance of a colleagues' record collection. We needed new shelves to store and display them all, so we bought a few pieces from IKEA that work very nicely. 

Unfortunately I didn't take any before pictures, I rarely do. I'm always too excited to jump in and get to work. I looked through my photo library and found some old pictures that were taken in the room. We have slightly moved the furniture around from time to time, but the feel of it generally stayed the same.

(Oh man. Look how cute and little they were!)

And here is our new living space!

While it looks like the small couch cuts off the space, it actually creates a cozy, warm feeling to the area.

I'm still looking to add decorations and pieces to the mantel and bookshelf. For now, I'm enjoying the cleanness of it all.

And you can see a bit of our new kitchen in the back. I'll be painting the walls and cabinets soon and once that is finished I'll post pictures. (I did take "before" photos of that one.)

Aleks' big home improvement contribution was the construction of a new playset for our backyard. The old one was already here when we moved in and was starting to get old, wobbly, and unsafe. At one of our first trips to the new Costco in town, we saw this playset on display and thought it was pretty cool. And then Nana offered to give it to Ruby for her birthday! The girls play on it all the time, as well as the neighbor kids. It took about a week to build, with Aleks working for 2-3 hours at a time. I must say, his swagger significantly increased when it was completed.

Here's the old set.


And the beautiful new one. The whole thing smelled wonderful the first week it was in our garage; all that cedar!

Now that Aleks has tenure, I've decided to make this house feel like a home. I think we're on our way!