The House Is Perfect. What Should We Change Next?

Every time I go to downtown Paris to shop or take care of business, I think how much fun it would be to live there. I think Randy and I would be good downtown loft-dwellers. I could ride my bike every day, to the post office, the farmer's market, the bank, the grocery store, the library, the wine bar.

But then I realize I'd be farther away from $tarbuck$. Oops.

And then I think about how much I love this house. And how we - and Sammie - would miss having a yard. And I'm growing vegetables this year! And I have a compost bin! And we just redid our bedroom, and the windows, and most of the front yard landscaping. And now we're about to start on the downstairs den.

Yep, the Summer Project is about to begin!

We're taking up the carpet and laying bamboo flooring. This will be our first time to lay flooring. We've done just about everything else I can think of - tile, wallpaper, plumbing, paint, drywall, faux stone, wiring, but we've never laid wood floors. Will be interesting. We...well, Randy...will scrape the ceiling, which will be a challenge, since it's so FAR FROM THE FLOOR. Then we'll paint, replace the French doors with a slider to match the one in the kitchen, rearrange the room to make it better for the new TV, and MAYBE replace the wood railing between the den and the kitchen with something a little more Mission style. That's still in discussion.

Randy said once that it's so odd that we keep saying how much we love this house, even as we have changed just about everything in it since we've lived here. Sometimes more than once.

I prefer to call it fine-tuning.

Because next? I want to stain the back patio, probably tile the front porch and stain the front walk, replace the trellis over the back deck, turn the greenhouse into a garden shed, build some raised planting beds for more vegetables, do that rain garden/dry creek bed thing Randy's been talking about for the marshy spots in the backyard...