The trouble with home improvement is...

there isn't ever really a point where you can say, "Yep. That's it. Done."

I may have mentioned in the past that we live in an 80-year-old house. Yes, we made the conscious decision to purchase an older home. New builds in this area had an appalling lack of character and trees. We knew, sorta, what we were getting ourselves into. The house had been renovated before we made our purchase. The contractor made it look real pretty. But a few months in we realized that he'd also made sure he didn't use up a lot of his employer's money. The best thing he did was paint over all of the horrendous color choices of the previous owner and refinished the hardwood floors (and they are beautiful). Other than that he just covered up a lot--sort of like slapping bandaids on everything. The downstairs bathroom would be a prime example.

So the latest project really wasn't huge--certainly not by our standards--but it still took time.*

There are two bedrooms downstairs. The smaller room on the back of the house was our office and the larger front (streetside) room was the guest room. Or Spear Room, as Jacob labeled it. We kept a spear in there--ergo...Spear Room. (I grew up around the Maasai. Of course I have a spear, or two.) Since my parents (Hi, Parents!) moved out and took their furniture with them the room has sort of been a catch all type place. It actually worked well as a holding room for the bathroom reconstruction. But the plan all along was to move our office into the larger room. And so, tonight I'm sitting in our new office, sprawled out on the chase lounge and enjoying my new surroundings.

Of course nothing in this house is ever as simple as that. There was a crater size hole in the plaster behind the radiator that needed fixing. We'll call that stage Fun With Plaster. And, of course, by "Fun" I mean "I'd Rather Stab Myself In the Eyeball With a Hotdog Skewer". Numerous coats of plaster later the wall is fixed and non-crumbling, painted a delightful shade of gray with a even more delightful zero VOC, non-toxic paint. The Husband and I--along with our gazillion books and two computers each--actually have room to move about and find stuff. Ahhhh.

Please don't ask me about the fate of the former office. For right now it is still home to the dust bunny colonies that managed to gain a foothold underneath the desks and bookshelves. It has been designated as a guest room. But we never have guests....

*Time for any project is of course figured by the usual formula--take the square footage of the space to be improved divided by the number of people doing the improvement and multiply that by the number of children needing constant and undivided attention, subtract the number of hours one is actually awake and then multiply that by the number of times Jacob asks for Mommy. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Home Depot wasn't using that formula when they figured that replacing a tub would only take 14 hours.