Bye bye railing!

Am I the worst blogger ever? 

I don't think I'm the worst EVER. I mean, there have to be people who put up one post and then abandon their blog forever. I'm not THAT person. 

But I'm pretty bad. 

I haven't updated since August. Shame shame shame. What have I been up to?  A lot of this:

Also a lot of this:

I took a photography class and a ceramics class at our local community college the last two semesters and what little free time I had was taken up with completing work for them. I needed to take classes in order to maintain my teaching certification, but at least these were FUN classes. House projects kind of stalled. But I got some awesome photos and pottery to show for it! 

And now, I'm BACK! And a major thing has happened in our house. Remember when we were looking at our office way back in August and it looked like this.

With that railing that was wobbly and the spindles were so far apart a toddler could just fall through them?

Well for a couple of days it looked like this:

(ignore the wall color here, Adam was in charge of photography at this moment, and doesn't understand white balance)

Can we say "unsafe"? Yup, we basically had a giant hole in our floor with no railing for a couple of days. But at least that hideous railing was gone! Also, Adam doesn't do heights, so it fell to me to rip out the carpet, pull staples and generally prep this back area while it was railing-less. 

But shortly after this period of serious-not-to-code-ness we had the bookcase we've been longing for! 

You'll notice it's empty. Even those white boxes in the bottom right corner are empty. Yeah. We don't NEED this storage. We might move some things up here eventually, even if it's just for looks. But the truth is we will use the storage someday and the railing needed to go. 

Take a look at the whole office now: 

The bookcase is wonderful and we are very pleased with it. No, I don't have any in-progress photos for you, because most of it was built at Adam's father's house. Yes, we did DIY this thing, but it was with the help of Adam's dad, who is a fantastic woodworker (he made all of his own kitchen cabinets, and LOTS of other pieces of furniture in his house). So while normally I'd be telling you all about how this was built, I wasn't there for any of it. Adam and his father built all of this and I am thankful for it. 

Also, having stuff custom built away from your house allows you to be blissfully uninvolved, and then suddenly the thing you've been asking for just appears out of nowhere. These are the best kind of home improvements. 

Oh, and remember the crow's nest behind the old railing?

Well now it's display space.

I'm not 100% happy with this arrangement of objet d'art (aka, stuff), but I think it's the kind of thing that will develop over time. It'll get there, but I'd rather collect things over time than buy a bunch of stuff at Home Goods to fill it in (no lie, though, I did go buy that pheasant at Home Goods). 

We also finally hung our diplomas. 

If you didn't already notice, these are over the stairs. When I mentioned hanging them a long time ago I said we'd have to construct some kind of scaffolding in order to get them up there because there is no floor right below them. That didn't happen. How did we get them hung? Well, if you haven't figured it out already from the photo where we tore out our railing and left a giant hole in our floor for two days, safety isn't really #1 around here. Hanging these things was done in a totally unsafe manner that I'm not going to describe in too much detail. Let's just say it involved Adam holding on me by waistband of my jeans. But hey, they're up there! 

So the office is MOSTLY done. There is one last detail that needs to be tackled - the wall over the chaise. 

It's a whole lot of nothin' 

I've been looking and looking for solutions for this wall that are more interesting that slapping a painting up there. But, you know what? I think we're just going to slap a painting up there. Since big art is expensive, and because I'm an art teacher with a knack for painting, I'm going to paint something and hang it there. I don't have my own art hanging in our house (except a couple of things that were little crafty projects). But here Adam and I decide a HUGE painting of a stick or twig would look cool. Big paintings of twigs, not really something you see all the time, so we'll make that happen. Eventually. 

"Eventually" should be my middle name. 

So anyway, that's the office update. And I have some good news. I've already redone the upstairs bathroom about 90% of the way. I'll have the befores and afters on that soon!