We’re one week into September already. School has started, albeit slowly for us. My youngest homeschools. She’s in her Junior year of high school so is fairly self-sufficient. She takes classes online and I help with things like math when she gets stuck or learning how to write papers of all sorts, which her in-school education was sorely lacking. She’s having some health issues that started this summer and have continued, nothing too serious but ongoing, so it’s good that she doesn’t have to go to an outside school. She would have missed the entire beginning of the year so far. We’ve been homeschooling since last February and it’s gone well so far. She’s always been a high honors student in school, and her grades have remained high at home.
Our new windows are in! They look great and I’m hoping they’ll help save on heating and cooling costs. I wish I could have gone with fancier ones instead of just the basics, but new windows are new windows. I just needed something that would keep the wind out, which our old windows did not.
I’m slowly working on redoing the whole house. Slowly because as is true for most people, time and money are a concern. I’m working through the small stuff right now – de-cluttering, organizing, painting, rearranging, etc. I watch a lot of home reno shows, and some of the lessons from them are finally sinking in. Our living room has always felt overcrowded and claustrophobic and I’ve never been able to come up with a solution. I realized that part of the problem has been that our furniture is too heavy and bulky. Plus, when we moved in smart tv’s were only just starting to be a thing, so our tv had to be on the wall where the internet modem came in since it wasn’t Wi-Fi enabled.
We had a sofa and love seat, an armchair, a trunk as a coffee table, two side tables, a trunk under the wall-mounted tv to hold the Blu-ray and VCR (yes, we still have one) and a shelf for DVDs. I decided to move the love seat to another room and replace it with a new chair. It’s a recliner with an ottoman (more a footstool) and is very mid-century modern, which suits the space more. The wooden legs make it feel lighter since there’s no heavy bottom or skirt blocking them, so it helps the room feel more open. The chair is also a fun, sunny yellow which helps brighten the space.
I moved the sofa to the front wall in front of the windows (the cats love it there) with a “new to us” surf-board shaped coffee table in front of it (also long legs that make it feel more open on the bottom). We got a new smart tv that has Wi-Fi so we could move the trunk, tv, Blu-ray and VCR to the other wall by the stairs, put the chairs near the other window with an end table between them, and left the modem and router where they are in the corner on a small table mostly hidden by the sofa. The other trunk, which houses blankets off season, moved to the attic.
The room now feels huge and open in comparison to what it was. There’s plenty of room for everyone, and it’s ready to be painted and decorated. I even kept a bookcase in there that I had planned to move because now there’s room for it.
There’s still so much more to do in the house. I’m working on the things that are doable now as I mentioned above, and planning one big project as the prior project is paid off. The windows are paid for technically, but I put the deposit (about 2/3 of the cost) on a credit card to pay off over 12 months to take advantage of the 0% interest and not use all my savings at once. I have it set up for autopay, so I don’t have to think about it at all. Once that’s paid off, we’ll move to the next big thing, which will probably be the apartment bathroom downstairs. It used to be my mom’s and now my son lives there. The shower/tub is old, rusty and really not usable, so it needs to be replaced. I haven’t decided about the rest of the fixtures (vanity, toilet) but may replace those too. But that’s for the future!
In the meantime, I’ll be painting and redecorating as much as I possibly can.
More to come!
Lara
2024 Lara Johnson