It's okay to love a tree, but don't LOVE your tree, you know?

First and foremost, a picture of what we now just refer to as “Tom’s Tree” because I’m pretty sure one of these days I’ll find him outside carving “Tom + This Tree = 2gether 4ever” into the trunk of it.

Based on our exhaustive research (we Wikipedia’ed it) it’s a Larch – either a Tamarack Larch or a European Larch, but we lost interest pretty quickly when trying to figure out which. When I was cropping the photograph I noticed how the north side of the tree is infiltrating the overhead line that runs along the fence, and I think it’s either cable or phone? If a strong enough gust of wind comes through our backyard, that sound you’ll hear will be Tom and I bitching about how our Internet is down. We can live without a lot of things, but Internet is not one of them. Another thing we can’t live without: A dishwasher that doesn’t smell like dead animals. Here is our new one in all its glory, after having narrowly escaped an incident with a crowbar.

The other night while Tom was having words with the dishwasher I was camped out in our bedroom closet removing wallpaper. The closets in both upstairs bedrooms are wallpapered floor to ceiling INCLUDING THE SHELVES. It must have filled someone with quite a sense of accomplishment back in the 50s to see their totally wallpapered closet, and apparently every inhabitant of the house in the years since didn’t have the heart to destroy all that hard work. Had the wallpaper been in good condition I might have wrestled with the idea of leaving it up, because the pattern in our closet was *just* kitschy enough that it bordered on likable.

We spent most of the day on Saturday priming and painting the bedroom, which we had agreed to paint the same shade of “barely there” blue as the bedroom in my previous house. In my old house I left the original wood trim because all the windows were new with a woodgrain finish and I didn’t want to paint new windows white. I prefer white trim for its clean line and the contrast against the walls, so this time around we painted it white. We also gave the ceiling a fresh coat of white paint as it was in desperate need of it. The room still isn’t totally done, but you can get the general gist of it from this picture. Mostly you see how there is no wallpaper in the closet anymore.

There will be no lying around tonight - even though I have what I believe is a chemical headache from attacking the bathroom tile with caustic chemicals last night. Our new carpet is scheduled to be installed on Thursday morning, and before they get here we need to lay down laminate wood floor in the entry because we’re not going to go with a carpeted entryway like the previous owners. We lucked out because my mom had almost a full box of laminate floor left from when they remodeled their house and since our entryway is only about 12 sq. ft. it winds up being more than enough to meet our needs.

While Tom is tackling that, I promised Nicholas that I’d have all his toys unpacked and moderately organized before I pick him up from school on Wednesday so I'm going to get started on that. Since most of our bedroom furniture is crammed into his bedroom, I’ll also be moving all of that back into our bedroom now that it’s predominantly painted. And I’d imagine at some point I’ll be watching Tom stare longingly at the power sander because the dining room floor is really eating away at him.