This has got to be the most bizarre article I have ever read on CNN. Does the black church keep black women single?
It basically is saying due to black women’s high standards, black men don’t have a chance. Wow….the writer even goes so far as to recommend “go where the boys go: tailgates, bars and clubs”. Hmmm…that is definitely sound advice. If you can’t find a man in church, go find a drunk in a bar…he’ll do.
Andrea
One day, I am going to reclaim all of my catchalls and cabinet space. It seems that the paint cans and screwdrivers creep in one by one from the shed and never make it back to the nice cozy home we made for them on nicely organized shelves. In an effort to keep all of the various “things” from being left in the house, Steven and I, last Spring, spent an entire Saturday sorting everything into rubbermaid containers and Vivian labeled them all for us. Unfortunately, this has not stopped the items from encroaching. Just like unruly kids, I already have had to chase the caulk out of the bathroom….
I am trying to coax the nail gun from its resting place in the hall, but the ladders are rooted to the floor and wont budge. Hmmm…..
Andrea
I painted my dining room today…finally! I have been talking about it for quite some time now. Since April to be exact. I guess the pressure of the summer ending and school about to start, finally motivated me to break out the rollers and wipe the gathering dust off of the paint cans bought back in May. I think the other reason I was dragging my feet was because I worried about the color I picked and whether or not it would all come together in the end –how I envisioned it in my head. I am happy to report that I am very pleased with the outcome and, without further ado, here are the pictures showing the evolution of my humble dining room.
The first pictures are from the realtor walkthrough in 2006. Unfortunately, this dining room was stuck back in 1986.
My favorite things about these two pictures are: 1. the seafoam green topped by a border topped by a white wall. Interesting. 2. You can see in the below picture what the kitchen used to look like. It has red damask fabric stapled halfway up the walls and swaths of material, supposedly valances, also stapled to the windows. I have already shared pictures of that in a previous post. The kitchen redo pictures will be upcoming. 3. the curtains that do not even touch the floor. They are just kinda floating there.
I did not care for the wall color, so I picked something bland (Bonjour Beige, Glidden) hoping it would go with whatever I decided to do later. Unfortunately, it did not. I fell in love with some red silk damask curtains, so I knew painting again would be inevitable. Here are the “waiting-til-something-better-comes-along” pictures.
Here is Vivian’s contribution to the day. She always seems to take pictures of me working.
And, finally, (I really shouldn’t say finally…you know me, I might paint again in a couple years!), here is what it looks like now. The turquoise paint color I picked out was vetoed. So, I painted Anchor Gray, Benjamin Moore, and accented in turquoise. I painted the two end chairs turquoise, put up the decal tree and turquoise birds and pressed a turquoise catchall back into service. Instead of putting plates back on the rail (blah), I decided to use the rail to showcase our family portraits. I am thinking about changing the shades on the chandelier from the frosted ones to clear glass to give the room more light and to allow the chandelier to match a little bit better. I have a buffet or sideboard on my wishlist. I have lots of linens, candles and decor items I need to store. You also may notice that the mantel is different. We switched it for the one in the study. I hope to replace the slipcovered folding chairs with something more substantial one day. That may be after I win the lottery. Oh, wait, you have to buy tickets for that….darn.
I know, I know. Its not Victorian. Even though the style of my house is Victorian, that particular style is not where I receive my decorating inspiration. I tend to enjoy modern/country/eclectic…trying to marry all three is definitely fun here at our house! It works for me. I hope you are celebrating this completion of a project with me!
Also, soon, I will post pictures of our bathroom remodel. I am still waiting for my wonderful husband to install the vanity and hook up the plumbing to our new double sink. Once that is done, I will post the before and afters of that.
In case you are interested, click here to see my inspiration pictures.
Good night all!
Andrea
I am transferring photos from my old computer and I finally have realtor walk through photos to share. These were taken in 2006. I will only share the kitchen ones. The dining room ones will be in the next post. I finished painting my dining room today (ouch my sore back and neck), so I will show the evolution of that room. I am also saving the sharing of the bathroom photos for an upcoming post sharing the details of the remodel of the bathroom.
Here is what it looks like presently.
And, here are the very scary kitchen pictures.
I believe mentioned in a previous post that we pulled up carpet in the kitchen to find the black and white tiles. I have HATED these tiles. They are chipped, not glued down, and just look plain dirty no matter how much you scrub them. We already bought some nice laminate to lay…soon…hopefully…
Its a wonder, looking at these pictures, that we ever bought this house in the first place! lol….its enough to scare anyone. Many people talk about our house being haunted. I can’t ever say I have been scared of a ghost, rather, some of the ugliness, in the beginning, was enough to give me a heart attack! For instance, the living room was painted a cheery in-your-face egg yellow. Some mornings, when we first moved in, I would get up and make a cup of coffee and venture into that room to sit down and suffer a shock just by sitting in that horrendous room. I am glad those days are behind me.
Well, good night all!
Andrea
…that if we were to travel the entire world by car, we would need ONE BIG TRAFFIC CIRCLE….Lol….only an Alexandrian would come up with that idea… 🙂 Can you tell where she was born?
Andrea
A good friend gave me a set of Mary Green dolls crafted around 1931 (if the original tag is to be believed). Mary Green was a well known theatrical stage and costume designer in the 30’s She often made dolls of famous characters in movies. The one I have a tag on says it is Katharine Cornell in the Barretts of Wimpole Street. I do not see tags on the other dolls, so I do not know which characters they are and whether or not they are characters from the same movie. They all have similar era clothing on, presumably Victorian. I have, as of today, donated them to the Louisiana History Museum on 503 Washington Street, downtown Alexandria. They will be on display in the children’s section if anyone would like to view them. If you have not yet been, the museum, along with the genealogical library, is a very neat place to visit.
Andrea
All right, so I admit it, I am a nosy old broad. Unfortunately, the way my mind works, I cannot get something out of my head until I reconcile it one of two ways. 1: That it makes sense, factual sense; 2. The mystery gets solved. So, what is truck 1301 doing in front of my neighbor’s house at 1:24 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon? The driver (not my neighbor), retrieved a blue ice chest from the porch, stuck it in the back of the truck, then got back in the truck and drove away. Is my neighbor ministering to the trash men by providing respite and water? Is he perhaps peddling drugs? Are they friends? Is this the end of their route? If so, then why do they arrive here at different times during the day? A different truck picks up our regular refuse on Monday and Thursday and it is early in the morning. I note that our trash was picked up early on Thursday, so this truck was not there to pick up our trash. Yes, I am too nosy for my own good. Maybe when summer is over and Vivi and I both go back to school, I will be more consumed with my studies rather than the strange goings on of the trash men of Alexandria… 🙂 Until then, I will just obsess about it.
The time
The blue ice chest
The truck number
The driver
I can’t help but laugh at myself. I am reminded of old black and white movies where old ladies watch their neighbors through lace curtains thinking the worse and imagining bodies being hauled off and evil things afoot. Then it all turns out to be perfectly innocent in the end. Which is probably the case here. Still…it has me curious…. 🙂
Since I have not renovated much in a while, I need to change my name from perpetualrenovator to obsessed-trash-man-watcher! Ok, enough of this absurdity! Its getting late. Gotta go to bed!
Andrea
Perpetual Renovator 