Howdy to our new readers!  We know a number of you found us through our interview this weekend on No Pattern Required…  thank you to Eartha Kitsch for the fun interview about the progress of our renovations.  We are so happy that so many people appreciate this crazy house and the work we’re putting into it.  And we’re loving your comments and questions!  Yay!

What a whirlwind of a weekend!  We are officially moved into the house, but only in the sense of “most of our stuff is now in this physical location”.  There’s not a whole lot of unpacking we can do, because every room is in a different state of completion, with none of those states being “Done”.  Each room needs paint or wallpaper on some surface, so we can’t put our clothes away (because the closets need paint) and we can’t push any furniture against the walls or hang pictures (because the wallpaper isn’t up).  We can’t eat anywhere except the kitchen counter, because the middle of the kitchen is filled with a ladder and paint cans and all sorts of other painterly stuff.  My home office is the closest to being completed, and even that will be a couple of weeks before it’s 100%…  it was the first room we got up and running so I could work, but the decor is still in progress.  So we’ll have office pictures up as soon as we can!

But you guys, it is so wonderful to walk into this house and smell paint and carpet!  Finally, “stale ashtray” is not the dominant scent.  The place smells, dare I say it, clean for the first time.  It’s glorious.  There is still a ton of nicotine to tackle *weep*, but we’re getting there.

Jack had his hands full this weekend.  Everywhere we turned, there was another “little” need that he had to tackle, that ended up taking up a huge amount of time.  Our first night in the house, we realized that we wouldn’t be able to plug in our coffee maker in the morning because all the kitchen outlets were still 2-prong…  rather than plug in an adapter, Jack wanted to do it right and make the outlet a grounded 3-prong.  Which took him down a 2-hour rabbit hole of wrestling with old wiring.  Then he had the mammoth task of getting the house ready for our cable installation.  Oof.  Obviously, since this house was done in the 1950s, it wasn’t built with cable TV as a consideration.  Somewhere along the way with the previous owners, whoever installed their cable thought it would be best to drape the wiring all over the roof.  I wish we had taken a picture of it before Jack made it right…  but the roof was basically a spider web of white cable, with splitters all over the place.  I have no idea how Jack made it right, all I know is he spent a good chunk of Sunday in the attic and when all was said and done, the wiring was inside and we were ready for our modern connectivity.  🙂

While Jack was making sure we were caffeinated and connected, I spent a chunk of time unpacking what I could and, I know you’ll be shocked, cleaning a bit more.  One of the cleaning tasks I tackled was one of my favorite little features of this house — the Tap-Lites!

I had never seen these things before, but man are they fun.  With regular light switches, if you want them to coordinate with your walls you have to paint them (which means drying time) or wallpaper them (again, drying time).  With Tap-Lites, their cover plates pop right off and you can put some wallpaper or other colored paper right inside and pop it back on the wall.

So, so easy!  So I spent a few hours scrubbing the nicotine-d and smudged Tap-Lite covers, and on some of them, replaced the decorative insides with wallpaper.

But not the bathroom ones.  Love that foil wallpaper!  🙂

These suckers are hard to come by, so Jack has been buying them up wherever he can find them.  If any of you have an “in” on a Tap-Lite source, we’d love to know about it so we can keep extras on hand.  If any of them break over the years, we’d love to replace them with another Tap-Lite instead of a normal boring switch!