House Work Continues...and Rachel visits!

The kitchen floor is done and looks beautiful. Now this year's episode of This Old House continues. Mike and Joey tore all the old wallpaper off in the dining room to get it ready to paint. Underneath the wallpaper was a stenciled border that I'm guessing was done in the nineteen-teens.

On the west wall there is also a window that's been cemented over. On the other side of the wall is the bathroom, so I'm guessing the window was there before someone added indoor plumbing.











RACHEL CAME TO VISIT (with Mike & Mary, of course!) We had such a fun weekend with them, as we always do. The are such great people. I truly feel that we have just extended our family more to add the three of them. People keeps asking me things like, "Did Mindy get to see her baby?" and, "Do you ever hear how she's doing?" This adoption is very open and we LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH!!!!!











Mindy's boyfriend, Jake, met Rachel for the first time. Aren't they cute? She sure looked tiny in his arms!

Guest in the garden

So, you may know that I love to keep a vegetable garden in the summer. The other day I found a little friend in my tomatoes. I think this is called a "cat-face" spider. It's pretty impressive if you zoom in on it's cat face, which is actually its bottom.


















I took this picture from the other side. It's harder to see because the sun was in my eyes when facing this direction, but the spider is in the top right corner.

Our house is always a work in progress!

So now we are working on the house again. We are replacing the kitchen floor with tile. It's going to be so pretty! We are also going to get new carpet downstairs, which means I want to re-paint the walls, too. One project always leads to another! I'm hoping to have it all done by Thanksgiving.
This is what the floor looked like for a day or so. Lovely. It always looks worse before it looks better.

In the center picture you can see the old linoleum from the 1930s. It was underneath the new floor that was done in 1983 and then the one that was done in 1998.

Okay, I can't figure out how to move the pictures to where I want them, but in the top picture (which I want at the bottom!) you can see the new tile going in. Quite a difference!

Someone please comment and tell me how to move pictures around when I'm posting.