Projects!!!

I just love projects. I love finishing a project, and then admiring the fruits of my labor, especially when it's something I've made for my house. Last week that's what I did. I did projects.

Here's what I started with:
And here's what I made first (it's the same thing in both pictures, just rolled up on the left, and rolled down on the right):












I realized as I was making the matching curtains that I needed to paint the walls BEFORE putting up the curtains, so Friday I did this:


By the end of the day Saturday, my breakfast area (really our only dining room, since our formal dining room is really our office) looked like this:
I'm really quite proud. The idea for the door window shade came from seeing one in my friend's house a few months ago. The whole thing is attached to the door with velcro, and the two strips holding up the rolled curtain are also fastened with velcro. The strips are made from scraps from my living room drapes, so the decor in the two rooms are tied together nicely. I'm so happy with the result! The other two curtains are stapled to 1x4's, which are mounted above the windows with angle brackets. That's why painting had to happen before installation, because the whole putting them up and taking them down is more complex than just taking down a curtain rod.

Some time in the not-to-distant future, the walls of the living room are going to end up this same color. The unfinished edge you can see on the left in that picture will not remain a sloppy unfinished edge. I want to get at least 3 walls painted before we go on our first trip, coming up late next week.

I've had a few random songs taking turns in my head lately: "Alice Childress," by Ben Folds, "City Love," by John Mayer, and "Selfless, Cold and Composed," also by Ben Folds. Then today my husband's facebook status put another song in my head, "Everybody Knows a Little Bit of Something," by King's X, his favorite band of all time, ever.