The Cottage

I promised people (particularly my mom) pictures of the walls that were housing me, and finally, here they are. And just in case you weren't aware of this already, we call the kitchen our Neopolitan kitchen because we painted it "Raspberry Swirl," left the trim and cupboards off-white, and, well, the floor is old brown linoleum.

This is the main entrance/breakfast nook. The table, of course, is a catchall place. You can see the corner of the microwave cart (a garage sale find), although we don't have a microwave. Instead, our bread maker (another garage sale find, one which regularly produces yummy loaves of buttermilk honey wheat bread) sits on it, and it provides a higher work surface than the rest of the kitchen counters, which were either installed by people who were really short or who didn't know anything about working in a kitchen.

Roger put a shelf over the stove for me so that we'd have a handy place to keep things; nothing's on it yet because we haven't applied the veneer edging to it and the edges are rough. The stove has three little burners, instead of two little ones and two big ones. It makes cooking food evenly a little difficult sometimes. I did, however, make fantastic Mexican Corn Chowder last week (in a borrowed pot). The white patches are from filling some holes; the stud wasn't where Roger thought it was--apparently the last people didn't believe in finding the studs when they hung stuff.

This is the writing desk in the living room. It's been organized since (if you can believe it) and though it's far from tidy, we know where everything is. Except the two blue and one purple Sharpies. The little loveseat in the corner actually works like two recliners, except that it doesn't rock. ($5 at a garage sale--the kid who had been perched on the arm, probably the whole morning, followed us to Roger's car and watched Roger tie it onto the back of his convertible; I almost expected the kid to start crying.)

This is the work area, also in the living room. Roger's tried to divide the room with a little entertainment shelf system (yet another garage sale deal), but the room is too small for that to work. Unfortuantely, at the moment, there's nowhere else to really put it, so it's still in the middle of the room. Still, the work corner is a fairly productive space, when we're not tripping over each other.

The bookshelf looks surprisingly empty, doesn't it? It's mostly garage sale books. Roger has a box or two of books in the basement to find and unpack. I, of course, have plenty back in Ohio. Still, I feel weird about so much empty space where there should be books. And that little window actually provides a fantastic view. We're disappointed that whoever built this place didn't put a big window right there.

There are no bedroom pictures, even though the walls are a really great color, because there's really no bedroom furniture. We have, however, bought a painting from a local artist--I'll post a picture of that next time, and you'll see the color of the bedroom wall then.