And a belated happy New Year!

We rang in 2011 with barely a jingle, sorry to say. I was laid up on the couch with a truly unpleasant cold. But, our 2011 has been pretty productive nonetheless. We have been working on a bunch of odds and ends. Starting off the new year, we got back into our painting clothes and finished installing and painting all of the trim in our master bedroom. Now our closet is really complete, with a door and molding and everything. This weekend I worked on a chore that I have been postponing for more than a year: touching up the wall paint. When we installed the new baseboards and door frames, we ended up with caulk and white paint on the walls. I pulled out 3 different colors of paint today and touched it all up. Sad to say, but I think the upstairs hallway is going to need a total repaint since the touch-ups seem to dry just a smidgen off the color on the walls. We'll probably save that project for another year.

The other super exciting thing that we worked on was building shelves for the office nook. We had some really unfortunate dimensions to work with: 49" x 13.5". Every commercially available shelf was 48" so just a bit short of the full span and when you look at making shelves out of sheet goods, you get really annoyed because everything is just a little too small to get an optimal cut from a 4'x8' piece of plywood. Lucky for us, our trusty lumberyard, Compton's, happened to sell 5'x5' pieces of 1/2" plywood. Eureka! We needed 4 pieces of 49"x12.75" plywood cuts and this did the trick with hardly any waste which made it a cheaper project in the end. Justin fabricated the shelves on Saturday afternoon and I stained them up. I'll get some polyurethane on them over the next week and then hopefully we'll get them hung before next weekend. The true fun starts when I can start filling them up with all of the office supplies and storage.