Finished...Really?

Last night, around ten o'clock, I made a scary observation:

Our upstairs is finished - well, mostly.

The only change/fix/upgrade that we have left is to get our fireplace in some sort of working order (eventually, there will be a long post about this, as we sued over it). But, in the short term, there aren't any more projects left.

We finished the floors, and rugs have been laid down.

On Saturday night, I got a call from J.C.Penney's that our new Roman shades were in - which weren't supposed to come for another 3 weeks. We got an incredible deal on them ($15 per shade) so it wasn't shocking that Andrew spent three hours and every curse word uttered by mankind to put them up. Regardless of the pain it took to install, the end product is that our entire house is now mini-blind free, and the shades look, at least to us, pretty fantastic - though anything would have been an improvement over the mini blinds that our cats had been slowly gnawing off so they could stare out the front windows.

And last night, I painted the ceiling fan in the master bedroom. Oddly enough, this is a project that we'd done before at our old rental. The fan in the study there had one of those primary color fans, perfect for a kid's bedroom, and I couldn't stand the darned thing. The day project that I thought the fan would be ended up being a nearly week long disaster involving copious amounts of spray paint. This time, I knew better. I got out my "sorority paints" (wood paint that I have a nice collection of after painting paddle after paddle during my college years) and went to town on the hardware - which Andrew removed quite easily, since we were old hat at taking down ceiling fans.

Then, while waiting for that to dry, I sanded and stained the fan blades. I wasn't a huge fan of the color of the stain, so I decided just to paint them brown. Unfortunately, after painting the nightstand in our bedroom, I was out of brown. But, my parents spent a small fortune on art classes for me when I was little, and I remembered the most important lessons ever shared there: the color combinations which will result in brown.

Yet, like any project under our roof, there was a roadblock. The only red/purple I had was fushia. I mixed yellow and green in and then some blue to get it darker, which resulted in a cool slate color, and then I added in the gold paint from the hardware. Andrew was watching me like I had inhaled too much of the paint fumes, but in the end, it actually worked really well.

We let the whole mess dry and went over to a friend's for dinner (single ladies: contact me - this guy makes FABULOUS lasagna), and then Andrew put the fan back up. Viola! A new fan for about $3 in paint.

Our next interior house project is to finish the basement, but I don't see that happening too soon. I know I'll figure something out and the little projects never cease, but there's something both thrilling and sad about looking around our little house and realizing that there's nothing pressing that I want changed in the immediate future.