We had a semi-random potluck dinner in the back yard on Friday. It’s fun to have a place where people can come over and socialize – that was one of my big reasons for wanting to buy a house, after all. We hung out and ate and drank and smoked Shelly’s hookah, and eventually moved out back around the firepit and watched logs burn. I think the last guests left around 2 AM. It was fun, but we were tired and hung over on Saturday… uff.

We’re still spending most of our free time working on the house, but the end is near. I redid the baseboard trim in the bathroom yesterday – there was a gap where the old vanity had been, so I ripped it all out and installed new stuff, then painted it. I recentered the mirror, over the new sink, and finished painting the remaining wall with the darker turquoise paint. The turquoise still needs some touch-up and the trim needs another coat or two, but it’s looking pretty good in there now.

The living room won’t really be usable until we get a couple of couches, but it’s all cleaned up and put away now. I leveled out our array of shelves and bolted them to the wall, and we filled them all with books. Ava did most of that; she alphabetized the fiction by author and sorted the non-fiction by subject. Wow. She did almost all of the painting down there, too: red, gold, and cream. It looks great.