Catching Up

Hola!

Today is a beautiful one in Milwaukee - incredibly, I hear cicadas still buzzing!  It is sunny today, very still, and very warm.  I don't believe I've ever heard cicadas this late in the season, but I'll take it, because even though some of the trees are reminding me that it is no longer summer, today it feels like it!

I have finished cleaning and putting the china hutch and curio cabinet back together; all that needs to be done now is filling them up with my treasures and polishing the wood on the outside once that is done.

The china hutch is so large it covers a lot of the finish on this particular wall (an "accent wall") that I don't care for.  By rights, I should have Kevin the Handyman move the hutch and paint that wall, but I just don't feel like it right now, and may not for months yet.  I want to get "settled" first -- still not feeling that way -- and then think about what I want to do with future decorating.

I'm starting to unpack the boxes from the former Maison Newton's front room:

 

I cleared out all of the boxes of books and workpapers from the former built-in:

And have contracted with Kevin the Handyman to return it to bookshelf status.  He will sand down the areas where the metal bracket holders used to be (you can see the bumps and lumps where they used to be and were painted around countless times), spackle and touch up the paint, then install new metal bracket holders and cut new shelves to fit the width and height of the niche.  The basement stairs are on the other side of the wall.  In the house next store that I looked at before deciding to buy this place, the actual cabinet with glass doors and wood shelves intact was in pristine condition, but I will be very happy with open shelves. 

Those planters I put out on the front stoop (I can't quite get up to calling it a porch since it has no roof or railing and is rather puny size-wise) have grown tremendously over the last month.  We had some abnormally cold weather and the African "daisies" suffered some, but this week we've had mostly sun and more seasonal temperatures, so they are holding their own again, even though it is now dark out by 7 p.m., sigh.

Oops - got part of my reflection, drat!

Some close-ups (I'm practicing):

And here is a photo of Maison Newton the ranch house, with my bright red mailbox:

I'm still working on backing up sufficiently to get the WHOLE house in the photo :)  Love that pop of red.

Back to work here...