No-Blog-O-Versary

That's right. One year and no blog entries. So let's have another go, shall we? I won't bother making excuses, I won't bemoan the fleeting fight of time, I'll just dive in with a quick recap.

What have we done on our house in the last year?

- The bathroom downstairs is finished and glorious, and the bedroom that accompanies it is delightful and bright. It's called the Nefertiti Suite.
- The old kitchen is now a karaoke/TV room, and the front south bedroom is now the kitchen. It's much better, much brighter, and is just between the two dining areas, instead of apart from either.
- The new kitchen and the new bathroom necessitated a new septic system entirely. It's theoretically only temporary, since the main drain is supposed to reach us in the next year or two, but the locals around here are sceptical, and we didn't want to wait.
- A grand big velux window is up in the front room of the attic, paving the way for the finishing of a bedroom up there. Another one is on the way for the southern roof. more on that (I promise) when it arrives.
- The whole attic was zapped with a huge toxic cloud in order to kill all the bugs living in the wood. There are some still living up there, but so far as we can tell, only in places we want to eliminate anyway, ie pull up the floorboards.
- The back, northern, wall of the house has been redone to match the rest of the exterior walls, very pretty, and there's a huge hole in my office. The double French doors are under construction.
- We finally cracked the safe open, and found a trove of fascinating artifacts within.

Our plans are creeping along. The general ideas haven't changed much. We're gonna loft the ceiling over the dining room and the back bedroom, with a mezzanine balcony looking out from the attic. The thick stone wall between the new kitchen and the dining room will be opened up a patch to allow a doorway, and the wall between the dining room and the back bedroom will go away altogether, making the bedroom into a fireplace sitting area. Downstairs, we want to make another en suite bathroom out of what is currently "the junk room", next to the front corner bedroom. Waiting on the main drain for that project. And the verandah requires an engineer's evaluation before we can really do anything to it. But the plan remains to tile it and flatten it and balustrade it and make it supernice.

And that's the update on the house.

I'll blog more about these things individually as time happens. I swear I will.

But there's more than the house. We've traveled a pile this past year, to Laos and Thailand and Burma and Paris and the UK. I went to Amsterdam for a week. Fun. And we've just finished with a very fun very full visiting season. Here is a list of who stayed in our house this summer in order:

Martin, Jo, Sam, Phil, Phil's 2 kids, Grandpa, Marmie, Kurt, Jennifer, Nichou, Neil, Britt, Emma, Jed, Jack, Ole, Putih, Thor, and Catherine.

And it's not over: Alisa and Hana are coming back in 2 weeks for 4 days, and also maybe Leo.

So the house has been getting some serious use. I like to think it makes the house happy, having kids running through its rooms, and people dining luxuriously.

I'm sure there's more to tell, it's been a year after all, but slowly slowly. I really will make an effore to blog a bit more regularly from now on.

Happy no-blog-o-versary!