Before I get to the house, I must lament over the abysmal last couple of weeks the Cardinals are having.  When the Astros have their way with you, things are bad.

But at last night’s Civil War Game at least they looked good, uniform wise.

(although I choose to ignore the fact that he’s wearing striped socks instead of stirrups)

Now on to the house.

This is going to be long and picture heavy because I finally got around to taking pictures (this morning) of the fence, the living room, the bookshelves, and the dining room.

First off, the living room.  This has been done for months.  Many, many months but I never got around to taking pictures of it.

We’ve got the cherry dry sink that was turned into a bar. Complete with bottles of wine that are at least three years old. Needless to say, we aren’t big drinkers around here.

Right above that is MrBunny’s ridiculously large collection of shotglasses.  These have been thinned out at least four times in the last couple of years.  Survival of the fittest!

If you were thinking about starting a collection of shotglasses- please note the massive amounts of dust on those shelves.  Granted this was after the whole sanding of the wallpaper debacle (which put a quarter inch of dust on this entire section of the house) but still, it is a bitch to dust all those… so 9 times out of 10, I don’t.

We’ve got one chair- my chair, noted by the xbox controller and headset.  I rarely talk but I enjoy listening to the preteen boys make fools of themselves thinking they are all bad ass.  PSA: If you play America’s Army and are not that good, nor that hardcore; do not attempt to play online.  I signed on thinking “oh I’ll see how many people are out there”, next thing I know I’m being barked at to flank left and get to cover and blah blah blah.  It was really intense, and I was sorely unprepared.

MrBunny’s chair and the A/V setup.  If you look closely you can see the dust on there too.  I really should have dusted that room.  You can’t see it, but right to the left of that chair is a gazelle machine that MrBunny runs on while watching random documentaries on Netflix (through the XBox).

Our fancy schmancy screen.  Just a piece of felt over some blackout material (that’s a window back there if it’s not obvious) stapled to some wood.  It works amazingly well actually.  But we moved the playstation/bluray player to the tv because the felt doesn’t give a very “crisp” picture.  Don’t notice that big of a difference with the xbox though.

So that’s the living room.

Now the fence.

This, obviously, is an “in progress” picture which I didn’t get many of. Was way too busy! Those bags? Concrete. Very heavy concrete.

The same section- fenced in. The little waggle there in the middle is a set of double doors that need to be sanded down a little bit more. Every time I think I’ve sanded enough and it’s a perfect fit… it’s not.

You can see MrBunny’s new boat (he bought it with a friend- it’s been back there for over a month now and still has not gone in the water.) and the garden. Other than that… it’s a fence. A backbreaking, one problem after another, my god is this thing ever going to be done, beautiful! fence.

Before we move on to the bookshelves and dining room…

A puppy break!

Okay- moving on.

I painted the benches-

and the bookshelves-

(and vacuumed)

FYI- rally towels are really difficult to frame. Especially if they are printed off center. But I like them so they stay.

The top picture is of some UK basketball team. I felt it only fair to give MrBunny some wall space. Not that he cares.

Big Al was taken down to make way from some Championship posters.  I like the one on the left because it has the words to the fight song up until Remember The Rose Bowl, and then continues on.   I’m sure Big Al will be back again come football season, but he might have to find a new home.

The guitars moved to the guest room and made room for some floating shelves, which are a major pain in the ass to put up.  But they provide a home for Fredbird, my signed Chris Carpenter ball, the Mark McGwire Wheaties box, and of course the Great Falls Dodgers minibat- a must for any serious collection.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for… the dining room!!!!

This picture was taken on March 25th, 2009. And for the most part, until last week, the dining room remained like this. I tried everything you can imagine to take it down. And nothing worked.

Because this paper was glued directly to the sheetrock and then primed/painted over. It was a disaster. So after trying everything, including an orbital sander (which was a huge mistake), we hired the guy who built the benches/bookshelves to come and fix it. It took him about a week of mudding/sanding/mudding/sanding/mudding/sanding but finally we got a workable surface up top there.

TaDa!!! The bottom part is Valspar’s ‘Spanish Tile’ (and took four coats) and the top is the Valspar Woodrow Wilson Putty which was also found on the top in this picture-

We also replaced the light fixture (thankfully)

*ignore the hall tree- haven’t found a place for it yet.

So there you have it. What I’ve been up to.
Oh and in amongst all that was this-

Good times.