After bringing it home on top of our car in December, we leaned it on the third floor railing and hadn’t thought much about it since until yesterday. It’s prettttty huge so we decided to hang it up here:

A little to the left.

The annual Progressive Dinner was last night, hence the dessert making the night before, so we took the opportunity to try a little furniture rearrangement.

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I have no idea if my dream library chair -the classic Eames lounge- will realistically fit up here… But I think I’m willing to try:

Of course if I had this chair I’d have to make time to sit in it to read some classy lit, so I will have to keep dreaming until the house is done!

Strawberry Tiramisu! Yum:

Meanwhile, I was making the cannoli cupcakes of my dreams. Chocolate ganache is so easy, and I have some left over… What to do with it??

Much more fun than painting doors!

We also put the hardware on the hall closets, put the shelves in and filled those guys up. Mini Open:

Mini Closed:

Linen Open:

Hall colors looks great with our Turkish rug we bought on vacation there a few months ago, but it probably will head back to our master closet- the proportions are better and now we’re used to luxuriousness underfoot in our closet.

Another night of painting doors:

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Rob installed the base in closet; bottom third of base (shoe) in room:

More Base! And one of our essential rolls of blue tape. We use it to punch-list as we go- touch up paint here, etc:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_list

Once that was hung, he moved up to the upper closet:

Rout, chisel, attach hinges, hang door:

Hotness. Even the cute little thumb turns are in on the upper doors:

Yay:

Needs some paint, but door hardware is a pain so it’s awesome to have these all in.

Primed and painted a ton of stops, base and other misc wood:

Third coat of water based poly on the cork:

Second and final coat of blue in the hall:

Whew. I’m tired thinking about it. Also discovered that our master bedroom plaster ceiling, which was laminated over with drywall a long time before we moved in, had been painted the exact same blue as our bedroom walls. The yellow is wall paper…

(I’m not getting into the story of just HOW I managed to figure this out)

Yeah so don’t do that… Or else your husband may go to pick up the pieces to install them and find this:

After the un-sticking, progress:

And done:

A real closet! The little bedroom is all grown up:

Rob reinstalled our restored ceiling fixtures in the hall…

X 3:

Complete with Edison bulbs:

I gathered my poly, a paint pan liner, a ‘chip’ brush (disposable paint brush), and an applicator specifically for water based poly which screws onto a standard broom handle. Here’s what I started with:

I started in the furthest corner, working toward the door, in the direction of the tiles, and used the chip brush to cut in the edge. Using water based poly is like mopping with hand soap, or watered down glue- not really in a good way:

After it was done I waited two hours, then it was time to lightly sand the first coat:

After some microfiber-ing, I put on another coat, with probably one more coat to go:

I poly-ed the threshold too while I was at it. Fun tasks for a snowy day!