oh, the simple joys

When we bought our house, we were all excited about the remodeling/updating we were going to do. That first summer, before we even moved in, we had the ceilings scraped of their godawful popcorn texture, pulled up the carpets and had the hardwood floors refinished, and painted most of the rooms. After we moved in we wired the house for phone, cable, and internet, did more painting, rearranged furniture, and redid the floors in the utility room, craft room, and workroom. And then the academic year reared it’s ugly head, and we stopped with the house projects (except for tiny things we squeezed in on weekends). Last summer, we resumed the house work by emptying out the kitchen into the dining room, tearing out the old counters and the backsplashes and the old stove, making room for a dishwasher and a pretty new stove, and having the cabinets painted. This was supposed to be our summer project - one we’re only now finishing up (we had to take another break for the fall quarter/semester). Now that the kitchen is almost done (finally!) we can actually think about what other projects we want to tackle, before we lose all interest in home projects.

The next substantial project is to update the hall bathroom (with its lovely pink floral wallpaper from the 1960s). The last time my mom came to visit, she stripped a bunch of the wallpaper (revealing the equally lovely pink walls underneath) - a challenge to the in-laws who are visiting later this month. On good days, I can think about the fun parts of this project - the new paint, the new accessories. The walls will be a fairly deep blue (like blue jeans) with the paneling painted a crisp white.

The initial plan was for a grown-up bathroom that could, with the addition of a few accessories, feel kid-friendly, too (someday, maybe, hopefully). It’s the bathroom that guests use, so it doesn’t ever want to be full of cutesy stuff... and we’re not really cutesy people. We have a couple of rubber duckies, so we thought we’d add them to the room for that little bit of fun. It was never the goal to have a rubber duckie themed room - we’ve seen a couple of those, recently, and they can easily get over-the-top.

Somewhere along the way, my mom started buying us little ducky accessories for the bathroom - a print of some duckies, a ducky bath sponge, a mini rubber ducky... Yesterday, she gave me a pair of ducky slippers - big, fuzzy, yellow ducks. They’re not the right size (which she knows) but she apparently couldn’t help herself. Why? What might be irresistable about fuzzy yellow ducky slippers?

They quack. A lot. In a strangely cute way. Who knew quacking slippers could be so amusing?