The Reveal

As I mentioned in the last post, the guys were here late on Friday evening starting to strip a lot of the protective masking off the floors. The second floor is completely unmasked now, and it looks awesome:



We had them leave the paper on the floors in the girls rooms as they have started to put the their personal touches on their spaces - Rebecca has come up with a cool geometric pattern of overlapping colored rectangles:



She's done 90% of it herself - the design, wall layout (a small bit of help from the adults with a level), all the taping, and nearly all the painting. It is looking great!

Lizzie is going for the opposite look - totally organic / freehand stripes. She got off to a frustrating start (this would be a tough painting project for an adult), but with a huge amount of moral support, technical advice, and infinite patience from Ammah (my mom) she's got it going. This is definitely a design that no adult could pull off - the complete freehand nature if it goes against all our urges to apply masking tape and make straight lines. I heard her say yesterday "I decided that I want to do this all myself" - so we are letting her have at it since it is her room. It's hard not to go "all adult" on her, so it will definitely be her very own work on this one.



Here she is, hard at work:




So, while the girls and Ammah were painting, Cathy and I were installing wire shelving back into the closets. We managed to get the girls rooms done, the hall linen closet, and the big one in the upstairs exercise room:



The cabinet guys also came back to install the mudroom cabinet and shoe-putting-on-seat:



And the carpenters were wrestling with the front living room window sill. It is made of Chicipate (Southern Chestnut). We were originally going to use Honduran Mahogany, but we couldn't find a wide enough/long enough piece of certified FSC wood. This option looks really great, so we are very happy with it.