Happy Thanksgiving!

We are having 20 people here for Thanksgiving tomorrow so we have been trying to get all of the finishing touches on the house before then. We still have lots of stuff at the old house to "stage" it for a showing. So, things aren't quite like we would want. Most of the walls have nothing on them. We have no coffee tables in the living room. And a lot of our stuff that makes our house seem like ours like lamps, books, pottery etc. is still at the other house. I wish we had our kitchen painted but that was not a part of the plan. We decided to wait a while on painting the kitchen and bathrooms. We have taken care of some other things lately.

We decided we wanted to get 6 stools for the built in table that divides the kitchen and dining room. I liked the idea of stools because they could be completely slid under the table and out of the way. We had been looking for a while for vintage stools. But, it is hard to find them as short as we need and even harder to find six. So, I settled on 6 stools at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I found them a few months ago and decided I would hold out as long as possible to see if anything else I liked better came along. With Thanksgiving around the corner I had to bite the bullet and order them because we need the seats. Then a week or so later I saw the exact stools for $25 less and I liked the color of the wood better. The stools I bought are darker wood than I would like (and darker than our other furniture.) but after we refinish the walls this winter and they are darker maybe the stools won't stand out as much to me. We also finally reupholstered the dining room chairs.

Almost ready for Thanksgiving. You can see the new upholstery and one of the new stools.

One of the first things that really stood out to me when we looked at this house was a wall sconce in the downstairs hallway. It seemed so out of style for this house. I'm sure it was put in when the dog kennels were removed and the basement was remodeled. I finally changed it a couple of nights ago to something more modern and the style of the house. I tried to include some photos but taking a picture of a light is quite challenging I discovered!

This is what the old light looked like in the hallway.

The new light turned off (much easier to take a picture of)

The new light turned on

I think I have already talked about accepting our pink and blue bathrooms for what they are right now. I decided we would decorate with vintage ads for pink and blue bathrooms. I really wanted to have these up for Thanksgiving so maybe people would see what we see in our bathroom.  So, this afternoon we spent some time getting photos of old ads printed, buying frames, mattes etc. One of the ads is for two bathrooms (kind of like ours) and it is being advertised with twins. I thought that was really cute. Another one of the ads has a picture of blue prints in it and it is about designing a bathroom divided into compartments with a curtain on tracks (we have pocket doors on tracks) so that 4 people in one family can use that bathroom at the same time. It is much the same idea as our bathroom. I love that the blue prints indicate that YES someone did at one time actually plan this pink and blue bathroom with intention. I have included some photos of the ads below. I will take pics of them on the bathroom walls soon.

This is the ad for two bathrooms with the twins. It is in the master bathroom.

This is the ad with the blue prints. It is in the second bathroom.

This is also in the second bathroom.

This is in the master bathroom.

 Another thing that we noticed immediately when we looked at the house was that the refrigerator just didn't fit in the kitchen well. It seemed like it was the first thing you saw when you walked in and it stuck out way into the middle of the room. As most people know refrigerators are much larger these days than they once were. So, this apparently was the problem. We were told that at one time the house had a "gourmet" fridge and the second owners put in a "normal" one. I am very curious what a "gourmet" fridge is and what it looked like. We discovered that in order to solve our fridge issue what we needed was a counter depth fridge. If you are not familiar with this concept, it is a fridge that sits flush with the counter top (which most modern fridges don't) and they are about triple the price (or more) of a regular fridge. So, you have to pay more for less space!

We had no plans to buy a fridge right away. But, we happened to be at Home Depot and my husband was bored waiting in line and started looking at a black Friday sale ad. (Apparently at Home Depot and Lowes black Friday takes place all month.) They had an insanely good sale going on for a counter depth fridge that was actually a name brand. The cheapest price up until now I had been able to find on one was double this sale price for a brand I had never heard of. So, we decided we better take it while we could get it. We were a bit bummed out to find out they wouldn't deliver it until after Thanksgiving. Then the next day we were at Lowes. I don't remember why but we have replaced a few light switches lately so that could have been the reason. Lowes had the exact same sale (well actually $1 more) and they could deliver tomorrow. Woo hoo! We cancelled the sale with Home Depot and got our fridge from Lowes. It now has an 18 pound turkey in it! Happy Thanksgiving!

I don't think this photo shows off how great it looks!