Café Design

OK,  so… Christmas is just a short day away! Can you believe it? With one more sleep ’til Christmas Eve I find myself anxious but also wanting to make these moments last a bit longer. I love the preparations just as much, if not even more, than the actual thing because then I know there’s a another whole year before Christmas comes again. And I love Christmas! It’s when I am at my happiest, especially since we’ve made it a tradition that my mom comes to visit over the holidays! Everyone’s happy, well-fed and thankful… We’ve been very busy these last couple of weeks (but then, we’re always busy) but we’ve also managed to sneak in many quality moments together and apart. I took my mom to Home Depot on Saturday morning (my favorite place to shop in town. Honestly.  Lumber, windows, paints, primers, French doors, hardware – better than clothes, I tell you! 🙂 Thinking about topics to post about, I realized I never got around to showing you some pics of our previous apartment taken by my sweet friend Alexia Guuinic.

Today we’re having the third snow day of the season in Western Mass and our daughter couldn’t be happier! She’s not the only one, this mama is happy too!  Although we spent the better part of the morning shoveling snow out of our driveway, our house never looked this charming! Isn’t it funny how snow is like frosting on a cake? Makes everything pretty, and the cold temps bearable. I hope it’s snowing where you are… 

It feels like lately I’ve been on a constant race trying to catch up with my exploding calendar, and my calendar is winning. I know it’s the end of the year and I’m sure everyone’s schedule just got busier than ever, but I can’t remember a time I’ve been this busy. But then again I can’t remember what I had for breakfast! For us, this past week included many highs and lows – a ballet recital for our littlest one (who’s not so little any more) preceded by intense dress rehearsals (she did beautifully and we couldn’t be more proud of her!); our front screen door breaking off with a sizable chunk of our exterior trim destroyed,  followed by desperate calls to our handyman; picking up my mom from Boston Logan for her much anticipated (by all of us) annual visit…and that’s just a fraction of it all.  It is all good now, but it has been one of those weeks where you find yourself lying in bed in the middle of the night going over your to-do lists and praying you’ve got everything covered! Obviously I hadn’t, because I missed Friday’s post 🙂

I realized the other day that it’s been a while since I shared updates on our home renovation. In the past many of you have expressed an interest in seeing “construction” and behind-the-scenes images of the process (thank you!), so I thought it would be fun to talk about some of our latest projects. As a warning, these are not pretty images, nothing is finished yet as we’ve been pacing ourselves time-wise and budget-wise to make sure we’re up-to-date with our financial goals and we’re not investing too much too soon into a house that is already at the higher end of prices for the neighborhood we’re in. But we do want to change things here and there, seeing that the house, as pretty as it is on the outside, is literally a 1960s time capsule on the inside, warts and all. The bones are good but the interior architecture is lacking the kind of interest that suits cute cottages like this one so we postponed purchasing the more expensive pieces of furniture until we’ve gotten the envelope, the architectural elements of the house right.