This weekend is Jason and my 1 year anniversary. These arrived today. Sorry, its kinda blurry.

Tomorrow we go skydiving! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have to admit, I stare at people a lot. Mostly other women. I’m sure it stems from my own insecurities and perpetuates my paranoia that someone, somewhere is always looking at me, but I can’t help it. Most days, I hide behind my sunglasses, which allows me to glance a little too long to inspect choices in outfits, hairstyles, and such. I feel safe behind the tinted lenses and don’t worry about people seeing me stare.

So its always a little unnerving the first day I wear my regular glasses after having worn contacts and sunglasses for a long period of time. I find myself staring at someone, only to remember they can see me and realize they are challenging me with eye contact. Okay, well, they’re probably not challenging me, but that’s how it feels. Which I’m sure is a reflection of my own guilt on the matter.

Anyway, today is one of those days. I am wearing transparent lenses and will have to be more conscious of my gaze. I guess at least I recognize it, right?

They installed our brand new huge stove/range/oven (if anyone can explain the difference, I’ll bake you brownies) yesterday and man does it look impressive.

It looks great with the wood floor and I am very excited to cook on it. Of course, they have to turn on the outlet into which it is plugged, but then we can bake away if we want. It might be helpful to wait until our countertops arrive though:

I know my dad and brother have something to do with the fact that I find this extremely entertaining: Dude…

Our house is coming along really well. We are beginning to see what the end product will be like and its coming together in the details. One big picture is the living/dining room. It is complete except for the hanging light fixtures:

The floor boards and shoe molding are two of the nice touches that really make it look pretty high class:

We’ve also added nickel doorknobs to all the interior doors. One of my coworkers summed up this process well when she said “Did you ever think you’d be excited about nickel doorknobs?”:

Yesterday they added the molding around the cabinets in the kitchen. It looks really nice:

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

This is our “prep” area. The box on the wall is for the microwave so it doesn’t have to take up counterspace.

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A lot is happening around the house today. They are painting the living/dining area, the tile guy is starting in the bathroom, and, most exciting, the kitchen cabinets are being installed today. One downside is that Jason is sick today so while he’s trying to rest, its going to be noisy upstairs. But maybe that means he can send me periodic updates!

As the title may suggest, we had our kitchen painted today and I am very pleased with the outcome. I was a little worried that the color would be too purple or too dark, but I think its just right. I was going for a “wine” effect. Its pretty difficult to capture the color in a picture, but I think this shot does it the most justice (of course, monitors may vary):

The vent in the ceiling ran right into the drop ceiling, so they found a pretty classy solution for the crown molding (which looks great, by the way):

One last view looking through the pass-thru:

This weekend we installed some of our new real wood blinds and they look impressively stylish. We had a little difficulty because of the curvature of the window trim in our bedroom, but the wooden header evened things out so you can’t even tell. The biggest benefit of the new blinds is that it cuts out 95% of the light coming through our windows, opposed to the 60% (if that) that our old metal blinds cut out. This made it very difficult to get out of bed this morning, the one drawback. Well, enough commentary, here they are:

Brought to you by my own impressively spacious Honda Fit and a very large table saw.