Tales From The Ipe!

I hung up some pictures today. It’s a momentous occasion. Why? Lemme ‘splain.

Picture it. Sicily, 1942. A young Mussolini had come to power…… let’s try this again.

Picture it. Christmas, 2008. I bought a set of 10 shadow boxes for my wife for Christmas. I selected various family photos, got them printed at our local CVS, and placed them within each frame. My wife is happy, and we decide to hang them up in the stairway landing upstairs. Since we’re planning to have the house painted, we decide to hold off on hanging the frames up. Why hang them up, when we’ll just have to do it again after painting the house.

Months go by, as we continually postpone painting the house. Hanging the pictures becomes an inside joke. March 2010, the house is painted, and I finally hung up all 10 frames. I couldn’t do it myself. Joshua was my assistant, and he did a nice job handing me my hammer, holding the laser level, and handing me each new frame.

It’s not complete. We have to replace one picture with a better landscape photo, and we need to find a better photo for the frame in the center (professional family photo?), but it’s up!  Sorry for the low quality cameraphone picture, but it’s all I had available. It’s probably strange to you that I’m elated to hang up picture frames. The reason for my elation is simple. We’ve been “on hold” for a long time with redecorating and making other little fixes to the house. Some things have changed here and there since 2005, but we’ve just started making the bigger changes. Waiting to paint the house has delayed making the living room nicer, hanging up family photos, and other stuff too small to mention. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but to me it always felt like part of our life was in a holding pattern, forever waiting. Now, it feels like life is moving again.

And that is a good reason to feel elated.

Josh helped me hang up these picture frames

The window treatments are officially up. The top of the living room window is 12′ off the ground, and oh, we don’t have a ladder. After pricing out buying a ladder or hiring a handyman who owns a ladder, my friend Doug offered to drive over to our house and install it for us with his ladder.

Eureka! I worked from home, occasionally helping out where I could. Between the new interior paint, the new slipcovers and accent pillows, and the new light fixtures, we’re finally catching up on all the remodeling that we’ve had on our list. You can’t do everything, so we’ve always done little things here and there. The recent work was a big chunk of the to-do list.

The living room itself is not yet complete, but we’re damn close. What’s left? Duh, my flatscreen HDTV, of course. Say it with me. Mwahahahahahaha.

Our window treatments are installed