Chaos

You may remember reading about our plans to renovate the house and rent it out this summer? We did, and it went really well. We had awesome renters, and the house looked great. I posted photos, everyone oohed and ahhed, and I felt like a design blogger. But of course I'm nothing of the sort, and I'm going to make everybody feel so much better about whatever mess or unfinished projects you have in your own houses. Because we moved back in about a week and a half ago, pulled all the stuff out of the storage room, and now the house looks like this:

The house painters arrived unexpectedly this morning to start on the front porch, so yes, that's the porch swing dominating the living room

and the family bikes are parked in the kitchen.

Looking at this photo reminded me that the flowers on the dining table are dead and I need to clean them up. In other words, life is totally back to normal!

One reason the living room is such a massive pile of stuff is that my major fall project is turning my own studio into a part-studio/part-bedroom so we'll have a four-bedroom rental next summer. The photo above is what it looked like before (on a really good day when I had done a lot of cleaning). That's my still-life lightbox setup, and there were three corner desks like that one. Right now ....

it's been torn apart to fit a new bed, so it's as bad as the living room. Almost all of this accumualtion has to go, so

looks like it's going to be a busy fall!