Long Time, No Blog

Well, March is almost over and it looks like I am a major blogging slacker. No posts in February, none in March, so far. I guess I've been busy, but there's no way I can catch everyone up on all our comings and goings, so I will just take it from here, with apologies. Opa and I are almost in our new basement home here at Chez Benham. We have seen the progress through framing, insulation, drywalling, drywall finishing, and now we are ready to paint. We had planned to use the painters our contractor suggested, but at the eleventh hour decided to do the job ourselves! No worries, because we have painted before, we have a very cool paint sprayer, and are just doing a one color job. If it looks just too weird we can always do a contrasting trim later. As for right now, the doors are in, our carpet and flooring has been ordered, as well as our appliances, our cultured marble should be installed this next week, our IKEA kitchen and closet components are awaiting pickup, so all is going along according to plan, except maybe a little bit later than we had thought. We wanted to be in the apartment by Tuesday 1 April, but we will probably be at least a week before all is in place for our move. Irene, Ricky's Mom, is arriving Monday from Mobile for a week's visit with her grandchildren and Lynne and Ricky. We have reserved a room at Days Inn in Lehi for the duration of Irene's stay, so things won't be so crowded.

Here are some pictures of our apartment at this point in time. We hope to prime this afternoon and paint on Monday. Or not.

This shot is from the staircase going down to our apartment. Notice the interesting corners, doorways, etc. Out here it is business as usual to have curved corners and edges, etc. I like it, I like it!!!

The doorway to the left goes into our bedroom. We had originally had plans for double doors there, but changed our minds. (We do that a lot....) The doorway to the right goes into our main living area. Check out my windowseat! I have always wanted one of those, though not necessarily in the kitchen, but I will take it where I can get it!

Here is a closer shot of the window seat. Out the window you can see the not very pretty window well, which is a basement fixture I plan to fix up. I'm thinking maybe a mini-mural of the flowers in my garden in Mobile. What do you think? Opa and I are planning to plant herbs in there, conveniently located for impromptu snippings for cooking.

This shot is from our bedroom looking through the bathroom door and into the closet. We had planned to have our washer/dryer in the closet, but found that there just wasn't space. So it is going to be in the storage room just next to the closet, which will be almost as convenient as our original plan.

This next shot looks into our main area, where we will have our dining room table just to the right, and a sitting area in front of the window, where we can look out onto our patio. I hope to plant the niches in the rock wall with Johnny-jump-ups and maybe some other flowering plants that enjoy the shade.

So there you have a small pictorial status report on our new apartment. Opa and I are very excited about this little home we are making for ourselves, and will ever be grateful to Lynne and Ricky for the generous sharing of their home with us since last November, and even more so for the donating of their very needed storage space so that we will have a nice place to park ourselves between the church missions we hope to spend the rest of our lives serving. Our plan is to submit our paperwork just as soon as our house in Mobile sells. We just switched realtors, and hopefully something good will come of that very soon!