New year (and a whole lot of catching up)

If I were one to make resolutions, more frequent blogging would be an obvious candidate particularly because I was just talking to a friend about our paint colors, remembered we had a blog, came over to look up a color and...realized how terrible I've been about putting information up here in the last year or so.  This blog has always functioned mainly as a resource for us to keep track of things but it isn't much help if I don't keep good records!  So, without further ado, here's a whole slew of things we've been doing, hopefully with some information that will someday come in handy (to us, at least).  I'll try to break this into a few posts to keep rooms/projects somewhat together...

First up - an "after" picture of what we call the second-floor living room.  This is the flex space on the second floor that could be an office or kids' playroom but, for now, is simply more living area.  We still need to add barn doors to the exterior but it's essentially complete. 

More living space, yay!

Moving back downstairs, we installed pendant lights over the kitchen island.  The pendants are here.

Getting started with wiring

And up!

Now that's a straight line!

And while we're in the kitchen...we also installed the backsplash.  We used a gray arabesque tile (Pharsalia 2" x 2.25" porcelain mosaic tile in glossy gray, to be exact - and I'll have to go dig up the grout color, which hopefully I'll remember to do at some point).  This was quite a job to install and took a lot of time to keep it straight and level - thank goodness for our laser level and Brian's penchant for detail!

A clean (and protected) slate

Moving along

Still working

Ta-da!  Tile in, grout to go

I honestly can't tell if the tile has grout or not in this picture, but I think it does and the backsplash is, in fact, complete so...we're just going to call this an "after" picture and be done