Tag: home decor

In which the day got away from me

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Let’s see: I spent a couple of hours hunting down bosses in Black Myth Wukong’s final level, which inexplicably transitions into an open world map but doesn’t actually provide you with a map, meaning such concerns as “north” and “south” become way more complicated than they ought to be. We went out to dinner at a local Italian place, the one with the really good bread, although I’m starting to suspect that they’re using genuinely stellar bread to cover up for mediocre entrees. We finally took down the utterly terrible curtains that have been hanging in our dining room since we bought the house and replaced them, and the hardware, with something not filthy and disgusting, and we went and bought paint for the entryway to the house, a decision that I think we’re going to live to regret, but my wife thinks otherwise, and she’s usually right about these things.

I don’t feel like that gets me to 9:00 PM, and I’m not sure where the several other hours of the day have gone, and I’m rather disturbed by my inability to account for, like, half the day. The boy is at a lock-in at school right now (I have done one of these during my career, and I will never do another) and you would think having the house to ourselves would lead to something exciting, but instead we’re going to watch one (1) episode of Great British Baking Show and then go to bed.

Adulthood’s exciting, innit?

Additional hotness of the new variety

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading4 Comments

If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.

A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:

Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.

So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.

We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.

I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.

Summertime has arrived

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, PhotographyLeave a comment

Okay, not really, there are still four days of school left— but the first Big Projekt of the summer has been accomplished. My wife decided that she hated how the porch looked (sadly, I lack a before picture at the moment, but I’ll see what I can find) so she spent the week stripping, etching, washing and repainting the floor out here, and I spent yesterday putting furniture together, and I’m pretty damn pleased with the results.

Four more days. Just four more. We can do this.

The final piece

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ReadingLeave a comment

I have had a plan to replace the bookshelves in the living room— now, if you’ll recall, in the room that used to be the dining room– with higher-quality, real wood, 7 foot bookshelves for literally as long as I’ve lived in this house, and 2022 has been the first year in a long time that wasn’t utter shit, so we finally have the money to invest in something that’s going to last: thus these four new shelves, which magically match the paint in the living room perfectly and are finally going to give my books some breathing room.

Goal for 2023: write shorter fucking sentences. Christ. At any rate in the last couple of months we’ve recarpeted, bought a new sectional, and now put in the new shelves, so the living room looks completely different. And much awesomer.

I’m not close to being done to shelving these– that’ll take a day or two at least, and there’s a bunch of books I need to find, as the old shelves didn’t exactly get moved in careful order– but that can be my project for the next couple of days. I’ll post again when they’re done.

That Lego set on the second shelf was one of my son’s gifts and it’s there because we’re guarding it from the cats until he’s done building it. I’m going to need to find cool bookends in the meantime; I don’t want these to end up covered in knickknacks but I also want to leave some space on all of them. That’ll be a fun Amazon/Etsy search, I think.

The typical assortment of end-of-year posts will start soon; I think the book I just finished is going to make it to the best-of list, though, so that one probably won’t be for a while. I find myself in the odd position of having not hit my reading goal for the year, so I need to finish two books at least before I can write anything about what I read this year. I’ll find something else to talk about in the meantime.

Once you see it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, PhotographyLeave a comment

My absolute favorite thing about my cousin’s house is that they have figured out where they want all of their pictures but have not figured out what pictures they actually want to display yet, so things like this are all over the place.