My, how time flies!

My apologies for taking so long to update my blog. There hasn't been all that much going on with the house - at least that's my excuse! I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving day. We had some of DH's family down and had an enjoyable time.

I drove to Winchester, VA on Tuesday to pick up DD so that she could spend all her time in the car doing homework. It was the only way she could come home for Thanksgiving. She also did homework pretty much morning to night the whole time she was home, and also in the car on the way back (I didn't have to drive her back - she was able to catch a ride with a friend from OH).

We have been having a problem with water getting into the basement. While DH was up on a ladder outside my sewing studio, he spotted the problem. The flashing in this area is missing, or not done correctly. There is a gap between the gutter and the wall to the right and the water is missing the gutter and traveling down the brick wall into the basement.
You can see the white marks on the brick (to the left of the ladder shadow) where the water has been trickling down the bricks...
DH has made a lot of progress in sorting boxes and things in the basement. Here are all the games - we sure do have a lot! I've gotten rid of stacks of games the past few years at the church rummage sale. We used to go to garage sales and buy games for $1.00, which is the reason we have so many. I'll have to sort through these again and set aside some more for next year's sale. Our family was big into board games, but not so much anymore.
The holiday decorations and textbooks/papers are on shelves, but we either need to get rid of some, or get more shelves...
Here is the corner where the leftover paint is stored...
And here are the empty boxes and luggage...
Our kitchen/family room stools arrived today! I got them assembled (only 4 screws per stool) and I think they look nice there. They certainly are sturdy, not to mention heavy!
Here is a shot of the room where the stools are...
I spent a good part of today sorting through the items behind the French doors in the great room. I arranged the shelves and got all the plaster dust off the shelves from when DH when doing some electrical work inside the closet.
We were very surprised on this first day of deer hunting season that our hunter did not show up to hunt. We figured the hunter set the hunting blind up behind our house 3 weeks ago to stake out a spot for the first day of hunting season, but he was a no-show today. We'll see if he shows up tomorrow...

The never-ending to-do list...

DH spent Saturday installing the gas logs in our fireplace. It's wonderful to flip a switch on the wall and have a fire in the fireplace. I have used it often since he finished installing it...

And the weather outside made it all the nicer to have a fire in the fireplace. We had snow flurries all day Saturday and Sunday, but fortunately only a bit of it stuck to the ground.
DH's other project for the weekend was to work on the broom closet. The builder only had one shelf in the closet and it doesn't hold much. DH will add a couple of more shelves for cleaning supplies, an outlet for plugging in chargers for phones, etc. (he actually installed it before I shot this photo), and an outlet to plug my Swiffer sweeper vac into to charge it.
While he was at the store to get a longer pipe to install the gas logs, he picked up a couple of thin sheets of metal to put in the bottom of my spice drawers to keep the magnetic tins from sliding around.
DD asked me to take some photos of her room and post them so her friends at college can see her room, so here they are. There are still a couple of piles of things laying around that didn't go back to college with her.
The dresser and closet side of the room and the all-important golf ball collection...
The desk area and entrance to her room...
The bookcase...
For those following the saga of the hunting blind that someone set up on our property, we still haven't seen any sign of the owner. The winds were strong on Saturday, so the blind collapsed but didn't blow away because it is staked into the ground. Gun season for deer hunting begins the Monday following Thanksgiving here in PA, so my guess is that he set up the blind early to stake out his territory. He'll be really surprised when he comes back to hunt and finds the Posted signs that we've hung up around our property!
A good part of this weekend was spent searching online for some stools for the bar in the kitchen/family room. I sent DH a long list of possibilities and he sent back a list of his 3 favorites. This one is the Tommy stool - I was a bit worried that the legs on this one would mar the wood floors and they were so narrow at the bottom it wasn't obvious that felt pads would work on the legs...
This one is the Hillsdale Cierra stool. Part of the problem with all the stools we looked at was the risk that the reds wouldn't coordinate with the red chairs that we already have in the room in front of the fireplace. They came in other colors, so the second dilemma was trying to decide on color.
We finally decided on this stool. It is the Hillsdale Venus stool and we bought 4 of them for the kitchen bar area. The online reviews were very good - very well made, sturdy, and comfortable...
I think this stool is really fun, but DH didn't care for it. Maybe I'll get it for my sewing studio. I'm planning to get a stool to sit on at my cutting table while I work on my scrapbooking. I need to get the counter-height cutting table in there first, then a 26" stool should work well.
I spent Saturday doing some cleaning and cutting shelf liner to fit the shelves and drawers in my kitchen. I didn't do all of the cupboards, but wanted to get the ones done that might get water or dirt on them. I mainly did the cupboards where I store my glassware and the drawers where I store my spices.

I also worked on a set of placemats that I'm making for our family room table. I finished one last week and yesterday I almost finished a second one. It may be a while before I get all 6 of them done! The embroidery takes 45 minutes to an hour per placemat and the handstitching around the embroidery takes about an hour per placemat. I hate handstitching, but it really adds to the details on the placemat. Photos to come later...