i just got to use all seven letters on my opening move in scrabulous! i’ve never done that. very exciting to get 74 points right off the bat. i am pleased to say that the house is thoroughly cleaned. as in sanitized and straightened. the guest beds are all made up, the guest bath is fully loaded with towels, toiletries, and sunblocks. our room is presentable and our bathroom is ready for guest overflow use. i need to do a load or two of laundry but that doesn’t really matter. we need to have company more often. seems to be the only time that we really, really clean everything. it’s so nice to have an immaculate house. and, yes, i am fully aware that it will be a wreck again within five minutes of company arriving. but those five minutes will be glorious. i’m really just so proud of what we’ve done with this place. i was proud of our house in ga because of the work that we put into building it (built a yard by laying sod and creating landscaped “islands”, built a bonus room over the garage from nothing but framing, built a bathroom off the bonus room from scratch by taking in some of the attic space). this place we won’t be able to “build” in, but we’ve decorated everything from scratch which is something neither of us has really done before. i can now say that i fully understand why interior designers get paid big bucks; it is a lot of work. i think that everything has come together quite nicely though. now if i could just get the time and energy to paint the rest of the walls. the bad thing is that it’s now down to the bigger areas. our bedroom/bathroom, the living/dining/kitchen, and the entrance/hallway. i’ll probably tackle the laundry room next since it’s the only small space left and we already have paint for it (leftover from house in ga). maybe i’ll do that next month. it certainly won’t be over the next few weeks as we are going to have two teenage girls here for two weeks after the rest of the family leaves. God help us!