In a Little Cottage Cozy The World Seems Rosy at Sundown

 One of my co-workers is getting ready to sell her house. They bought a bigger house, when her son and her mom both lived with them. Now that her son is in his thirties and has moved out, and her mother died of her dementia a few years ago, they want something smaller with less upkeep. So, she took last week off to get her house ready to sell. Which basically means they are getting rid of tons of their crap and doing some projects to make it more attractive to buyers.

That got me thinking. Our house is about the perfect size for John and myself. but it needs a lot of work. What if we got our house ready to sell, but then didn't move? Wouldn't it be great to do that work just for us, and do the projects to make it more attractive and with less crap inside of it? So, that's my new goal.

Of course, I'm not worried about making it nice for someone else to want to buy it. That usually means making everything more neutral, and, as  you know, I'm not a neutral kind of person. I want our little cottage to be sweet and homey, and full of books and music, with a big kitchen where I cook wonderful meals. It doesn't have to be spotless, John and I like to LIVE in our house, which means we have linoleum tile on our kitchen floor, so we don't have to worry about something happening to it when John works on bikes in our house. I also want our yard to be full of flowers, and vegetables and have funky little sculptures and gewgaws, and whirligigs. I like quirky, funky places, like a Hobbitt house, or Snow White's cottage, and if woodland creatures wanted to come over and clean-up the place, I'd be receptive to that too.

 To that end, we are still working diligently on our place. Since we don't have a lot of money, we have to do the actual work ourselves, and try to find the stuff we need on sale. On Saturday, the store that used to be a Hy-Vee grocery story, but is now a Hy-Vee drug store (?) that has a huge garden center in the warmer months, had a sale of 15% off their landscaping and garden items. So, I took full advantage and bought a few more sculptures, and flagstone and some bullet pavers.

Then I started arranging them as a border around our very small backyard. I didn't get to do the digging and then the weed cloth and lava rock placement yet, but I'm getting a lot closer. There is just soooo much work to do, and never enough time to do it all.

John also ordered new linoleum floor tile for our kitchen. Since our house was built in 1950, we got black and white squares in keeping with the period. We'll see how long it takes to get here, but we'll have more than plenty to do around here while we wait.

For now, I plan to keep plugging along on getting my house ready to sell, and then staying put and enjoying my whirligigs and gewgaws.