I've been enjoying a lovely lazy day today. Mark made us a yummy breakfast this morning and we had some of the whole wheat bread that I'd made yesterday. It turned out very nice, much better than the white bread I had made previously. We don't eat a lot of white bread but I made white because I was out of whole wheat flour. I'm really loving our bread machine (getting sick of hearing that yet?).

We decided to stay in today and hibernate and recharge as we both go back to work tomorrow. I guess I'm ready to get back at it, three weeks was a long break and I feel better for it. I'm happy about what we've been able to get done around the house since I've been off and I feel like we had a good break as well.

The main floor of our house is really shaping up. It totally needs to be painted but that will have to wait. For now, we have the living room sorted out in a way that we're both happy with. Our house doesn't have an eat in kitchen or a dining room. Part of the living room is supposed to be for dining but we hadn't been using it for that purpose. We had put our table and chairs in the front hallway (next to the kitchen) since we moved in (over 2 years ago). We'd talked about reconfiguring things and moving our table into the living room like civilized folks but hadn't gotten around to it (ie we kept putting it off!!).

Yesterday we finally did it and it looks really nice. The downstairs is finally "unpacked" or at least is clear of all boxes. At the same time, we're trying to clear out our office and get it sorted out. In the meantime, our guest bedroom has become completely full of "stuff." I'll be sorting through it all over the next few months, repacking stuff, throwing stuff out, selling anything that is "ebay-able" or schelping things to goodwill. Our house is about 50 or so years old and it's not very big so we don't have a lot of storage space. We've decided to use the third bedroom for two purposes: as an office / computer room and for storage. We need to make a trip to IKEA to purchase a few more pieces for our STEN shelves and then we'll be able to start moving things back in here.

I'm so happy about all of this, about finally getting rid of the clutter in our house. All of my goals for 2003 involved organization. The work we've done this weekend goes a long way toward meeting this particular goal (notice, I'm not using the "R" word as I don't belive in resolutions!). As promised, here is a "before and after" photo thing of the one end of our living room for those of you who like visuals. We plan to paint the room a deep red shade and to purchase a new sofa and chair, in the meantime, here's what it looks like: