It was a new experience to be on Cape Cod in the winter. It's neat to see and do things you're used to seeing and doing in summer in a totally different season. Those things of course didn't include swimming and long days at the beach, of course. We're not that crazy!
I saw the Cape Cod Mall festooned with wreaths for the first time.
The kids rode the carousel in the mall that they've both ridden on every summer of their lives, this time in their winter coats.
We went to some of our favorite restaurants and we went down to the beach, one time in a blizzard, which I've already written about. We spent a lot of time at the house and out shopping for the house. That definitely worked for me! What did we buy? Here are a few examples.
The bedding set in the room we're using as the master bedroom was left by the previous owners. It was cute but old, and I wasn't that comfortable sleeping in it. I get the heebie-jeebies sleeping in bedding that other people have slept in for years, even when it's perfectly clean and fine. I couldn't shake the heebie-jeebie feeling after three nights, so I went to Bed Beth & Beyond in search of a new bedding set that would match pretty well with the way the room was already decorated. I found a set I really liked that coordinated well with the room and was also on sale.
The old bedding set was pretty but worn and a little too flowery for my taste, although it matched perfectly with everything else in the room.
This is the set that I liked the most for this room, a nice blue and yellow paisley set from Laura Ashley. It was a good fit, since as you can see in the pictures above, the old bedding set was also yellow and blue.
I love it. It was a great find! And no more heebie-jeebies.
I also got matching valance curtains for the windows.
The living room couch was another flowered thing in the house that we didn't really like. It was solid but old and starting to sink in the middle. That week Peter and I went furniture shopping and bought some new furniture for the living room and for the basement family room (once it comes into existence next month). I know it sounds corny, but it was truly a dream come true to shop for furniture on Cape Cod for our own house there. It's a blessing that I don't take for granted.
It was a great couch for making forts. My mother was the architect of this one.
Fabric samples for the new couch. Decisions, decisions. (Fun ones!)
I loved picking out pictures and other decorations at one of my favorite New England chain stores, The Christmas Tree Shop. I got these seashell-bedecked fishes for one of the upstairs bedrooms.
The other upstairs bedroom is the kids' bedroom, where John had plenty of space to spread out his Pokemon cards and play.
That white bookshelf is another thing I got that week at The Christmas Tree Shop. Peter's brother Paul put it together for us when his family came to visit one day.
Peter's father mounted a television on the wall above the fireplace in the living room. This area still needs a lot of work--the cables need to be covered and hidden, and I want to get some kind of a corner bookshelf to hold the DVD player, satellite box, and things like that. For now though, this is how we left it. It irks me that the TV couldn't be perfectly centered over the mantel, but it was almost impossible to do because of where beams were placed in the wall (or something like that). The perfectionist in me will see that it's off-center every time, but others say they don't even notice. (How can they not notice!?)
Here are John and my mom hanging out in the living room. This was the evening of the blizzard once it had wound down. We were getting ready to drive up to Boston and stay there overnight because of our early-morning flight the next day. In other words, this was the calm after the actual storm as well as the calm before the storm of our weekend travel woes.
This big window in the living room needs attention in the form of some kind of new window treatments. I'll be working on that this spring or summer.
Sorry that this post is kind of all over the place. I started out by writing about the summer things we were doing in winter, and it turned into a discussion about the house. I really need to do a proper introduction to the house, and I'll do that this week. It's kind of overwhelming because I have many pictures, some from before the previous owners moved out right after we bought it, some taken since we "moved in," and I have to figure out how to put it all together and make it just right. I'm finally going to just take the time to do it and be overwhelmed no more!
Here's a little teaser to one of the unique, fun features of the house: the secret hideout room that I mentioned before in another post. Stay tuned!
