It Doesn't Matter What They Say, in the Jealous Games People Play

I had fully planned on doing this yesterday, but my entire day got derailed by another phone call, which resulted me in curling up in a ball and crying in the playroom closet all day.

You think I'm kidding?

I'm totally not.

Anyway, here's the result of the banana bread from yesterday...


Yummy. But...

It didn't rise enough.

It was kinda dry.

The flavors didn't "pop" the way I wanted them too.

It didn't slice well (it just crumbles).

Of course, it didn't stop me and Griffin from nearly eating the entire loaf in less than 24 hours. But I still need to play around with the recipe some more.

And of course, the madeleines were not made yesterday, so I need to go do that soon.

And here is my decorating dilemma...

Our house was built in the 40s. Between the house and the garage was a breezeway. In the 70s it was made into a room. The previous owner used it as a dining room. But since it has doors everywhere -- one to the front yard (that we use as our front door, the "real" front door has bad chi for coming into and out of the house), one to the garage, one to the backyard, a doorway to the kitchen and a doorway to the living room. Hence, that's why I call it the entry room -- it enters a lot of rooms.

When we were first looking to buy this house over six years ago, one of the first things I told Aaron was that the room needed to be redone. It had a cool red wallpaper with an ugly border, but the wallpapering job was horrible. You could see the seams and they were peeling really bad. It use to look like this...


... and, of course, what happens to a room with a shoddy wallpapering job when you have kids?

They rip it to shreds.

The room has officially been torn up and in "progress mode" aka DO SOMETHING WITH MY ALREADY YOU CRAZY LADY since July of last year.

Here's a part of the valance that use to hang in there...


I never really liked it much, and it didn't quite match (and doesn't quite match the red I have planned), but it went great with the watermelon border (yes, Water. Mellon. Border. There are no words to describe the fugliness of the watermelon border).

We liked having the room red, a lot. And we want that room to still be red. But, (here's the big dilemma) we are not sure we have fixed all the water leaks. And because we didn't get all of our rainfall last fall, and then again this past spring, and even now we are considered in a drought there is no way of knowing when we are going to get enough rain to be certain that all of our water leaks into that room are repaired.

And I'm really tired of it looking this way.

But I'm not going to dump all the work, time and money into that room to paint it a dark red and then find out we have HUGE water damage that we couldn't see.

So, here's what the room looks like now...


South-facing wall, to the back yard.


West facing wall, to the kitchen and dining room. This is the wall that the armoire lives.

You can also see here that I've had to plaster the walls (it's about half way down) because of course half the room is drywall and half the room is 70s fake paneling.


North-facing wall, front door.


East facing wall, garage door.

I have a lot of plans for this room, and having it torn up for nearly a year is Officially Driving Me Crazy.

So, until we know all the water leakage is fixed, I was thinking of finishing the plastering, priming and painting the room a soft green like this...

Something really light so we can keep an eye of water damage, but so the room doesn't look like a constructions zone anymore. Then, after a year (or however the fucking long it is going to take to figure out the water leak) I can paint the room the dark red and do my faux-finish treatment.

So, what do you think?

(And Aaron should be home today. Finally. And he should stay in town all next week. It's about damn time.)