We're still here...Now with Purple!

Yet another long stretch of no progress combined with a struggle to take pictures left a lot of readers (all three of you) in suspense about the room. Well wait no longer. It is finally (mostly) back to some semblance of normal.

After the mid-August drywall installation another 10 days or so passed with no progress, partly because we went on vacation and partly due to bad planning on the part of the contractors. Then in late August they painted, finally. Our big "upgrade" from this chaos is that we let our pre-schooler select a color for the alcove, since there was a discrete set of walls and an obvious place to end the color change (and it wasn't like we had enough green in the can anyway so they'd have to buy a new gallon). No surprise that she picked PURPLE! She picked Sherwin Williams Dahlia and we compromised by going one shade lighter (which was plenty dark, as we learned from the neon green in the rest of the room) to Awesome Violet (SW 6815). To my surprise, we still had our light blue ceiling paint and they were able to blend the line so the ceiling is still all sky blue. That section now has no clouds of course (and probably never will) but at least it all goes together.

They installed new baseboards and other small things as well. The window wasn't ready from the manufacturer so the hole stayed boarded up and the corner stayed dark (I swear I took a picture from that day but I can't find it anymore).

There was a redo on the baseboards (they were about a half inch taller than the existing ones) that delayed us yet another few days while they waited for some rain to stop (all their cutting equipment had to get set up outside) and then because they failed to plan for store closures on Labor Day. Then finally, finally, they fixed the baseboards and framed the window (though it was still boarded up...).

And then Lo and Behold, just last week (7 weeks after the tree fell on our house, if you're keeping score), the window was ready and the room was done!

Of course by now we had completely lost the curtain hardware (more is on the way!). And another funny problem is that the outlet (seen above in the lower left of the picture) is now covered by the corner bookshelf. They must have mounted it in a slightly different place than it was originally and it's now no longer accessible when the furniture is back in its original place. Darn. The contractors also weren't nearly as picky as I am on their paint work, so I did a little touching up on the edges myself.

But at least this place is starting to look normal again! We have a new rug (the other one had so much glass and wood on it that I would always have been a little worried no matter how much we vacuumed it and shook it out). Toys and books are all finding their way back to their original homes. And the curtains can probably go back up this weekend.

 7 weeks. 7 long weeks.

(This is not quite the end of the story - there's a bit more outside work to discuss another time...)