final summer house update and Milwaukee happenings

This is my final update for the summer with pictures of what we've been working on around the house and what we've been up to in Milwaukee.  As Jake moves into his busier intern months soon, we won't be doing as many things either around the house or elsewhere, but I'll continue to update about Milwaukee periodically.

The only thing that I took a lot of pictures of around Milwaukee the last couple weeks was during my second summer trip to the zoo.  This one was with Jake.

Some people had expressed interest in seeing our new bed now that we have the frame so here it is.  We love it.  Our comforter is going to look gorgeous on it in the winter.  It's almost the same gray as the frame with bubble designs.  We have all neutral sheets to match it.

I've finally been making some serious headway with getting rid of our massive collection of (empty!) boxes.  If we cut them up, they can go with our regular cardboard recycling.  The basement is going to seem so much bigger without the empty boxes.

Some of you know that I put in a lot of effort the last couple years to sell tons of our old textbooks and other books that we never plan to read again.  We only added one shelf after we moved, and I unpacked all of my kid books that I had in my classroom.  And we still have empty shelf space!  I'm in shock.  I still have a couple boxes of books that I'm trying to sell that I can store elsewhere, but we really made a lot of progress downsizing our collection.  And no, I did not make that pillow with my name on it.  An old friend made it for me back in high school.

We literally trimmed half of our front bushes off so that our house number would be visible from the street.  I feel badly that people haven't been able to see it so well until now.

Jake replaced our upstairs bathroom faucet.  We were mostly looking for an aesthetic change with a little hope that a new faucet would increase the water pressure.  We were shocked at the water pressure difference.  It's like having a completely new sink.  And new faucet does look much better.  We were in for a little surprise about how long the job would take, though.  We'd replaced both of the bathroom faucets in our condo before we sold it so we thought that this wouldn't be too tricky.  Haha so much harder in an old house!  I'm proud of Jake for sticking it out with this project.

Also, FYI for those who have been following the saga of our poor broken upstairs ceiling fan, after one failed attempt, our second fan now works beautifully.  Jake is fully enjoying having a working fan and light in his office area again.