Yes. Yes we do. :) I haven't blogged in a while because Jai was oot for almost 3 weeks and not a lot of renovation happened during that time. I did repaint the front porch railings though - thank you very much. What I mostly "worked" on was shopping for furniture to cut down on some of that echoiness our empty house exudes. And yes, shopping is work.
Jai researched and picked out our tv from Best Buy. Apparently he used the ol "a guy I know knows another guy who saw this tv for $200 less on some website" line and it worked on the dutiful electronics rep. We're currently using our white IKEA coffee table as the TV stand, a small IKEA bench as a coffee table and the floor as our bench when putting on shoes. :( Don't worry, recycling box might get upgraded to bench in the meanwhile.
I had a pretty exhausting adventure buying the big white wool rug in the picture. I got an amazing deal on Craigslist for that 9'x12' off-white rug, but the catch was that I had to transport it from Aptos (past Santa Cruz) to Santa Clara, sans-Jai and sans-truck. That rug is incredibly heavy. One person couldn't roll it up, so I was a little worried when the lady selling it kept warning me over the phone that it's HUGE and HEAVY. She even reduced her selling price to nearly half because she was afraid nobody would take it even though it's a great rug otherwise. I brought all the rope I could find from home, and duct tape and a tow cable (don't know what I was gonna do with that) to be prepared to drive a heavy white rug sticking out of the SUV while climbing the hill back to Santa Clara. Luckily, with three of us we managed to squish the whole rug barely within the SUV so I didn't have to keep the back door open and drive at 20mph the whole way back. The next day my Andre-the-Giant-esque neighbour saw me struggling to wiggle an inch of the rug out of the car and carried the whole thing under one arm into the family room for me. I think I should register him in those crazy competitions where big dudes pull airplanes with their teeth.
