Let's give it a go, shall we?

Welcome to my blog! I suppose for my first post I should give a little background information. I live in a town big enough for three fast food burger joints, but small enough that the nearest mall/big box installation is 25 minutes away. The closest decent mall is an hour's drive through corn fields, and for a good mall, well, I just go visit my parents near DC.

Our town has a quaint Main Street, pretty Victorian houses, good schools with excellent student/teacher ratios, lovely countryside with rivers for kayaking and hills big enough for skiing. Headlines on the front page of the local paper say things like "Man thankful pet parrot survived house fire" or "Woman sees face of Jay Leno in raisin bread".  It is a slow, easy pace of life, something we were aching for after six years in a huge city where we spent more time alone in traffic than with each other.

Our house is one of those aforementioned pretty Victorians, the kind of house I've always dreamed of inhabiting. The only thing lacking was a mysterious trunk filled with love letters and old dresses hidden behind a secret door in the attic. (Thank you, Nancy Drew.)  I live here with my husband, three sons, and a bossy standard poodle, and I am thankful every day for our situation--but the house is 140 years old, and therefore needs some serious upkeep. We have a long list of projects we'd like to/need to accomplish, and the first one up is a biggie--we're gutting the groovy 1968 kitchen.

And of course putting it back together, hopefully in a much better state than we found it.