She's back!

In October 2014, we'd been living in Everett for seven months and the house for three. I was enjoying checking out local thrift stores and other weird places when I found one of my prized possessions at a liquidation store. At least that's what they called themselves. It was really just a junk store. I never saw any batches of discontinued products there. Everything was 50% off the day I found this giant cardboard promotional poster marked $7, so I only paid $3.50.



She's big enough to take up almost the entire wall of the entryway to the basement lounge, and she really sets the tone for everything else you find down here. I was concerned she'd get damaged during the bathroom remodel with our contractor and his helpers coming in and out constantly, so I took her down. And then I didn't want to put her back up because I started to worry about the state of the old nail holes. So we've been without her for over a year.

Our contractor has been back doing some smaller things around the house. He put up a rail with a cable fence so people can't tumble down the rock wall six feet into our neighbor's yard, and another section of it replaced the handrail on the lower steps heading up from the driveway. He patched a pothole at the bottom of the driveway, installed a replacement wall heater for my office, rebuilt our deck stairs, and took care of a few other repairs. And since he'd be around for a while, I asked him to build a frame for Donna. She's huge enough that going to a frame shop would be extremely expensive, but it was easy for him to cut and assemble some nice cedar he found on sale.



It's so nice to have her back.