What Makes A House A Home?

To the Selfs, the answer to this is curtains.  But that's getting ahead of myself.  Let me explain:

Jason moved into our townhouse back in 2005.  By this time next year, our goal is to have sold this house and have moved into a single-family home somewhere else in Wake County.  That said, we used this holiday weekend to start planning what repairs/improvements need to be made to this house to prepare it to sell.  After making a list (yay, list!), we headed over to Lowe's to start pricing our improvements.  One of them was to hang curtains in our living room.  I don't know why Jason thought our window needed sprucing up...

Our super-exciting living room windows

We went, we priced, we were getting ready to leave, when all of a sudden, I fell in love -- with curtains. The sample was hanging there, beckoning to me.  "I'm your style, Megan," it said, "and I coordinate with your couch pillows."  I got Jason's attention to show him my new love.  At the same time, he picked up a package of curtains to show me.  Surprise surprise, they were the same pattern!  I convinced him that we needed to go ahead and buy the curtains... and the sheers and the rod.  Since he hates the steamy afternoon light that comes in through the window (and since the curtains were his idea in the first place), he readily agreed.

So this is how we spent our weekend:

Step 1: Hanging the rods.

Step 2: Hanging the sheers.

And the finished product:

Ta da!

Close-up of the curtains.  They're energy-saving blackout curtains.  Want to watch a scary movie at 2:00 in the afternoon?  You can have a dark living room with these!

Close-up of the rods.  It's amazing how hard it is to find rods that don't have giant pineapples or pinecones on the ends.  Seriously, people, we don't all live in manors!

What else did we do this weekend?  We got a whole bunch of paint chips to start deciding on paint colors.  We shopped around at BB&Beyond, Home Depot, and Target in addition to Lowe's.  Oh yeah, and we started looking at houses.  But that's another story...