In the rest of our house — the “non-private” areas — I never close the window shades. Our windows in our living room stay open 24/7. I figure maybe I’m preventing burglary that way. A would-be burglar can look in our windows, see that there’s nothing in there worth stealing, and move on. But also, it’s just a hassle to open and close the window shades, so I leave them open all the time.

But obviously, a bedroom needs privacy. So I’ve spent weeks contemplating what I would do on our windows and the door in our bedroom. All three will have velvet curtains, which is pretty thick fabric. Plus, they’ll be lined with white lining so that they’ll be white from the outside. I know I’ve shown this a thousand times lately, but just as a reminder, this is the overall look that I’m going for…

That’s the same shade that I have on the window in my walk-in closet, and I pretty much always keep it in the top-down position so that I can have natural light and privacy. The only time I open it from the bottom up is when I’m in there doing laundry.

And while I used to have those on all three windows in the bedroom, now I only have them on the two windows and the door is fully see-through, offering no privacy at all. (Excuse the older photo. I don’t have updated photos yet.)

Anyway, I don’t want to put a shade on the door. I’m just not a “shade on the door” kind of person. But I also don’t want to put privacy film on the door because I really like being able to see out of that door when I want to. I may opt for privacy film in the future, but for now, I want to see if we can go without.

So I’ve been thinking about my options, and here’s what I finally decided. I’m going to use a layered approach so that I have options depending on how much light we want in the room at any given time. Here’s what I mean.

I’m going to keep the shades on the side windows. And then I’m going to reuse the sheer curtains that I used in here when the room was a home gym.

It took me a while to find exactly what I wanted, but I finally decided on this curtain rod (affiliate link). I really liked the brackets, and I especially liked that the rods aren’t adjustable.

This curtain rod is very similar to the one I have in the studio. And while I like the one in the studio much better, it didn’t come in a double rod. But this is a close second.

Like I said, it’s not an adjustable rod, which I really like. Instead, on the longer rods (like this 8-foot one I got for the door), the pieces screw together in the middle.

So for the door, the velvet curtain panels will be 1 1/2 widths of fabric each, so that will be plenty for me to actually close the curtains at night for privacy.

We’ll see how it works out, but I’m excited about the idea of reusing those sheer curtains again. I also like the idea of bringing some white up to the upper portions of the walls so that it’s not too teal-heavy on the upper walls. I think that little bit of white sheer curtains showing will bring some much needed lightness up on the walls to break up all of that teal. So hopefully it works out the way I’m envisioning in my head.

At the beginning of every year, I make a list of home goals for that year. Since I’ve started doing that several years ago, I’ve never once gotten through the whole list during the year. I always put way too much on the list knowing that it’s impossible for me to get through the whole thing.

But I like to use the list as kind of a general guide to keep me somewhat focused. It’s more like a buffet where I know I won’t eat every single thing on the buffet, but what I do eat has to come from the buffet. That’s the general idea, at least. There have been a couple of years where I’ve detoured quite a bit from that initial list, but for the most part, that’s how I view my list of home goals.

The one thing I know for sure won’t happen this year is tearing down the sunroom. At the beginning of the year, it looked like this…

Our washer and dryer were still in there. And while those have now been moved to their new, permanent home in the walk-in closet, the hot water heater remains. While I know where the new hot water heater will go (in the current guest bathroom that will soon be turned into a storage room), I’m still completely undecided on what kind of hot water heater I want to get. So until I make that decision and actually get the hot water heater moved out of the sunroom, the sunroom has to stay.

I also have a lot of stuff stored in this sunroom that needs to be moved out, so with less than three months left in the year, I can say pretty confidently that tearing down the sunroom will have to wait until next year. That’s disappointing, but at least I can see a light at the end of the tunnel on this.

I got quite a bit done on my workshop at the beginning of the year. It started off the year looking like this…

And today, it looks like this…

The four items still on the list for the exterior are to (1) mark off a planting bed around the building and add mulch, (2) do something to make the garage door look interesting, (3) build a pergola above the garage door, and (4) add exterior lights. I know for sure I won’t get the pergola done this year, or if I even still want a pergola above the garage door. But now that the weather is getting cooler outside, I could easily take a day and the those other three things done in a day, especially if I want or need a break from working on the bedroom. I already have the lights for the exterior. They’ve been sitting in the studio for months now. I just need to find an hour or so to get them up. Of course, they won’t have electricity yet, but at least they’d look pretty!

I had also put on my list all of the inside projects for my workshop. Obviously, those will have to wait until next year as well. As soon as I get the bedroom done, and then do a quick makeover on the studio bathroom and get the current guest bathroom turned into a storage closet, the workshop will be my next big project.

Obviously, the biggest items on my list for the year were the different areas of our bedroom suite. I tackled my closet first, and it’s the only area so far that is 100% finished. I still can’t believe that it started off looking like this at the beginning of the year…

And other than the flooring installation, which I hired out, I turned that room into this…

The only thing on my original list that I ended up not doing was building cabinets or shelves above the washer and dryer. And so far, it has worked out just fine not having additional storage there.

The foyer has come a long way from what it was at the beginning of the year. (Sorry, I don’t have a new picture since I painted the bedroom and added trim. I’ll work on getting new pictures this weekend.)

My original list for this area looked like this, but there have been a few changes to the original plan:

1. Install hardwood flooring, Done! See it here.
2. Sand the hardwood flooring,
3. Stain and seal hardwood flooring, See it here.
4. Finish the French doors to bedroom suite,
5. Install crown molding, Done!
6. Paint the walls, Done!
7. Paint or the gold leaf full-length mirror I found a mirror to purchase instead,
8. Build an upholstered storage bench I’m going to reupholster a bench I alread have,
9. Create a new scuttle hole to the attic This will go in the storage room,
10. Create a new scuttle hole to the crawl space This will go in the storage room,
11. Make or buy artwork I’m going to use what I have.

And then I need to add these items to that list:

12. Hang the grasscloth wallpaper,
13. Wire sconces to flank the full-length mirror,
14. Install the new ceiling light,
15. Patch the hole for the old ceiling light.

I think that’s it for the foyer.

And then there’s the bedroom. It has also come a long way since the beginning of the year. Again, I’ll have new pictures by the end of this weekend with all of the trim finished.

And here’s what my original list looked like for the bedroom:

1. Install hardwood flooring, Done! See it here.
2. Sand the hardwood flooring, Done!
3. Stain and seal hardwood flooring, Done! See it here.
4. Close up scuttle hole in ceiling It’s staying, but I do need to trim it out.
5. Paint ceiling, Done!
6. Repair and prime walls, Done!
7. Install wainscoting, (Almost finished! Still working on wood fill, sanding, and caulking.)
8. Install crown molding, Done!
9. Hang grasscloth wallpaper,
10. Install wall and ceiling trim in the bedroom entrance, Done! But my plan changed from my original plan at the beginning of the year, so there’s no ceiling trim.
11. Make an upholstered headboard,
12. Build a pretty bed frame to cover the not-so-pretty frame of our adjustable bed,
13. Build two bedside tables I bought bedside tables instead.
14. Sew velvet curtains,
15. Make or find artwork,
16. Create a reading corner (which may include reupholstering a chair), I bought a chair instead, which should be delivered in the next couple of weeks.
17. Accessorize to finish.

And the one thing I left off of that original list was:

18. Refinish the dresser.

UPDATE: I forgot one last category on my 2025 home goals list! I had some house exterior projects on that list as well.

I think this is where I got a little overly ambitious. My list included the following:

1. Redo (and finish!) the skirting on the front porch,
2. Re-install the shutters that came down,
3. Re-install the front porch tape lights that fell down,
4. Mark off planting beds and add borders and mulch,
5. Add lighting to driveway and sidewalk,
6. Build the steps to the side studio door.

Obviously, I’m not going to get any of that big stuff done, like the finishing the skirting on the porch, marking off planting beds and adding mulch, adding lights to the driveway and sidewalk, or building the steps to the studio door. Those will have to wait…again. But I do hope to fix the shutter that fell and fix the tape lights that fell down on the front porch. In addition, I also hope to get the new exterior door in the bedroom painted and get at least a couple of new plants in the ground in that area by the end of this month.

First, let me show you actual pictures to remind you of how these areas flow together in real life. I’ll start with the music room. Obviously, this isn’t a recent picture. Once I get the bedroom suite to the point where I’m ready to load in furniture and decor, I’ll get the tools, boxes, and paint cans out of the music room and get updated pictures. But for now, this will have to do.

So in the picture above, the cased opening on the far left is now the doorway to our bedroom suite. That’s where I installed the French doors as our bedroom doors. The doors in the center of the photo lead to the sunroom. That’s the room that will be torn down, and once we build our addition, the room just beyond those doors will be the family room. And then the cased opening on the right leads to the kitchen.

The view from that cased opening between the music room and the kitchen looks like this…

Just beyond the peninsula is the dining area. In that photo above, that area was being used as a sitting room (long story). But for now, it’s being used as our temporary bedroom while I’m working on our bedroom suite. That 15-lite pocket door to the left of the shelves leads to my studio.

And then if I turn to the right just a little bit, you can see the cased opening between the kitchen and the front living room.

If I stand at the end of the kitchen peninsula looking towards the door to my studio, you can see the pantry there on the left.

So here’s a better look from the dining area (I’m standing by the windows on the front of the house) towards the pantry, the back wall of the kitchen, and then on the far left of the picture, you can see that cased opening between the kitchen and the music room.

Hopefully that helps you get your bearings a little better. So once we build the addition, then new family room will sit behind the music room and the kitchen and share a wall with the current pantry. So the first idea, which is obviously the easiest, is to leave the pantry as is and not bother with adding a doorway between it and the family room. Obviously, I like that idea a lot because it fits with my goal of getting the house done as soon as possible and allows me to keep all of that storage in there. The downside is that the only way to get to the dining area is through the kitchen. That may not actually be a big deal. It’s not like we live in a sprawling mansion, so the distance from that doorway in the family room to the dining area is really not that far.

The second idea, which was the idea that I had in mind, was to widen the opening between the dining area and the pantry as much as possible while still allowing enough wall space between the dining area and pantry to hide the upright freezer. And then I’d move the freezer to the opposite wall, which would allow room for an opening between the family room and pantry. The upside to that is that it would be a more convenient route from the family room to the dining area that eliminates traffic through the kitchen. The obvious downsides are (1) I’d lose storage in the pantry, and (2) the traffic would be through the pantry, which might seem awkward. Also, any time you add another doorway, you have to think about traffic patterns through rooms with furniture. So having a doorway there would limit furniture placement options in the family room.

The third option is to eliminate that wall altogether and leave the back wall of cabinets from the pantry. The upside to that is that the dining area would feel much more open. The downside is that there would be no place for my upright freezer, and I don’t know where else I could put the freezer.

And the final option would be to shrink the pantry to about 2/3 its current size, keeping the 2/3 of the pantry on the right side of its current footprint, add a wall on the left, and creating a kind of alcove with a doorway between the two areas. I actually really like this idea. The downside is losing storage space, but I also love that I could put a bigger window in that little alcove for a better view to the back yard. I can just imagine it with some beautiful curtains, maybe a little bookcase under the window, a table lamp for a soft glow of light at night, etc.

So those are the options that y’all have given me. I love testing out different ideas that readers give me and seeing how they might work for us. Y’all know that my brain gets stuck in ruts and I have a hard time getting myself out of those ruts. So it’s always nice to have outside ideas that help me think outside of the box.

What are your thoughts on these ideas? And if you wrote a suggestion in a previous post and I missed it here, let me know and I’ll add another floor plan with the new idea.

Yesterday, I got all of the trim and wainscoting painted in the bedroom foyer, and with each new step completed, I get more and more excited about how this is going to look when it’s all finished. There’s nothing like getting a fresh coat of paint on trim and walls in an area that has looked pretty messy and busy for so long.

I still didn’t have time to get the upper walls painted, and I also found that I didn’t have any ceiling paint on hand. I didn’t want to take time out to make a trip to Home Depot for ceiling paint, so I just focused on finishing up the trim and wainscoting.

What’s interesting is that in person, the trim and waincoting look so good and finished. But as I was editing these pictures, some areas of the wainscoting look like they’ll need another coat of paint. *Sigh* Oh well. At least the hard part is done with the trim and wainscoting. Getting one more coat of paint on those areas that show up in the pictures wont’ be a big deal at all.

Those big areas inside the picture frame molding definitely look a little streaky in the photos. It’s so interesting how pictures show things that don’t show up when looking at it in person. So those inside areas will certainly need another coat of paint. But at least you can see the color now, and you can just imagine how it will look with the teal grasscloth on the top parts of the walls.

I still need to paint the bathroom (storage room) doors. You can see that I got the dust cleaned off of 2/3 of the doors and then got sidetracked. That’s the story of my life.

I just love how this doorway into the closet looks. I can just imagine how it will look once the grasscloth is up. I think it will be beautiful.

I took a few wide-angle shots of the foyer so that you could get a better view of the whole area. Keep in mind that the wide-angle setting makes the area look a lot bigger than it actually is.

But so far, I’m very excited about all of my decisions — the wainscoting, the floor color, the walk-in closet doorway.

It’s kind of crazy to look back at how this small area of the house has changed and evolved over the years. In case you’ve forgotten, this is what this hallway area looked like when we bought the house…

In the photo above, I was standing in the doorway between the hallway and what’s now the music room looking straight ahead, and there were three bedrooms off of this hallway. In that photo, the doorway on the left went to a guest bedroom that eventually became our home gym and will now be our bedroom. The doorway on the right went to the original master bedroom that eventually became our big accessible bathroom. And the doorway to the third bedroom, which is now my walk-in closet and laundry room combo, is just out of sight on the far left.

When I started on this area the first time, no walls were moved, and all three bedrooms stayed intact. I did widen the doors to the bathroom on the wall on the right and added doors that opened like French doors. And then I added a built-in cabinet where there had been a closet. The door to the guest bedroom (now the walk-in closet and laundry room) still remained obscured beside the built-in cabinet. But this was a pretty large hallway in its original footprint.

And then when we turned the original master bedroom into our new bathroom, that’s when we moved the wall in towards the hallway and closed up that doorway to the hallway to square up that room so that it could become the bathroom. That left us with two bedroom doorways off of the hallway — the guest bedroom on the left (still obscured by that cabinet) and the doorway to the room that became the home gym on the right.

And now the whole area is almost unrecognizable from what it was originally. The whole doorway and the walls surrounding it were removed from the room that was the home gym, and that will be our bedroom. The hallway closet was removed so that the other doorway was no longer obscured, and that doorway was widened given more height, and that bedroom became the walk-in closet and laundry area.

But regardless, here’s what the bedroom foyer looks like as of this morning. It dawned on me yesterday as I was working that I can’t keep the doors on this bathroom (which will be a storage closet) painted teal. These will have to be painted, and white seems like the obvious color since all of the other doors in the bedroom are painted white. That’s going to be quite a change! I don’t think these doors have ever been white.

Way back when I did the original bathroom remodel, I painted those doors black.

And then I think it was a couple of years later that I decided to change them to teal. And they’ve been teal ever since.

So painting those doors white will be a big change, but it’s obviously the only color that makes sense.

And I have to tell you that after all of that indecision on how to finish out the doorway to the walk-in closet and fretting over how it would look to have this doorway be different from all of the others in the house, I am absolutely thrilled with how this looks. I just love how that trim looks wrapped around the door jambs.

Since it was going to be different, I wanted it to be obviously different, which is why I didn’t want to use any kind of standard or modified door casings around the opening. I wanted it to look very obviously intentional, and I’m very pleased with how it looks with the other two doorways in the foyer.

So that’s all of the progress so far. As I said, it’s not a huge difference from how it looked the last time I showed you, but I promise, lots of progress has been made!

I have more caulking to finish, and then I hope to get everything in the foyer painted by the end of the weekend. That might be an ambitious goal, but I’m going to try my hardest. I’m ready to move on to the bedroom trim!

And yes, it probably makes more sense to do all of the trim in the whole area, including the bedroom, before doing any painting. But when have I ever done anything in the right order? And I really need to see something finished very soon to keep me motivated. But I could always change my mind, also. Maybe I’ll decide to do the logical thing and finish all of the trim before I start any of the painting, but I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.

And on another topic, Jonathon G. Wells is back. Remember him? I wrote a whole post about him because he’s a lunatic, in my humble opinion, and since he’s a business owner who presumably goes into clients’ homes, I thought people should know what kind of person he is. It’s been a while, but he has reared his ugly head again.

I’ve blocked him on all social media, and I blocked him from sending messages to my phone, but I guess I didn’t realize that he can still send me voicemails. And that’s what he did. I’m sharing this publicly because he made outright threats this time, and I want this information to be very public because seriously, if anything happens to me, to Matt, to any of our animals, to our house or property, etc., I want thousands of people to know who to point the finger to immediately. And while I got sidetracked last time and didn’t take out a restraining order against him, I won’t fail to do so this time.

So last night, I realized that it had been a few days since I listened to my voice messages. I don’t answer phone calls unless it’s someone I know personally, and I almost never listen to voicemail because they’re never important. So imagine my shock when I got this voicemail from Jonathon G. Wells:

Yes, Kristi, it’s Jonathon Wells. It is about 4:30 in the morning. I have been made aware of your egregious post. My attorney has already been contacted. Take it down by 9:00am this morning or you will not be happy with the outcome. And that is a THREAT. I’ve already contacted the Waco police department. I have contacted others. You have no authorization to use any of the screen captures or any of the commentary that you have made. Completely inappropriate. You are unhinged. You are unwell. I simply mentioned “dust” on your ridiculous post gluing Christmas ornaments to your bathroom ceiling. You are a fat, ugly, disgusting c*nt. I am not playing now. I am serious. I thought that perhaps you had wised up and removed everything and let it go. Cleary you didn’t. You’re a sick piece of f*ck. Now take it down by 9:00am. That’s my final warning.

Let’s all take a second and laugh at the absurdity of him saying that I don’t have the authorization to use screen captures of his website where he used pictures stolen from other designers for his portfolio. So he can steal other designers’ pictures and put them in his portfolio, but I can’t take screenshots of his website. That’s rich. And absurd.

The second one was sent at 3:37am on Monday, September 15th.

Subject: CIVIL SUIT

The text of the email said:

Get ready. To lose everything.  All of it.  Every last cent you have. This lunatic is ON. You Fat, Ugly, Dusty C*nt.

The third one was sent at 4:21am on Monday, September 15th.

Subject: FAT C*NT – TAKE THIS DOWN IMMEDIATELY. ALL OF IT. EVERY UNAUTHORIZED SCREEN CAPTURE. EVERY COMMENT. EVERY LITTLE BIT. EVERY MENTION OF MY NAME AND COMPANY. IMMEDIATELY. I WILL COME TO WACO, YOU FAT UGLY C*NT. DON’T PLAY WITH ME ANY MORE.

The text of the email said:

I HAVE YOUR HOME ADDRESS.  YOUR HUSBAND’S WORK ADDRESS.  I HAVE ALL OF YOUR INFORMATION. YOU SHOULD BE VERY VERY AFRAID.  AFTER ALL, I AM A LUNATIC, RIGHT? BC I COMMENTED “DUST” ON YOUR POST. STALKER.  

For the record, I’d be very interested to know Matt’s work address. Anyway, I will be taking action this time, no question. These days, when someone says they have your address and make outright threats, that has to be taken seriously. Jonathon G. Wells is unhinged. And again, I want this information out there because if something nefarious happens to me, Matt, our animals, or our property, I want thousands of people to know immediately where to point the finger.