What Ana Does

This winter I'm all about updating our Powder Room -- the bathroom off the kitchen our guests use. It's ugly. Just plain ugly. I painted it last year and switched out the horrible light fixtures, just to improve it a little, but now I'm ready to tackle it. Before - The Powder Room when we moved in With a small budget, I was planning to work with the vanity and either paint or tile-over the floor. I think the floor is the main issue. Replace the faucet and tile the wall. Maybe some kind of window treatment. Oh, and replace the towel bar with hooks. I really don't like towel bars. They never look organized -- always messy.  But Dave offered $3k from the house budget ... and I was off to the races! I'll hire a handyman to replace the floor and install a NEW vanity. Yay! And I'll tile the wall and paint the remaining walls.  Now, I have to make a decision on the vanity. They're expensive and will direct the rest of the finish choices. Here's the three choice...

While touring museums in Copenhagen, I also had a lot of fun taking photos of collections and patterns, zooming in and cropping them just right. Here's what I captured ...   Card Catalog at the Library Signets at the National Museum Noses at the Glyptoteket Roman Coins at the Glyptoteket Royal Medals at the Rosenborg Castle Rings at the National Museum  

In Copenhagen I didn't want to buy clothes or hats or t-shirts or posters. Nope. All I wanted was kitchen supplies! I found a few really beautiful kitchen shops that blew me away. I love a beautiful shop, right?!  Here are a few shops that I snapped photos of while in Copenhagen:  I would have bought this entire table of pottery, just recreate this sight in my own dining room. Danish pottery is simple, pastel and lovely. I wanted it all. 

What a jewel box of treasures, this small Danish city is!  While David worked, I toured on my own. And maybe it was because I had total freedom to do and see whatever I liked, or maybe it was the beautiful city, but I had the best time.  Here are the links!  We stayed at the Copenhagen Island , which was just south of the city center on the harbor. Can't say I'd stay here again -- first the wifi in our room was spotty. Which at first I didn't think I'd mind, but got annoying when I was looking up museum times for the next day, and trying to upload photos. Also, we were in a office-populated area and next to the big mall, so there wasn't a lot of nearby restaurant options. Though, in their favor, the breakfast buffet was included and quite good. The Marriot was just a few blocks north and would have been better located.  Sunday We walked around and explored. We love to get the lay of the land. There's a huge amusement park in the middle of the city called Tivoli ...

There's a dropzone next to the garage door and close to the kitchen that wasn't working for us. So it was time to fix it.  It was once a closet with doors, but there are two other closets in the same hallway so we pulled off the doors and moved in the dresser for storage and spot to drop keys.   But the shoes just piled up around the dresser. And we no longer stored kids' socks next to the door. Or masks. And the top of the dresser wasn't large enough to drop off the mail, purse and keys that I need it for. See? No longer working. So I came up with a plan ...  I tried to convince David to demo out the wall on the right, to add some extra breathing space with the garage door, but I couldn't get him to agree. Regardless, we need a longer countertop, some extra shelves, and a bunch of baskets for allllll the shoes in this house. So many shoes.   Once I cleared everything out, I repainted and attached all the shelf bracing using some scrap wood I had in my gara...