Today, meeting on campus (planning for Women's Heritage Month), then over to the house to check on progress, see how workers are doing. This week, they've started on stripping paint and redoing the plumbing / heating. Then 2:30 meeting with interior designer Harlene to walk through the house and do an initial consultation; we'll see how that goes. She's from a store called Fringe in Oak Park; I really liked the designs they had displayed there.
It's in some ways a long while until the house is ready for interior design -- except that it'll make life a lot easier if we can buy furniture at a leisurely pace over the next several months, and will also let us buy great items when they're on sale, etc. And as well, some decisions affect others -- i.e., wide-plank Brazilian rosewood floors are 2-3 times the cost of thin-strip stained red oak. So deciding what we're using and where is a big budget item, and that affects whether we do things like extend the addition another 2-4 feet, or put in a pizza oven. So it really would help to start nailing those wood floors down now. So to speak.