Some of the progress in my home...

 I took a little time to look back at the last posts that I have made.  I was seeing what I had written and then looking around the house, there have been some marked improvements.  So I thought I would go through some of the improvements and bring you up-to-date.

Rob and Kate arrived yesterday.  There was an expected new snowstorm overnight last night and they decided to play it safe and come into town a day earlier.  Kate and I have an online class on Monday, Adventures in Dyeing Fabrics at Home which is part of the

Fairbanks Fiber Festival.  Because of Covid, it is being held as a Zoom class.  We have been gathering items that we need and tomorrow we will be setting up shop in the garage so we do not get the dyes on our white carpet.  I have 12 while, cotton bandanas from Dharma Trading to play with along with dyes that I got from Amazon and Joanns.  I will get some pictures tomorrow and share our beautiful... or not so beautiful projects.

Rob has been busy clearing my front steps and the side deck from the 13 inches of snow from Friday.  I am so grateful for his help.  After clearing the snow from the driveway, I am usually a tad tired and sore so the finish handwork is not always done.  Last winter I had to put out a box near the garage for packages when the steps were not useable.

So... to start bringing you up-up-date.  I will go room to room.

I will start with my bedroom.  For those of you who might be new or have not read any of the previous blogs, I left my home of 35+ years in southeast PA in September 2019 to move to Fairbanks, AK to be near my oldest son Rob and his wife Kate.  At 72, I needed to be closer to my family who would be able to help me when things become more difficult. And I wanted time to make my new home feel like home.

My son and his wife bought a house in Fairbanks that will be where they move when it becomes time for them to retire or when they find it better for them to be in town instead of outside, off the grid in a more remote area around Fairbanks.  The house is a three-bedroom, split-foyer style house.  The upper level has 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, living room, dining room, and kitchen.  The lower level is the family room and Master bedroom (it is huge) with 1 bath, laundry, and a sauna along with the entrance into the two-car garage.

I am trying to do most of my living in the lower level.  I have turned the family room into my bedroom, the sauna into my fabric stash storage, and the BIG Master bedroom into my craft room with a TV area, a cutting station, storage for dog stuff and foodstuff, a small fridge for cold drinks, an ironing area, a design wall, a computer desk, a sewing area for quilts/crafts, my embroidery machine, and my quilting frame.

I brought stuff from home collected from 40+ years of being in one place.  It filled the dining room with kitchen stuff, one entire side of the garage with other boxes as well as more boxes and furniture in each room.  It has been a little over a year and over time I have set up my kitchen, set up a guest room upstairs, and Rob, Kate, and I have furnished the dining room, living room, and their bedroom with new furniture to suit everyone and make the house comfortable for all of us.

I am going to update my bedroom today.

This is the outside corner of my bedroom.  The window faces the front of the house and right now is covered with the lace curtains that were left behind and the blackout curtains I added this spring to keep out the daylight of summer with 21 hour days.  The chair is an accent chair that I bought here.  This room is so much bigger than my bedroom in Parkesburg, it just needed a chair to make it feel complete.  It sits next to the barrister bookcase that had been in my dining room.  Next to that is the tall dresser from my bedroom set with the bedroom TV and speakers on top of it.

The round cylinder on the floor is an air purifier.  There are three of them in the house, two on my level and one upstairs.  It cleanses the air in the room every hour and has a filter that should stop bacteria and viruses.  I got them when Covid began.  There was no proof that they would help, but any little extra thing is a plus.

The top of the bookcase has my favorite picture of Rudy.  It is also the hat that he wore during his last days to keep his chemo-bald head from burning or being cold.  The teardrop contains some of his ashes, and little mementos sit on the mirror.  The bottle behind his picture has the last bottle of his favorite cologne.  There are days when I feel his presence and even though it is never opened, I can smell that cologne.  The little book-like object that is closer to the wall is a plaster pawprint of Winston that was taken at the vet's office the day he died.  The lighthouse is one of several that we had at the summer house in Maryland.

This the view from the area above.  That is my cedar chest from my bedroom in Parksburg.  There is a body pillow on top and some odds and ends that I am still using that also need a home... so for now they stay there so I can find them.  Next to that is a TV tray table and my travel TV that I would put in my car when I traveled.  It has a built-in DVD player and I could use it in places where the TV was sucky or in a guest bedroom so I had something on so I could fall asleep.  I have gotten used to something on as I drift off.  It also has a ROKU device for streaming.  I usually default to streaming a series that I have seen many times so I do not have to worry about what happens next. 

All the way back in the corner is a small dropleaf table that had been in the sewing room in Parkesburg.  A lamp, Google speaker, and charging tower grace the table.

Moving to the left is my queen-sized adjustable bed.  There is a feather-down comforter with a pretty flowered cover with matching shams.  It is a bookcase headboard, so books and trinkets and all are inside.  On top are some blank journals, battery-operated candles,   and the red and white lighthouse on the other side of the top. The left side of the bed finds the matching nightstand.  Another table with my Echo Spot, coasters for cold drinks, an extra water bottle or two, vitamin D chewies (we need extra in the dark winters) as well as fiber gummies plus an essential oil diffuser for a lavender aroma as I fall asleep.  The little pieces of carpet that you see is the top of the dog ramp so Miles has access to my bed at night... although I have come into the room to find him sleeping up there during the day, little bugger!

Still standing between the tall dresser and the bottom of the bed, turning to the left this is the view.  The little stand just to the left is one of the DVD/BluRay shelves that had been in my living room.  One is now downstairs in the bedroom, the other is upstairs.  The boxes by the corner are our supply of ethernet cables and switches to get hard-wired internet throughout the house.  We had to get an outlet installed in the storage under the steps.  It is there now, but we need time to get it set up.  The hallway leads to the stairs to the upper level and the craft room.  My bathroom is through the door, as you can see.  What looks like a blue rug outside of the bathroom is a dog bed where Miles likes to play with toys or wait for me to finish my shower.

Next to the bathroom door is my dresser and mirror.  This is in front of the window opening to the Sauna.  Since I am not using the Sauna for a sauna, and there is a window in the sauna that would have let light in during the summer, I decided to cover it with this dresser.  As you can see, this is where I let junk fall.  Every so often I go through it and it looks good for a day or two before junk starts accumulating again.

This is to the right-hand side of the mirrored dresser is the alcove that leads to the garage.  It has a closet meant for coats and a set of coats hooks that I have been using for my outerwear.  Just a few weeks ago, I added some smaller hooks to the wall unit so I can separate the coats, jackets, scarves, and the like for easier access.  I also put hooks on the outside of the closet doors for bedrobes and lounging wear.  Inside the coat closet are my spring/summer/fall clothes, some shoes, and some of my Vera Bradley luggage.

This is a total view of the alcove.  The door is metal, probably fire-rated, and goes into the garage.  I added hooks for hats.  I use ball caps in the summer as the caps keep the mosquitoes off my head.  There are knitted caps for warmth in the winter when I go out or work with the snowblower.

Once I got all of this nailed down and as I uncovered them in the boxes from the garage, I began to add the artwork to the walls.  I have finally placed all of my favorite artwork in places of honor around the room.

This is just to the right of the garage door.  This is my wall of ancestors.  In the middle is the last picture taken of my parents, Jack and Marsh Lepp.  To the left, the top picture is Mom and Dad a year after they were married.  It is a fun, playful picture that showed how they were all of the time they were alive.  Below that picture is a picture of my mother with her father, William C. Noel.  Below that picture is his wife, my grandmother, Mabel Doyle Noel.  Underneath the center picture is a picture of my mother and father, with my aunt and uncle and their friends shortly after my parents were married.  It was taken in St. Louis, MO where they lived for a time after they graduated from college.  Above the center picture is a picture of the POOPS... The Playful Order Of Parents Society.  This group was just very good friends of my parents who would get babysitters for their children for a weekend in February to go away to Columbus, Ohio (The Lincoln Lodge) for a weekend of no children, adult conversations, good food, poker, and bowling for the men and shopping and chatting for the woman.  This group remained close friends for close to 40 years when they began to move to warmer climates, suffering from illnesses, and passing away.  Not a single divorce among them... it was a beautiful thing to see.  Sadly, everyone on that wall is now gone.  Hence, the wall of ancestors.

This is the picture to the right of the middle picture.  This is my mother as a young woman.  Do you see a resemblance?  

These are the pictures that are on the right wall of the closet and next to the garage door.  These hung in the Maryland house.  While spending weekends and vacations there for almost 20 years, I had founded a Red Hat Society chapter called the Flaming Roses.  These are fun-loving old ladies over the age of 60 who would dress in purple outfits and wear Red hats and go out from time to time to just have fun.  And the Flaming Roses did just that.  The top picture is a sketch that one of my members had made and I framed it and hung it in the Maryland house.  The smaller one is very special.  In its infancy, the founder of the entire organization could be found anywhere and one of my members had run into Sue Ellen Cooper at a lunch in Florida.  She asked for an autograph from the Royal Queen Mother and Sue Ellen had signed the little card to me and wished our chapter well.  A real treasure for me.  So this tiny corner is my Red Hat Chapter memory wall.

One of my Red Hat friends has turned into one of my Best Friends.  She is extremely crafty and talented.  She is always sending me special drawings and things that she has created.  I have some of her other drawings in the craft room that you will see at some time later, but these two special projects are hung over my closet.  So every day I get up and think of her and go to bed thinking of her.  I miss her and is one of the things I miss most about my move, but we chat on the phone, but her hugs are what I sometimes need.  This is one of my Marji Lantz galleries.

These two drawings are by a well-known artist in Tennessee... at least well known to my parents and to me.  Her name is Julia WInters and you will see several of her works throughout my home.  The deer is a print of a pen and ink drawing that she did.  The little ballerina is an original that she made for my mother.  So this is the first of several Julia Winters Galleries. 

These are the pictures above the coat hook area.  The picture on the right and left of the center is from my first solo trip to Florida after Rudy died.  I drove to Florida with my dog Molly.  I spent a month in Cape Coral, enjoying the area, spending time with my friend Lorraine Rees and looking at houses while I considered purchasing one to become a snowbird.  At the end of that visit, I drove to Pensacola Beach where I met my son Brian along with his good friends Matt and Janice Stark.  We enjoyed that area of Florida and did some sailing time as both Matt and Brian are licensed, sailing captains.  These two prints are from the Pensacola area and remind me of that trip.

In the middle is one of my favorite recent pictures of Brian.  Brian has the nickname of "Fishtie".  In high school, he would wear ties that looked like a variety of different fish.  After graduating from Penn State, he found work in Minneapolis where he currently lives.  He had also developed a love of the occasional bow tie.  He had started wearing his old fish ties to work on Fridays and really wanted to find a bow tie that was also a fish tie.  When he could not, he asked me to try to make one.  It took time, but he found the fabric, and then we together found a way so that when the tie was tied, it created a whole fish.  He is demonstrating the result for me in this picture.

This is a pen and ink print of another Julia Winters drawing.  She would hand color each print.  This was a picture that my parents had given to my Grandma Lepp (my father's mother) to decorate her apartment after she moved to Cookeville, TN to be near my dad.  She had a little back porch there and would sit outside and feed the squirrels.  It has always been one of my favorite prints from Julia, so I got it after my grandmother died.  It now hangs over my bed and I think of her every day I get to enjoy this print.  It is amazing how we collect things throughout our years that remind us of the people we loved the most.

This little picture is a watercolor that I picked up at one of the many cute shops that we found in Maryland.  Looking carefully you can see a tiny hummingbird hovering before flying in to enjoy a plethora of trumpet flowers.  I had collect hummingbirds for a bit, you will be seeing more in a later blog, and I fell in love with this picture when I first saw it.  I did not buy it right away, but I kept seeing it in the shop each time we went in and finally bought it.  It hung in the summer house until I sold it and then in my bedroom in Parkesburg and now, here in Fairbanks.  It makes me smile!

This is one of 2 original Polli Trumbore watercolor pictures.  Polli was a good friend to our family when we lived in Ashland, KY.  She made beautiful hats.  My mother had several and she made a hat to match my "getaway outfit" for the trip to Carter Caves for the honeymoon with my first husband Bob Cermak.  In her spare time, she did these lovely watercolors of local scenes from the area.  Mom and Dad got me one for Christmas one year and Polli gave me one for a wedding present.

This is the other Polli Trumbore.  She had a real talent for watercolors.

This is a picture/print from a local Parkesburg artist named Dennis Minch.  He did many scenes that depicted various times of the year in that area as well as other places in Chester County.  I had become friends with Erin Minch in the last few years in Parkesburg and she was selling some of her father's work in her Beauty Salon.  It is a small scene of winter in Parkesburg on Strausburg Road heading down to Main Street.  The building at the bottom of the hill was an old bank and Anna and Rocco's Deli/Restuarant and an old church off to the left.

These items are from my Christmas in Seattle when I was there instead of Alaska because Kate had been so sick.  The upper picture is a nighttime scene of Seattle from a distance.  The bottom is actually a quilted topographical map of Seattle and the bodies of water in the area.  The lanyard is my bus pass, as I got fairly good at taking the phenomenal transportation system there.  Should I ever go back, the bus pass should be valid when we return.

These pictures are outside my bathroom door.  The top one is a photo by Tay Whiteside from Black Dog Salvage.  He had been taking photos in the various buildings that they were getting salvage from.  This one spoke to me.  It was in an old school building in either Pennsylvania or New Jersey.  The American Flag had been left behind and was covered in dirt and debris, yet the colors still are shown brightly as the sun came through the windows.  

The bottom painting was a gift from my church family at Parkesburg Mennonite Church just before my move.  Anita Gordan-Palmer had taken a photo and transferred it into an oil painting and framed it.  It reminds me of my beautiful church family, whom I miss every day.

This is the final print.  I found this on Facebook Messenger just before I left Parkesburg.  This spoke volumes to me with its theme.  It made the trip here and is at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway that connects my bedroom to the craft room.  I just love it.  Another one that makes me smile.

So there it is; a grand tour of my bedroom.  I will continue the tour over future blogs... so stay tuned.