The Dragonfly Study Center has been a work in progress for many months now, ever since we moved in last fall. We’ve made improvements bit by bit—uprooting bushes, painting shutters, installing a new sign. But one project we’d been planning since October but couldn’t tackle until warmer weather arrived was repainting the gables under the roof, along with the door, handrail, and sign out front.

Well guess what.

My family did all of that while I was gone. They surprised me! In the middle of my Oxford visit, I got an email with some pictures, (ostensibly of a new picnic table set up in the yard), that also happened to reveal a refreshed color scheme. The old peachish-tan stucco of the gables had disappeared behind new, soft gray paint. And both the rusty brown handrail and the (formerly royal blue) signpost in the front now match our charcoal gray shutters we’d painted last year.

Wow, what a little paint can do! Just as a reminder, here’s a photo we took last October when we moved in, before we’d made any changes.

Yeah. We’ve come a long way already. So THANK YOU to my parents, who led this latest project, as well as to the others who lent a helping hand. I’m loving this building more all the time!

(Now all we have to do is landscaping….)