The Blue Room

After 8 years together, T and I are merging households later this month.  We’ll stay at Sassafras House and part of that process has involved making her an office from the room formally known as the guest room.  Potential guests need not fear; there are still extra beds in this house.  In preparation for the conversion, I’ve spent a good deal of time sorting out the many things jammed into the guest bedroom and its closet over the years .  There is no before picture because it was an unholy mess and why should I tattle on myself?  But I started the big cleanup in February and by April the room was cleaned out and ready for its next life.

T and I looked for paint to refresh the faded yellow room, which gets Southern and Western exposure from two large windows.  We both like blue and settled on a color called Fresh Air.  A few weeks back, I got up painter’s tape to protect the white woodwork trim.

On Good Friday, I used my day off from work to good effect as the painter-in-chief.  I started on the ladder edging in the trim, of which this corner room has a great deal.  

It’s not a huge room and by late afternoon, the painting was done.

That night we pulled down the painter’s tape and in the morning light, the dried walls looked quite splendid.

Then the pine floors got a good scrubbing and were refreshed with Rejuvenation, which works like a dream on old floors with a polyurethane finish.  The original 1931 pine floors are shining.  Within the month, the room will be filled with T’s desk and bookshelves, a cozy blue oasis with a splendid view of Old Man Tree.

Even better than that is the two of us living together full time.  After eight years together, it’s time!

Pretend Grown Up

I don’t have a desk at home, I have a laptop that follows me wherever I choose to work.  Most often, that’s a corner of my sunny dining room near a cabinet that contains my craft projects, a basket for those essential things we all seem to have, and an assortment of chargers for the family electronics.  

My essentials basket has a collection of items: address labels, bookmarks, stickers, JT’s schooI pictures, and the odds-and-ends of daily life, including the few bills that I don’t receive on-line.  Essential papers like car insurance and car registration renewals are also stored in the basket, which I keep to a reasonable size so as to prevent the accumulation of crap.

Of course, crap still accumulates.  When it seems especially over-flowing, I clean out the basket to find things I’d forgotten I had and plenty of things I should never have saved.  This week, I’m finishing up a project to pack up the entire first floor of my house in preparation for my wood floors to be refinished.  This means that the whole cabinet gets cleaned out and packed up.

That process has convinced me that I am barely a grown up.  For starters, the sheer volume of stickers that I’ve found in the cabinet suggests I’m a child.  For another, I unearthed my car registration just days from its due date.  The alarming fact here is that I had completely forgotten the registration was due.

As each corner of the first floor gets tidied and then packed up, I look forward to putting the house back together when the floors are complete.  I fantasize that I’ll return a tidier and more well-organized adult.  

After all, one must live in hope.

You Made Your Bed, Now Lie in It

My parents are coming to town on Wednesday.  My multi-staired home is not a good fit for my dad, who has difficulty walking.  While my mother and I were sorting out a plan to obtain a daybed for the downstairs study so dad could avoid the stairs, dad pressed send on his own and had a box spring and twin mattress shipped to my house.  So it was that I spent a few hours last Saturday afternoon putting together a box spring.

And then unwrapping a mattress.

There is now a day bed in the study.  Bedding was collected from the closets; sheets and a cushy mattress pad were acquired.

The study is a lovely room with French doors and a load of windows.  It's chilly in the Winter but come the open-window season, it's a nice room.  I am currently daydreaming of obtaining a bunch more pillows and enjoying breezy afternoons spent reading in this corner of the study.  Of course, the jury is out on whether this bed is at all comfortable.  I expect that dad will provide his assessment after a few nights spent in his new rack.

Talk about sleeping in a bed of your own making……

Before and After

I acquired my dining room chairs from an auction in 1997.  They were bargain-priced and have served us well but over the years, but were never especially comfortable.  Over the years, a few have also grown rather rickety and though T was willing to give a hand toward fixing that, it seemed a rather large chore for chairs that had never really been comfortable.  I few weekends back, we stopped in to a local unfinished furniture store and spotted some lovely replacements; chairs that were sturdy, looked great, and were comfortable.  The investment seems well worth it and we decided to try our hand at staining furniture.  

Rather than start with the chairs, we opted for a small plant stand with plenty of detail work. It started life as a plain wooden item.

We choose a MinWax stain with polyurethane built-in and set to work on Labor Day weekend.  

An hour later, the stand was ready to dry and we were sold on the idea of finishing the chairs ourselves.

We are confident that we can stain the chairs and so now new chairs are in order.  A staining weekend or two is planned for later this fall.  By Halloween, we hope to be sitting in sturdy comfort.  That’s happy!

Labelled

Over the weekend, T helped me with some Spring cleaning: specifically, we organized the pantry.  I have a fairly spacious kitchen pantry and I have cleaned it out on previous occasions, most recently in 2009, which is rather too long ago.  No matter how I try to keep up, the pantry eventually looks like this and I can't find a thing:

There was plenty of confusion in this pantry, enough to make me scratch my head for days.  Trouble came in threes.  I had three boxes of lasagna pasta, a food I make less than once a year.  I can serve that lasagna with bread crumbs; I had three shakers worth. There were also three boxes of raisins and I don’t really like raisins.  The collection of vinegars raises some very interesting questions.  No matter, in the end, things got cleaned out and organized.

And then the shelves got labels.

The pantry is much tidier and desired items are easy to find; I’m hopeful that the labels will assist in keeping me organized.  That’s happy!

Organization

Just off my kitchen lies a small butler's pantry.  There are narrow shelves in the closed-door cabinet above and below are four open shelves that I use to store a variety of things: extra garden seeds, hand towels and extra toilet paper for the powder room just across the hall, plastic plates and cups for eating outdoors, paper napkins, cookbooks, bug spray, super glue, cookie cutters……the diverse list is endless.

For that reason, of course, these shelves are awfully easy to clutter up.  I use baskets and have tried to maintain some organization but over time the shelves had become a disorganized heap.  It would be one thing if I didn't see that heap every day, but I did.  Worse yet, so did most visitors to my home.  The shelves were a natural first target for the summer clean-up season.  The before picture, which I remembered to make after I had cleared off the first shelf, tells the horrifying story.

Two hours and one trash bag later, things are ordered and tidy.  I'll be able to find what I need and I won't be overwhelmed by the clutter. 

I am particularly pleased to have the water bottles organized.

It's nearly always a defcon 4 crisis when we need one of these bottles for some sort of sporting event.  The new method of organization means that I can tell at a glance that the bottle supply has been depleted (i.e., it's time to check JT's baseball bag, backpack, locker, and goodness know where else, to liberate some bottles now filled with brackish water).  Something about organization makes me feel empowered...I am neat and tidy, hear me roar!

Open for Business

Pictured below is a table in my dining room.  This is the place where we store JT's artwork supplies and homework materials.  And it had also become the depository for every spare piece of crap my packrat son wanted to keep. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, this colossal pile of junk made it nearly impossible to find a pencil and paper to get homework easily done.  But no more.  I removed the crap. 

And I've organized the table and its supplies.  We are ready for the homework season.  As you might imagine, the boy is delighted.  Simply thrilled.

All Taped Up

The woodwork painting was completed last night and this morning I got out my painter's tape and went to work.  This afternoon, I'll paint the ceiling and then the color will be applied to the walls.

 The upper third of the walls is slated to have wallpaper.  I'm undecided about wallpaper on the new wall, so I've decided to paint both sections of that corner and then decide if that upper third should also be papered.

 Updated photos later today.

Weekend Update, part I

This week, my bathroom renovation reached the point where things needed time to dry and set.  So each day featured just a little bit of progress.  As of this weekend, I'm at the paint stage of the project.  I am doing the trim, wall, and ceiling paint myself in order to save some money.  It's not a huge job, but it does require that I plan out my attack.  The trim ---- both the chair rail, the molding, the door and its frame ---- will be painted first.  In the case of the door and the door trim, that will require some sanding and a tackcloth. The door trim took a beating in the renovation (and hadn't been perfect to begin with).

Update: the first coat of trim paint has been applied and things look good. The contrast isn't easy to see (the hazards of an all-white bathroom), but I'm happy.  Tomorrow's paint will be the color and once that's up, I'll have a better feel for the changes.