My day.

Still no Hyundai. I was going to take Todd to work this morning so I could go grocery shopping, but I was too tired to organize my coupons last night, and today I am coming down with the cold that Todd has been fighting for almost a week. Such a generous husband, giving me his cold. Such a sweetie!

So, stuck at home again, I hauled out some of the stuff I bought at Michael's last weekend. They were clearancing out a bunch of the home decor stuff they've had out since January, and I finally made my move and snapped some of it up.

I keep a low bench right outside the front door with various decorative items on it, and when I found a bunch of birdhouses and pitchers at Michael's, I decided to get a bunch of it and re-do my arrangement on the bench.

The bench was made for me by Todd several years ago, and I painted it a sort of maize yellow, but that doesn't go with the stuff I bought last week, so I also got a couple cans of spray paint and hauled it out in the yard and painted it today. Of course, I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here's the "after":

I'll have to see if I can find a "before" picture on the other computer later. I need to fill in a couple of gaps with more tchotchkes, but you get the basic idea. I'm hoping that little ceramic angel survives...our porch is like a long, narrow wind-tunnel and I have had more than one treasure blown off the bench and broken.

[Edited to add: I found an old shot of the front door with the bench beside it...this was right before Christmas 07. I got rid of the red chair on the other side today--I've had it for five or six years and it's looking very ratty, so it went to the curb:]

Then I took the same can of spray paint and overhauled this little table that sits between the wicker chairs on the other side of the porch:


Again, I didn't take a "before" picture--what's wrong with me?! My problem is that once I get all revved up to do a project, I have to plunge right into it and I don't want to take the time to track down my camera. This is a huge improvement on this little thrift store table, though--the legs were pale yellow, and the top was off-white with a big apple decal in the center, and a painted checkerboard pattern around the edge. Sort of folk art style. I think plain khaki looks better, esp. with the dark brown chairs. Now I need to find some small, cute plant to set on it...again, something that hopefully won't get blown away when a big storm comes through.

I am a spray paint novice, but I'm always reading other people's blogs and seeing all the wonderful transformations they create with it, and I am totally convinced now. It took about fifteen minutes to spray the bench and the table, and by the time I got deadheading all my hanging petunia plants, they were dry and ready to put back up on the porch. Very impressive.

These birdhouses have been sitting on my front door bench with a couple of baskets and a grapevine wreath, but they didn't go with the scheme any more, so I just set them on the porch steps with the grapevine wreath propped behind them and another little Michael's angel next to them:

Speaking of items that got blown over and broken, this is one of them, a very cute glazed pot I picked up at a garden store in Portsmouth. I couldn't bring myself to throw away the bits, so they've been sitting pretty much where they fell. A couple weeks ago I stuck them in the garden and pulled up a spare sedum to plant in front of them.

Here's the McCoy vase I picked up in Westerville on Monday:


I have a similar vase that I bought years ago when we were living in Ohio:

Here's the bowl I got on Monday, I still haven't found a spot for it to sit yet so it's hanging out on the kitchen counter. Someday when Todd makes shelves for our living room, I'm going to display all my pottery together.

What a gorgeous day today is, sunny and cool. I need to do some cleaning and tidying before my brother's family comes for the weekend, and plan some meals and get some groceries. I hope this cold dries up and goes away fast!

Toile Party.

Pretty Organized Palace is having a Toile Party today, and how serendipitous! Because my mother-in-law stitched me up a gorgeous toile shower curtain last week:


I've had this lavender toile fabric knocking around for seven years, ever since we bought a house in Columbus that had a lavender bedroom. I turned it into my study, and I was amazingly productive in that room, which I attribute to the lavender.


I fell in love with this lavender toile and bought it to make curtains for the room, but we were in and out of that house so quickly (eight months or so), I never had the time.


I've been hanging onto it ever since, waiting, and I finally got the chance to use it in my newly painted and redone guest bath.

The background is not as creamy as it looks above--it's hard to get the color right both with flash and without. We trimmed it with the green stripe because I spent months trying to find a coordinating fabric, and finally decided to go with something completely contrasting. I'm so thrilled with how it came out! Thanks, Viv!

Go take a look at everyone else's toile items, too. I love toile.

This week...

...this is the Big Project:

I will get this bathroom done in a timely manner, I will, I will...!

(And let me be clear that the filth on the wall was there when we moved in and has proven impervious to scrubbing--so I hung a cabinet over it. Now I'm gonna paint over it!)

While I work, I am singing along with this:

I got this set up the way I want:

I'm putting together this:

...for an Easter basket swap...it's going to be really pretty when I get it done!

Reading this, and not sure if it's worth it:

And there's always, always this, isn't there?

When I get to heaven, St. Peter's going to hand me a full laundry basket, I just know it.

And now I have to go scrounge up some dinner out of this:

I've been trying to get us to eat up everything in the freezer, and we're truly down to the dregs now, though it may not look like it. Not much besides frozen stock, waffles, and random ancient bits of meat. And lemon ices.

Hope everybody's having a happy Monday!

Wall art.

Such a cold, dreary, rainy Saturday! Todd went to a fishing promotional thing at Bass Pro, and I drank tea and read and dozed, and then I got off my butt and put together my wall art and had Todd hang it up, and then I made blueberry-orange muffins.

Wall art: I bought a children's book at a sale or flea market or somewhere last summer that had great pictures of seashells in it, with the intent of photocopying and framing some of the pages...I finally bumped it to the top of my to-do list last week.

I had to order the mats, because Michael's doesn't cut mats in its framing department any more. When did that happen? I used to be able to go in and have them cut a mat while I waited, I'm sure of it! Plus, they were far more expensive than I'd expected, so I only got two instead of the four I was planning.

So here's the headboard and the area around it...it has been needing something on the walls, but I haven't been sure how to arrange it. So the seashell pictures are hanging on the right, I had Todd hang 'em up for me.

(Eek, naked bed! It was laundry day today!)

You can see that the area to the left is encroached upon by the curtain rod, curtains, and window, so a symmetrical arrangement isn't really possible. Do you think one more seashell picture over on the left would be a good balance?

Or would you make two more seashell pictures and hang them on the closet wall that adjoins the first two, mirroring them? So it would be an arrangement of four in the corner.


In which case I would come up with something different to hang over the left side of the bed. I think we can all agree that area needs something.

Here's a close-up of the pictures themselves, sorry the second one is crooked, but it was well above my head:

I'm very pleased with how they came out--they look much better in real life. They really dress up my little corner, with the lamp on and my books on the nightstand and my cozy blankets and pillows just waiting for me to hop in:

I've got more seashells to frame, so do let me know where you think they should go! I could put one on either side of my dresser mirror, too...decisions, decisions...

You gotta love serendipity.

I had a bit of good luck today. I've been looking for a quilt for the past six months or so, with the idea of wrapping it around the seat cushions of my couch, to extend their lives a little longer. I found a frayed spot right in the center of one of the cushions a while back, and it's just been nagging at me. I don't want the fabric to tear.

We bought the couch new exactly nine years ago and I love it as much now as I did then. It was a momentous purchase because, if memory serves, it was our very first NEW furniture purchase after eight years of marriage. I wasn't at all sure what kind of color/pattern I wanted, but the minute I saw the swatch, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that was what I wanted. The funny thing was, it wasn't at all a color I'd even considered before!

It's just a very simple gray-green with a leafy pattern woven into it. I think the fabric's called jacquard...? This shows the pattern well:

Such a great couch, I just love it. Sigh.

I happened to pick up the Kohl's flyer out of the newspaper yesterday and all their quilts were on sale. So I stopped by this morning and found a twin-size quilt on an end-cap that looked much closer to what I had in mind than anything else I'd seen. It was $31.99 on sale, which wasn't great, but I figured I'd take it home and give it a shot and bring it back if it didn't work. $31.99 is still cheaper than a whole new couch, right?

When I got to the check-out, the girl beeped it, and then gasped. "This is only $5.99?!" she said. Yep, as a matter of fact, it was! It's discontinued! Huzzah!

Here's how it looks:

What do you think? I haven't sat on it yet, but I think it looks nice. I may have to safety-pin it along the bottom if it shifts around too much, but that's okay.

Later!

Still here.

Well, I ended up not going along to MD--I decided at literally the last minute that I'd rather just stay here and not walk around in the frigid cold up there looking for stuff to do. I felt bad, but it seems like the right decision--Todd is working till pretty late each evening, so it's not like I would have seen much of him anyway.

I spent most of Monday and part of Tuesday sleeping, and that seems to have helped with the cold and exhaustion. (Thanks for the get well wishes!) I felt much more peppy today, and went back to the horrific mess in my study and almost got it all tamed. Tomorrow I need to do some painting and cleaning elsewhere in the house. I also have a little Valentine's Day project I really want to take some time and work on. I hate it when I buy stuff for a project and then never get it done. That's the source of half the mess in my study!

While I'm sitting here taking a breather, let me share some long-overdue photos from October, when my mother-in-law came down to visit and helped me get some curtains up. There's a very nice blog called Nesting Place whose author has come up with an idea she calls "window mistreatments." This idea really intrigued me, because I've never been fond of traditional window treatments. They're expensive and intimidating, and just not me.

When we moved into this house, the only curtains I put up were some long cream tab-tops from Target in our bedroom, and a rod-pocket valance with cherries on it in the kitchen, which Todd and I had made for our last house (remember, he's the seamstress, not me. I'm just the presser of hems.) Then my mother-in-law made me some simple panels for my study a year or two later. (You can see 'em here, just scroll down almost to the bottom of the month.)

So anyway, window mistreatments. Basically the idea is to grab a long piece of fabric, fold it over so you don't have to hem it, and then use upholstery tacks to stab it into the wall at appropriate intervals.

Viv and I are both a little more precise than that, so we did cut the fabric to the appropriate width and then hem it, rather than having bulky folds. Here's how it came out on the living room window:

The valance looked a little naked, so I went and got some $10 sheers at Wal-Mart and tacked 'em up under the valance. Voila!

In the dining room, we have long vertical blinds on the sliding glass doors to the back deck. They run on a flat, covered rail about 3" wide. I was never able to figure out an easy way to cover that up, but Viv had a brainstorm and suggested clipping fabric directly to the rail with...drumroll...mini clothespins! And it worked great! This is a piece of fabric I'd originally intended for the living room--and we had hemmed it up back when we did the study curtains, but never got around to using it. It looks great in the dining room, I think.

Here's a close-up of how she did it:

Then I had Viv whip up two simple panels with ring-clips to cover the half-bath window off the kitchen, but I don't have a good picture of that.

Now I just need some simple valances for Todd's study and some kind of nice curtain for our bathroom window, and then the house will be fully curtained. And we've only lived here three years and counting...!

Don't I have an awesome mom-in-law? My windows would all be naked but for her!

On the move.

Ahhh, I'm finally coming out of my stupor of sickness, and it feels so good!

Today I decided to take advantage of having Todd's dad here and have him and Todd rearrange the furniture in my study. I had to take everything off my big bookshelves, clear off my desk, move it all across the hall into my bedroom, and then they came in and did the heavy lifting.

Then I started bringing everything back in, pausing for occasional coughing fits. All the dust didn't help with that!

I still don't have it all put away yet...that will take a while. I have to go through everything, toss stuff out, re-pack some of it, re-organize more of it, etc. etc. And hang stuff and all that. I got my comfy chair all nestled into the corner, though, and it looks nice.

Tomorrow I'm cracking the whip again and they'll be taking down the outdoor Christmas lights and putting the tree and ornaments in the attic. Hee hee! (*rubbing hands with glee*) Men are so darn useful!

I also listed a huge stack of cookbooks on PaperbackSwap. I realize that I turn to the Internet now whenever I'm looking for a cooking idea--Allrecipes is my stand-by site. And I need the space the books are taking up. I still have plenty left, don't worry!

Then I'm going to empty out all the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen and figure out where things need to go now. I have stuff busting out of everywhere, and I know I don't need some of it. And some of it might be able to go somewhere else, too. Although it feels like all I do in this house is move things from one storage spot to another, trying to find the perfect place.

Speaking of the Internet supplanting books...do you think I should get rid of my paperback thesaurus and my big hardback dictionary? I check the Merriam-Webster and Thesaurus.com sites automatically now, before it ever occurs to me to check the actual books.

I love January. I love starting out the New Year getting organized!

My favorite rooms.

I was sitting at the kitchen table after eating my Crispix this morning, having a cup of tea and surfing the net while waiting for my dryer load to finish, and I just looked around and thought how much I like this part of my house.

On the ground floor, we have the living room and entryway and stairs on the front side of the house, and the kitchen/dining room and a small half-bath on the back side of the house. The kitchen and dining room are my favorite rooms in the house, or maybe I should just say "room" since it's just one big area.


On a gray day like today, it's especially warm-feeling, with the bright lights and the green walls. And I can sit and look out the back doors at the trees.


Or I can look the other way at my messy table and desk.

Nah.

It's not fancy, but it's comfortable and warm. And I like all my stuff.

I am actually enjoying a smidgen of down time today because I've gotten so much done this week. (Patting self on back here.) Today is laundry and cleaning out the fridge and getting the downstairs tidied up, and going out for a farewell bash for one of Todd's co-workers tonight. Tomorrow is packing, getting the upstairs tidied up, and vacuuming, and then going to Todd's office party. And then Sunday morning we're off to Ohio. So it's nice to have a little patch of time where I can just enjoy being at home.

Birdhouses.

I was at Michael's yesterday and found these little papier-mache birdhouse ornaments on the clearance rack.

Last night I sat down while Todd snoozed in front of the fireplace and I covered then with Basic Grey Wassail papers. Then I added some Melissa Frances stickers, a few notions and a liberal dose of Martha Stewart mica glitter, and of course, Stickles glitter glue.

I can't decide whether to attach ribbon loops to the top or just leave them as is, but here's where they sit until I decide...


I put some fresh pyracantha berries and leaves in my little pitcher, and added some rosemary and lavender sprigs. Smells good.

Over and out.