Alive

I got a wild hair this morning and just felt like mowing the grass in the back yard.  What little there is.  With the weed-eater, since the mower actually doesn't work.  There was enough grass, enough weeds, and enough dead leaves floating around that I thought I might be able to get the compost bin re-booted with what I could cut and scrape up with the rake.  

Imagine my surprise when, upon digging out and turning over what I thought was a dead compost bin - not having been fed or turned since it got so blisteringly hot in June this year - I found a compost bin very much alive.  Gross and dry on top from not having been turned, yes (and there was a sock in it - wth?), but underneath was fluffy, rich, soft, black, fragrant compost.  Mmm.  

And I also found that the 'Delfino' Cilantro that I found back in the corner by the compost bin has not only come back, but re-seeded itself all over that corner - the whole area is filled with baby Cilantros, and baby Yarrows.  Seemingy out of "nowhere". 

A promise for the turning of the year?  Hope is a thing with leaves.




.

December In Review, and 2011 Favorites

One post to bind them all!  (Because I don't feel like doing two of these).

December: 

• epic thrift shopping at the Goodwill Outlet/Distribution center
• Table Rodeo, which yielded "new" nightstands, a little devotional altar in my meditation space, and a "new" end table in the living room
• knew knobs in the guest bath, now that the cabinets are put back together
• made an old trunk table into a shelf for my office
• put together a wee coffee bar in my kitchen
• opened up a can of whoopass in my craft room!  

2011:  Favorites & Major Transformations

post here

January:  replaced my metal back door with a pretty wooden one - with paint!

                           "wtf??"         "idk."

February:  it snowed!  In central Texas!  That's like the THIRD time that's ever happened!  (Not really, but it's pretty rare). 

(And actually, my pipes froze, and I didn't have any water for three days, but, no harm done, thankfully).  

March:  re-arranged the bedroom.  I still love it, though I'm ready to start tweaking some stuff.  Or, I will be, as soon as the guest room is finished. 

I also spray-painted the mini-blinds in the living room.  I spent about $15 per blind, rather than upwards of $40 each to replace them with wood.  Yay! 

June:  Until June, I was excited about sprucing up the backyard.  Then the worst drought in 100 years hit , and derailed everything for everyone. Giant trees - hell, whole forests died, between the drought and the horrible wildfires that raged through over the Summer. 

I managed to get a couple of small trees in and going strong this Fall, though, and I plan to reboot my efforts in the Spring. 

July:  Re-arranged the living room like whoa.

  

August:  started another blog, for my SCA stuff. :) 

October: re-did the guest bathroom  

November:  once the weather finally started cooling off, I  got busy cleaning up the yard and getting parts of it ready for the Garden-stravaganza I have planned for 2012.  

December:  just about finished re-doing my craft room.

On to 2012!!!  Hope everyone has a safe and fun New Year's, and a happy, fulfilling new year! 

.

  

Now For the Little Things...

Couple of extra touches in the craft room (some; not all):

Replaced the plain white muslin café curtain with a soft linen one; plant, more artwork.


I made this curtain, and the one below, Monday evening, which was the first time I'd used the new sewing table + file cabinet setup.  It's AWESOME.  Idk how I was dealing with that awful, rattle-y, shelf/box situation before.

Yup. I still hate the clock.  

Linen curtains over the closet door, to hide the mess when there's a mess.







<-- cat eating breakfast in the mirror. hee.













.

Before & After: Craft Room Whoopass

I opened up a HUGE can of whoopass on my craft room over the long holiday weekend!  I'm tired, and sore, and at this particular moment I pretty much never want to paint anything ever again - but the room is 99% finished, and I'm SO excited about that!  Check it out:

Before:

 Loooong sewing table. Stained plywood top (ok, but the finish was wearing off), on black wire shelves for legs (wobbly, ugly, cramped legroom).

Gray walls.  Soft and relaxing, but boring.

Green painted concrete floor. (Hey, the paint was free, and at the time it was better than bare concrete).

3 of 4 wood plank shelves, fabric s l o w l y  being moved from bins on the floor underneath to "neatly" "folded" stacks, pending storage box decision.

Closet packed to bursting, half-assed, mis-matched carboard and paper boxes, and big plastic bins.


The bottom shelf was supposed to be an extra work surface for me to roll my chair up to. Do YOU see any place to work??

<-- 8yo carpet




After:
After a loooong four-day weekend of taking shelves down and re-painting them, painting the walls, sorting and organizing until I thought I'd die from it, and making some furniture changes:

I painted the top 2/3 of the walls a fresh, crisp white.

The wooden shelves were painted a cool, charcoal gray - kinda reminds me of the color of those old, metal, Steelcase desks.

The closet, formerly a weird, too-light blue, got the same treatment:  white walls (top and bottom), and "Steelcase" gray on the shelves.

I like the gray "frame" around the closet opening.






<-- the carpet's been removed in here, as well. Finally.

The sewing table top also got painted gray;  the shelf  "legs" were replaced by Ikea's CURRY legs, in silver.

While the dimensions of the top haven't changed, the table itself is about 3" shorter than it was - which I was REALLY worried about doing, but it actually turned out to be exactly what this table needed. No more shoulder strain!

A LOT of art went into this room, much of it my own.  These four are actually the very first "real paintings" I ever did.

The black bulletin board that used to sit behind the sewing machine on the right is now hanging vertically at the end of the desk. Less looming, and more space for art! :)

<-- Ikea's HELMER  file cabinet.  SO cute, and SO incredibly perfect for all of my sewing things.  No more shelves full of random boxes of loose stuff! :D

ALL of the shelves and fabric boxes are now in place! The boxes still need labels.

There's a gray "frame" around the window, too - since the walls were already gray, I just taped off everything I wanted to refrain from painting. The inside of the window casing is still gray, too, and I really like the effect.

Look, a ceiling fan!!!  Belive it or not, this is nearly my favorite part of the room.  This room is ridiculously hot in the summers.  Now I don't have to wheel in a big ugly box fan to keep me cool in here.

Note the gray border around the top of the walls.  There's a nifty ceiling thing that hasn't happened in this room quite yet, so I left space. :)







That's a lot of change, for a LOT of work - but really, not so much.  Really, all that happened in this room was:

• painting
• changing the table legs
• installing a ceiling fan
• bringing in that little Ikea file cabinet

But it took four days to do.  Four days of nearly non-stop work - Saturday and Monday were like 14-hour days.  I'm actually looking forward to going back to work this week, so I can sit still, hehe. 

There are a couple more things in this room to show you, which will happen in their own post - like curtains, plants, and other "soft" things, to break up all this gray-and-white, which, in these pictures, seems a bit stark. The fabric boxes still need labels, and I have a nifty idea about that to experiment with.  Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be finishing up the ceiling, too.  

The next big thing, though, will be putting real flooring down in this room, and its neighbor.  If things go the way I'd like them to, that'll happen this next weekend.  Woohoo! 

.

du Café

Mmm, coffee.  About a month ago, sick of the coffee maker being in the way of my cooking, and the coffee supplies and cups taking up cabinet room where I needed more mixing bowls, I moved the whole kit and caboodle* to the opposite side of the kitchen, to a corner counter that I wasn't really using...except to pile stuff on.

ok, not really. this was while I was re-doing the laundry room

After: 

coffee station!

This is more stuff from my Ikea trip this week.  That's a SNUDDA lousy susan, with a SOARE woven mat on top, just for kicks.  (Those of you who've been to Ikea with me, like, ever, know that every time I'm there I practically stick my face into the bin of these things and smell them.  I *love* the way dried banana fibers smell.  I finally broke down and bought some of them to use around the house, just because I love the scent..  The silver tray was a thrift store find many moons ago.  More coffee and extra supplies in the cabinets directly above.

My favorite part, though, is this adorbs little creamer.  The pattern is being discontinued, and so I scored this  little dude for a buck. Squee!


* Yes, I just wanted to say, "kit and caboodle."

.

Before & After: Tableshelf Printerstand Badkitty

Many moons ago (many, many moons), I bought one of those Southwestern-y looking square trunk tables. You know: rustic pine wood, pre-dinged for your battered furnishing convenience, with rusted iron hardware (because mmm, tetanus*).  Shortly thereafter, I realized I had been smoking crack when I bought it.

I refinished it a number of times, and eventually just painted it black, but it was still a big, flat, clunky table, and I'm WAY too clumsy for large, low-to-the-ground furniture. I have the broken toes to prove it.

"cabinet"

 Eventually, as unwanted furniture in my house is wont to do, it ended up in my sewing room, upended, as a "cabinet."  Yuh-huh.  I wasn't even keeping anything in it, just piling crap on top of it. (As I am wont to do).

I thought about knocking it completely apart and actually building something out of the sides, but I gave up after realizing I could really only make...a big square table with it.  (I've had a serious creativity cramp the last few months, around the house).

"table"

Not to be defeated by a table, I finally decided to just remove the table-y parts and use it as a big square shelf.  You can never have enough big square shelves, after all.

I dragged it out to the garage, removed the feet, the doors, and the center top piece that didn't open (why, exactly...?), and all the trim molding around the bottom edge.

a good start

I wrestled with what to do with the finish.

Leave it, and claim that it was beautiful in its curbside-find simplicity? Paint it a bright, snazzy, eye-catching color?  Nope, don't have any of those, don't feel like buying new paint for this.  Touch up with more black?  Nope, don't have any of that, either.

In the end I settled on using this table shelf to use up the leftover gray paint from the guest bath.

heyloogidat!

There!  Waaay better than the ex-coffee table that used to sit in this corner, which was constantly piled with books and papers, and which invited A Very Bad Cat to sit on the scanner whenever the hell he felt like it.  Something missing, though...

Now the top of the table shelf is full, which means there's no room for the aforementioned Very Bad Cat to hop up there and screw with the printer, or the curtains. Or the plant (which is an Elephant's Foot Palm, related to the Ponytail Palm (Baucarnia recurvata), both of which apparently taste really good to cats).

everything needs a plant on it (in my house)

Vertical magazine and file organizers courtesy of Ikea. Five of them for two bucks. Aw, yeah.

P.S.:

Before. Yowza. 

* And, because I said that, I have to say this, because it's an odd pet peeve of mine:  you don't really get tetanus from rusty metal. The condition of tetanus, aka lockjaw,  (which is actually quite serious, by the way) is caused by any one of a number of tetanus bacteria, which are soil-borne, anaerobic bacteria, and which die when in contact with oxygen. A rusty nail buried in the ground? Sure, maybe (boots and gloves in the garden, people). A rusty nail sticking out of a table in your house? No way. Certainly not a clean sewing needle in a sewing machine, Dr. Guy Who Made Me Get That Horrible Shot For No Reason). 

Ikea Alphabet Game

Go to Ikea's website. Type a letter in the search bar, and then a second, if necessary, and explore the first Swedish product name that comes up in the search.

This is Ikea's BRADA laptop support, for $2.49.  I don't have a laptop, but I bet it'd make a nice lap-top support for an art pad - especially since I've recently started experimenting with calligraphy, and with painting Very Small Pictures.  Looks like the lip on the front of it might be tall enough to cut into my wrist, though.







This post brought to you by Ikea, and their dearth of laminate flooring solutions on the website; and by my total lack of posts lately.  I swear I have a shelf drying the garage that I can post about just ANY day now...



.

Knobby McKnobberson

Another "small thing" in the guest bath that's hugely important to the overall look:

Hooray Knobs!

TADA

Matches the one on the upper cabinet...

...which had been there for like a year, LOL. 

Table Rodeo, Part 2

When last we met my living room and it's end tables, it went a little something like this:

There's a wee one with a silver tray and a plant on it to the left of the min-couch (covered with a white blanket in this picture).  

This post is about the corner between the two couches, though, where until just the other day, there was a round, black, wicker table with a silver tray on top, next to the silver standing lamp I refinished, and a pretty painting behind it on a wooden easel. 

Here it is after ...in transition, let's say. This is the tall, antique (Victorian) plant stand that had been, until the other day, the nightstand on my side of the bed.

It's a bit tall, which I thought would be weird; but I really like it where it is.  

That tall Bird of Paradise plant is looking a little pekid these days.  Sigh. 

....I started this entry with every intention of doing MUCH more to this corner, and then I got REALLY REALLY SICK.  I haven't had the energy to do anything this week.  Next time we see this corner there'll be art on the wall (no, really!) and some more stuff happening with that table and behind the couch.

Maybe after the weekend, if I have time and can, you know, stay vertical for more than an hour at a time, hehe.

.

Yippie-Kai-Yay

Is that how that's even spelled? Does anyone really know?  Anyhoo:  TABLE RODEO this weekend!  Similar to the "Houseplant Rodeo" I do 3-4 times a year, wherein houseplants get moved around, put into new pots, trimmed, bathed, and generally spruced up and reorganized.  This time with tables!


#1  Altar + Meditation Corner
My little prayer altar got moved from the tower of cube-furniture in the bedroom, to a small wooden chowki in the "back" of my living room where my little meditation corner has been set up.

Before:  the meditation corner, with the "tower" altar next to it, before I moved the tower into the bedroom. Also before I moved the couch into its current spot. Old picture.

 

After: The new Meditation Corner, rotated 90º (because it functions, and is more comfy, that direction), and the new little devotional altar next to it.

I like this version a lot better.  It's simple, and quiet, and pretty. 


<-- also some new cushions. :)








Talk to you about #2 later this week...when it's finished, hehe.

.

RUG!

Hey, you guys wanna see a really crappy photograph?   I thought you did.

ooh, ahh. 

That would be a nine-dollar area rug.  Yup, that's what I said:  this baby cost me a whopping $9.99 at the Goodwill outlet the other weekend.  Are you freaking shocked?  I couldn't believe it.  I couldn't not buy it.  It's practically brand-new, too. There's a bit of wear on one of the short edges, which I tucked up under the mini-couch when I put it in my living room, and that's *it*.  It's gorgeous. 

*see below

Tada.

Believe it or not, I DID actually dust off the ol' real camera for this one, and took some fabulous photos.  And then I couldn't find the cord that connects it to my computer. #&!!#%@*!!!

It took about three minutes after I got the furniture in place and stopped moving things around before two dogs went to lay down on the new rug, and a cat walked over and started sharpening his claws on it.  The dogs I'm okay with, but I'm pretty sure I scared the cat so badly that he'll never go near that rug again.

For at least an hour.

.


* Yes, those are the same papers I taped to the wall three months ago in order to test-drive placement for some canvases I'd planned to paint and hang up there.  I still haven't done anything more on them...not even put the ones that fell down back up, which is why there are only three in the picture.  Because I'm (1) lazy and have (2) been doing other things.  
...And I still haven't covered the mini-couch aside from throwing blankets over it, because I suck. 
JUST LOOK AT THE RUG OKAY. 




.

Pics Or It Didn't Happen

WHEW!  I've been so busy with work this week, I haven't had time to make a blog post!  I have been getting things done around the house, though.

I've begun a little Side Table Rodeo in the house which will end up affecting three different rooms.

I went EPIC THRIFT SHOPPING with some friends last weekend and acquired a big honkin' area rug for ten dollars.

I'm making some art.

I've started more painting in the guest bath.

Soon as I have time to finish projects, put that new rug in place, take pics, and post about it, you'll read about it! In the meantime, everybody have a great weekend. :)

*woman

.

When Closets Attack!

I believe I've mentioned before that my bedroom closet is a great big hot mess.  The dream is something along these lines...

wouldn't this be nice? 

And to be fair, while the reality is something slightly less organized, I am getting there, albeit slowly.  My closet doesn't affect anyone but me, so I'm allowing bits and pieces of it to come to me whenever it does, and spending my focus right now on the guest bath and guest bedroom.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I paid a visit to the small north Texas town of Burkburnett, and while I was there, I stopped at an indoor city-wide garage sale type of event to poke around.  It was cute in that Tiny-Texas-Town kind of way, there were lots of really nice people, and even live music in the center of the auditorium, which was nifty.  And I found a pair of cute little mirrors - about 15x18" - for $8 for the pair!

 I had them sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks before I figured out what to do with them - well, with one of them anyway.  Into the bedroom closet they went!

Ooh, ahh. 

 It was...okay.  I actually cleaned up this portion of my closet quite a bit - removed some storage bins I wasn't using that I'd set on top of the dresser and then ignored, for example (remember that dresser?)  I also put the dresser up on bed riser feet so I can get to my socks without throwing my back out (it's a little small, but it'll do until I find the perfect one for this space ).

But it wasn't...quite...

THERE!  

A nicer, newer basket for my hair things and scarves, and some gold paint for that mirror.  I painted it on, then wiped the edges down to "weather" it a bit.

~*sparkle*~

 Now to
(a)  figure out what to do with the other mirror like this, and to
(b)  do something about the rest of the closet...

º~º

"Ikea Hack"?

That candle holder in the guest bath, by the way, is actually pretty much just a stack of candle holders, LOL.

The wooden base is a candlestick from Ikea.  I glued a blue glass flat pillar candle plate on top of that, and then, for the bathroom, I stuck a brown glass votive holder on top.

It's like Jenga, but with fire and broken glass danger.   I'm kidding. It's totally secure.

.



.