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.

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Craft Room Shelves, Take III

Craft Room Shelves 

I don't think I've ever, in my life, taken THIS long to put up one damned set of shelves.  I keep finding myself one bracket short (and cue Peanut Gallery).

three out of four ain't bad?

The good news is, I'm one bracket away from putting up the fourth and final shelf, and then I can go get some plastic boxes from Ikea to store all that fabric in, to keep dust off of them.  I also need to re-organize the closet a bit so I can fit those last two gray bins into it: they're both full of old costumes, and upholstery fabric, none of which I want to put out on the shelves.

before: stacks of tubs, ack! 

I also moved all the cat boxes from the guest bath cabinet into this room.  They're on the floor under the shelves, for now, until I can get some sort of enclosure built around them to keep the litter dust from flying, and to camouflage the, er, boxes of turds and sand.  º~º   So, building stuff YAY.

To be [perennially] continued...

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Even More Guest Bath

It's not a major accomplishment or anything, but I did two things on Sunday, after having paint the lower half of the room on Saturday:

Guest Bath Cabinet
The vanity cabinet is litterbox-free, scrubbed, disinfected, and deodorized.  No more litterbox smell in this tiny room, and no more throw rug full of litter overspray in front of the cabinet on the floor!  Ewww!

It's a small thing, but it's a HUGE thing. 

Next for this room: cabinet hardware, and maybe a paint job on the lower cabinets. Haven't decided yet.



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More Guest Bath!

Look!  I did some more painting in there!

Before Okay, Well, Last Week:

After: 

It's gray on the bottom!  See, once I get every single room in my house painted gray, then I can move to a new house.  Not really.  I cut the leftover Behr "Woodsmoke" paint from the living room in half with plain white to make it a soft dove-gray (okay, okay, actually, it was to make sure I had enough paint).

look, Ma, no toilet paper! 

I like the effect quite a bit - and it IS level around the room, in spite of the photo through the mirror making it look like it's not.  I did play with the artwork a bit, and made the frame over the towel rack horizontal instead of vertical, and I like that a lot better.  It still sticks up above the shower rod, but that's going to get moved up higher anyway once I get the curtains in place.

Curtains which I don't have, by the way:  curtains, a new (and washable) rug, and some towels.  Next, though, some practical things need to be addressed:

• the missing cabinet door
• cabinet door hardware
• litterbox...issues. 
• possibly another paint detail I haven't decided about yet

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Month In Review

October In Review   (10 days late, lol)


Hung a room-divider sheer curtain between the living room and office
Gave all my big houseplants a much-needed and long-overdue bath outdoors
Got some more work done on The Aquarium Stand That Wouldn't Die
Went to Ikea
Finished the second of two couch covers I made for a friend
Found a coffee table on bulk trash day with awesome feet, which I refinished and put on my couch
Re-covered a desk chair I got from Ikea, for my sewing room
Hung the third shelf in the craft room (one shelf at a time? really? I swear)
Cleaned out and painted the guest bathroom.

I also put a towel rack in the bathroom, but have yet to actually hang it on the wall.  Lot of good THAT does all of your wet hands.   So...



To-Do List for November

Hang the towel rack in the guest bath
Do the second phase of the painting/color scheme in the guest bath
Finish the aquarium stand???
Lots and lots of yard cleanup
Plant another tree in the backyard, and some grass seed in the front before it gets too cold
Hang the final shelf in the craft room, and get some of the rest of the painting done in there that I want to do.

once upon a time, I had a beautiful garden. 

Vee shall zee...

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More Progress In the Guest Bath

There's still a bunch of painting to be done in the guest bath, and some new textiles in there (shower curtains, rugs, towels).  But for the time being, I got the freaking towel rack  put up tonight, and some art and tchotchkes thrown in.  I like it so far.

vanity corner.  garden print via blessedwildapplegirl

LOOK A TOWEL RACK

"Girl Combing Her Hair" by Wm. McGregor Paxton

My fave thing about the old bathroom: the art over the throne.

Which is sideways.  I'll get to that.  Photo via Pinterest.

So far, so good.  I need to do something with that Paxton print - it's too high up on the wall. It looks fine in person, but in the picture...Idk. I'll look at it, and play with it some more.  I think I might stick it next to the mirror instead of the little garden-window print, and do something horizontal above the towel rack.

hmm. 

It's all coming down this weekend anyway, so I can do the rest of the painting in here.  But for what is basically a trial-run of all the stuff on the walls and the vanity, I'm pleased.


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When You Care Enough To Send the Very *BAWK*

Sometimes you just need a pair of brightly-colored, ceramic chickens.

My BFF got me these for my birthday a few weeks ago.  They're silly and cute, and I love them to pieces.  And no, I'm not normally into decorating my house with livestock figurines of any kind, but these are special.

My mother had a pair of them when I was little, and I loved them SO much.  I never could explain why, there was just something about them.  My mother decorated for each holiday, and all sorts of other special occasions, but her chickens never came out of the cabinet, and were never displayed.  She didn't really like them, and I have no idea where they even came from. But I loved them, and loved to take them out of the cabinet when no one was home and arrange them on a shelf or table, and just sit and admire them for a few minutes before I put them away.

It's a long story, and one I won't burden you all with, but, suffice to say, I lost my family a long, long time ago, and have almost no mementos from that time in my life, especially ones with happy associations.  And for that reason, my BFF got me a pair of chickens I loved for no reason when I was a child.  It's amazing to have people in your life who care enough to think of and remember the little things like this.  :')


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Another Lost Post! (Couch Feet)

WTF, blogger?   Here's one I thought I posted last week, which I just realized never made it through.

LOOK, COUCH FEET: 

Sasha approves of this couch.

 From the coffee table I rescued from the roadside on bulk trash day last month.  I harvested the feet and the piano hinge that once held a folding top, and gave the rest to a friend who plans to make it into a shelf-y entertainment center type of thing.

Before:

short, plastic Ikea feet

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Surprise Flowers!

I love gardening moments like this, especially after the bad gardening year it's been.  I went camping over the past weekend, and came back to find the 'Romantika' Clematis in the backyard, which partly covers the temporary fencing in front of the bed I built last month behind the back porch, in full bloom:

<3

And then suddenly, seemingly for no reason, she made a hat.

Oh, weird - I thought I posted this like a month ago.   Here, have a random-ass, outdated post:

I can has crochet.

that's me

me again.

 

And then I joined Ravelry.com!  Because YARN.  This happens every year around this time.  

Wanna see some more of my stuff?  Go here.   

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Yardnation!

Nothing fancy, but a little elbow grease (as well as a few scratches and a ruined pair of sandals) goes a long, long way towards creating the Backyard of Dreams from the chaos of the Creeping Death Fungus of 2010 and the worst drought this state has ever seen, in 2011.

Another step along that road:

Ooh, ahh.  *SPARKLE*

That nice clean corner was full of THIS.  O_O

It doesn't look like much, it was worth about three hours' work, and a whole lot of peace of mind.  I didn't find any deadly spiders, scorpions, snakes, or rats in there...but I was always worried about it.  Not for my own safety (having, as I do, boots and gloves and common sense), but for my dogs, who would chase bugs into the pile and can't tell me, "Hey, mom, I was just bitten by a Black Widow. Maybe we should go to the animal hospital right now."   You know?

Plus, it clears out a HUGE corner of the yard.  The one corner, actually, where I don't plan to plant anything cool.  This is, to put it simply, the Dog Poop Corner.  As long as they have a big, open space to use, the dogs don't use the rest of the yard, and I plan to keep it that way.

Next on the list for the back yard:  a canopy over the patio, some raised beds for vegetable gardening, and some new sod in the Spring.

it's going to be seriously cool.

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