Something I Want Out of Something I Don't Want

I loved my dining room table.  I really did.  Thing is, I never used it as a dining table.  It was too small to seat more than 2-3 people comfortably, and since when do I have dinner parties?  It was mostly a flat surface that accreted random detritus, and it was wasting space.  Meanwhile, I've been wanting a round coffee table for some time.  So I took the dining table apart, cut about a foot and a half out of the pedestal, and reassembled the whole thing: 

Before:

2013

After: 

And then...

I made myself a little time-out corner in the dining room, instead.  A couple of extra tub chairs that didn't fit in the living room, and the [antique?] plant stand/table that a friend gave me a few years ago.  I needed a comfy place to sit and use my asthma nebulizer machine, and now I have one.  Yay!

Ta-da!

A "New" China Cabinet For the Dining Room

After I re-purposed my old china cabinet into the living room as a bookcase, I was given another one by a friend about a year ago.  It was really big, and wasn't really my style; but I had another friend who was interested in trading her china cabinet for it.  It took us a while to coordinate the swap (she lives on the opposite side of town, and we're both pretty busy), but we finally did it last weekend.  The new cabinet is an Ikea LEKSVIK cabinet (discontinued):

The bottom half  is full of Sylvan's and my cookbooks; and the top houses some of my rock and mineral collection, which hasn't been on display for the past couple of years since I moved the other china cabinet.  Yay, rocks!

Top: shells in the back left corner; naturally-formed crystal points and clusters
Middle: carved spheres and points, a jar of tumbled stones, and a fluorite plate
Bottom: mostly fluorite, with a couple of decorated rocks from the garden

Somewhere I have a box full of fossils, and another box containing my sulfurs, chalcanthite, and a few other things; but I have NO idea what I've done with the boxes.  I'm so organized.  (x_x)



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"New" Furniture For the Craft Room

Playing the sliding-tiles game with furniture in my house again:  

Problem: 

• a giant armoire full of towels and sheets in my bedroom, which was in my way, and was also inaccessible to my roommate when I was asleep in there
• a mostly-empty hall closet
• some slapdash shelves on a corner wall in my craft room, full of boxes of fabric and supplies, and  surrounded by piles of same on the floor

Solution: 

1. I removed the shelves in the craft room and put them up in the hall closet, and moved all the linens into the hall closet where they're accessible to everyone
2. I moved the armoire to that corner of the craft room, and re-organized the boxes and supplies into it

(I don't have pics of the hall closet - there's so little light in that hallway that I can't get a decent one.  It's basically just shelves in a closet, though). 

And then...

A friend and I swapped dressers over the weekend - my small one for her large one (she wanted to use two smaller dressers in her daughter's room instead of one huge one).  And so this came home with me on Saturday: 

Ikea HEMNES

Most of my fabric stash had been stored in sixteen of those white plastic Ikea (SNALIS, discontinued) boxes (like the two on top of this dresser in the pic), stacked in/on top of that long, low, black shelving unit under the window in the pic (it'll be re-homed soon).  The contents of all but those two boxes fit neatly into the four main drawers in this dresser, and I got all of my small scraps into the smaller drawers at the top.  

So, what do I do with fourteen 5-gal plastic boxes?  I'm not sure yet.  They'll probably end up holding craft supplies in the closet in this room, or full of small tools and things in the garage.  



Cross-posted from my SCA sewing blog, clothofstars.blogspot.com