They All Rolled Over and One Fell Out

Seven years is a pretty good run for a bed.  Especially a wooden bed that you built yourself, when you'd never built more than a simple shelf before.  Sadly, my long-beloved bed finally gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and I've been sleeping at an angle ever since, due to the way in which it sort of half-collapsed.
Oops.

I'd been looking for the perfect metal bed as a replacement, and I really wanted the SVELVIK from Ikea.  However, (as with 90% of the things I lust after at Ikea), I waited too long and the SVELVIK had been discontinued by the time I showed up ready to buy one.
Oops.

Target, and the internet to the rescue!   It isn't exactly the SVELVIK, but it'll do nicely - and does.  This went together easily and relatively quickly.  It's nice and solid, and I like the finish on it.  Best of all, it's inexpensive - and it was even 30% off last week when I ordered it.

I've been playing with the bay box window in the bedroom, too:  more plants, fewer laundry baskets on the windowsill.

Bonus:
Ikea's RASKOG cart being a bicycle  workshop cart (with GLIS organizer box in the top).  It's not terribly organized yet;  I just have small things on top, medium-large things in the middle, and BIG things in the bottom (mostly the tarp I put down when I clean the bikes indoors).

Sorry about the weird photo filter. My phone did that and I couldn't be arsed to take a new pic at 6:30am.  :D

The To-Do Barrel

Since finishing the shelfy nook in the living room, I haven't done much around the house.  Truth be told, I have SO much to do that I'm not even sure what to do next.  My to-do list feels less like a list than it does a giant barrel full of tasks that I have to jump into in order to pick one.  And there are sharks in it. And piranhas. And bears. There are definitely bears in there, you guys.

However, the weather's been absolutely amazing, and Spring seems to be springing several weeks early this year.  So over the weekend I turned my back on my barrel of tasks and turned the unused garden beds in the front yard into actual gardens.  Wanna see? Click here. 

But what's next inside the house?  I basically just need to pick a room:

The Back Room
The 2-car garage this house was built with was turned into an enclosed room and a 1-car garage many, many years ago. The resulting room was home to children, roommates, couch-surfing friends, and, eventually, a semi-feral cat with no respect for the litter box, and just mounds and mounds of trash, full of mice and bugs and mold. BLEH. This room is currently the worst part about this house - but hey, fixer-upper, right?

This room needs cleaning, flooring replacement, repairs to the closet doors, repairs to the room door and trim, replacement of an electrical outlet and all the face plates on outlets and switches, repairs to the walls, prime & paint on all the walls, the ceiling, and the trim molding.  Fun! 

This room is high on the priority list because next week is Bulk Trash Pickup - I can get the last bits of junk out of here, and get the carpet out of the house.  Since it's going to be emptied anyway, I might as well get to renovating it. 



The Master Bathroom
This room is also high on the list, because we use it so often. There's a big walk-in shower with a bench and several sprays, which makes it the preferred human-washing space (and I also use it to wash the dogs).

It needs repairs to the grout and tile in the shower enclosure, repairs to the walls, prime and paint on all the walls, trim molding, doors, and ceiling, and the pendant lights over the vanity need to be seated correctly (they're loose at the ceiling).  Also, there are two walk-in closets in the bathroom, and neither one has a door.


The Craft Room
A.ka. master bedroom, turned into a joint craft space like we did in the old house.  Everything in here works pretty well, except the wall color, which is crime-scene red. It needs primer and paint, and the baseboards need to be finished the way I did in the living room (caulking in the nail holes, joints, and seam against the wall, and then painted), as well as paint on the trim molding and windowsills, new blinds, and curtains for the sliding glass doors that open out onto the back patio.


The Kitchen
I pretty much have carte-blanche to fix things and decorate/paint however I want in this house, but the kitchen cabinets are one of the few things my land-friend specifically asked me to do.  The cabinets themselves need to be stripped and painted, one cabinet door needs to be repaired, and they all need handles and/or knobs. 

Popcorn needs to be scraped off of the soffit above the upper cabinets, the walls and ceiling need to be painted, and all the baseboard molding needs to be finished out.  There's a ceiling fan in the breakfast nook that doesn't work - that'll need to be repaired or replaced, as well.  The light fixture in the room is a fluorescent fixture with a wooden frame and plastic "stained glass" decorative cover (1984, y'all. I actually kind of love it)  - the cover needs to be cleaned thoroughly, and 3 of the 4 fluorescent tubes are out and need to be replaced. The pendant light over the sink is loose at the ceiling, and needs to be seated properly.


And All the Rest
Specific rooms aside, pretty much all the rest of the baseboard trim in the house needs to be finished out, all the doors and door trim molding painted, kids' stickers removed from some doors and walls (my mother would have killed me for that!), and all the ceilings either dusted or just repainted.  Most of the electrical outlets in the house have paint on them, except for the few I've scraped clean while painting other rooms. 

*    *    *

Because of the timing with Bulk Day, I'll probably tackle the back room first - it makes sense to get started while it's empty, and get it done and out of the way.  I really don't want to. I like pretending that room doesn't exist.  On the upside, I do have a three-day weekend coming up, so I should have plenty of time to at least make a big dent in that room, if not finish it entirely. I'll let you all know how it goes. 

Bücher

Some of you will be horrified by this confession, but, when we moved in, we didn't organize the books. We just threw them onto any old shelf willy-nilly, just wherever they would fit.  CHAOS.  The house was still under construction, schedules were weird, the Shelfy Nook was still a hole in the wall.  You know how it is when you move into a place - no matter how well-laid your organizational plans, priorities shift on the fly. Plus, if you're doing any DIY in the process, there's always a good deal of Scope Creep to handle. 

Last weekend, once the Shelfy Nook was complete, the house underwent a weird transformation: suddenly the floors were covered in books, as if there had been some horrible library explosion.  It was terribly confusing for the one cat and one dog who absolutely abhor any environmental disruption, and a playground for everybody else.  My roommate is the resident bibliophile (I prefer e-readers, myself; though I do adore really old books), and she quickly took charge of the sorting and categorizing, handing armloads to me to shelve when she was done.

We are now officially surrounded by books - organized books. Whew! That only took three months.  See:

The aforementioned Shelfy Nook, on the west side of the living room.

A bookcase by the windows in the living room, on the east side. 

To the south, behind the primary seating area, is just about my favorite piece of furniture - also filled with books.  Here is where we put the nifty old stuff, and small collections/series.

On the north side of the room is the shelving unit that houses all the DVDs...and there are books there, too.  We're surrounded! (Which is okay by me). 

Two narrow shelves in the "dining room" (don't eat bikes, kids).  You'll see these again, soon - this room is one of the next items on my to-do list.

Yet another cabinet full of books, this one in the breakfast nook, full of cookbooks (Roommate Sylvan is also a fabulous vegan cook and pastry chef, and has even written a couple of cookbooks of her own). 

This is another room on my to-do list, by the way.  So much to do!

















Not shown: yet another shelf full of books in Sylvan's room, a couple of boxes of music books and costuming books in the craft room, and the few selections I keep in my room because I like looking at them (a boxed complete works of Jane Austen, and a set of tiny Yale Library Shakespeare study books bound in fabric, which I adore).


Everybody have a great weekend!