Suprise!Living Room Rearrangement!

My BFF, in response: "*checks betting pool*  Okay, who had...April 3rd at 7pm?"  

So, yeah - I was a bit frustrated with the living room situation.  I mean, it was cute, it was divided into two discrete usable spaces...but it just wasn't working.  For one thing,  There were only *2* usable spaces: the computer area, and the living room/tv-watching area.   There was also a pretty little meditation corner that I wasn't using, like, ever, anymore; as well as a gigantic work table set up to do crafts and stuff on that was just crammed into one side of the office area.  There was also no room at all for any of our musical equipment, like, at all.

Also, if I haven't ever mentioned it before:  I'm not a talented hula-hooper, but I'm an avid hula-hooper, and I had NO space indoors in which to do it (the garage is too hot, and too cramped; and the backyard is way too visible to the neighbors - I'm also a self-conscious hooper).

So this week, I decided something:  I don't care if the room is "balanced" or follows somebody else's design rules.  I like the things in it, but I needed them to be arranged in a way that was useful to me, and comfortable to co-exist with.  And so last night, Kress and I did this:

Basically, I flip-flopped the entire room, which opened up a much larger work area, with lots of floor space to hoop in, AND gave us room to move the musical instruments back out into the main living area, which is where we use them, and we both love having them on display. :)

Kress Vanna-Whites the new tv area, still covered with junk that
got piled everywhere while we were moving things around

still the same size as the old area, too - no actual space lost here

and nothing but space gained on this side!  computer, work table, AND music

also much more open-feeling than the previous arrangement

details and fill-in not finished yet, but will be soon.

It's weird!  And it's totally AWESOME.  We've really needed a *big* music space, and I've really needed a *big* hoop (and dance!) space.  We both really, really like it.  It's odd and "unbalanced," but it works for what we need.  And it feels comfy and perfect. :)

It's not remotely done - there's art and rugs and more window stuff planned, as well as:

• the big work table is actually going to go live in the garage as soon as we get the garage rearranged and painted the way we want it;  there'll be a little reading nook/sitting area back there in the corner; and
• the mini-couch, visible on the right in that last photo, remains, for the time being, stranded all alone over there.  I've completely given up plans to make it fabulous...I hate it.  I hate the shape, it's too hard, the back's too short, etc.  I'm trying to decide whether to replace it with similarly-sized but comfortable and flexible extra seating; or if I want to set up my new keyboard*
• Third option: keyboard and dedicated music practice area by the window, alternate seating area where the mini-couch is? 

*  I bought the keyboard from a friend recently, but I haven't had a place to set it up and start working with it yet.  When I brought it home, Kress asked, "...do you play piano or keyboards? I didn't think you knew how."  

     "I don't," says me, "But you know how I love to collect musical instruments and then not play them!"  

LOL.  I'm really excited about it, though. :) 

.

Ambitious Much?

Ladies and germs, the garage as it exists in my imagination:

ooh, ahh. 

1.   More 2x4 shelves, like the ones I already have on the south wall (waaaay in the back there next to the door and weird rakebroom looking objects).   These shelves need to be a tiny bit deeper, as well as longer and taller, and with more space above and below, for large, bulky items.

2.  A fake-cabinet "slipcover" for the water filters and softener, to keep dust off.  Basically just an open-backed box to slide into place, with doors in front so I can access the control panels without having to move the box itself.

3.  Salvaged kitchen cabinets from somewhere?

4.  The tool bench (which is currently where #1 and 2 are in the sketch), underneath a

5.  Pegboard tool organizer!  OH YEAH.

6.  This would be the standing shelf that's in my bedroom closet right now, which I've had in the garage before, and it works great there.  As soon as I get off my a$z and hang the clothes bar and wall shelves in the closet that I've been meaning to put up, I can move the free-standing shelving unit back into the garage.

7.  The garden tool hanger rack, which is currently in the front of this same wall, where the toolbench needs to live.  This time I need to hang it higher, so I can hang extension cords underneath the shorter-handled tools.

8.  My bicycle, on one of those nifty pulley things that allow you to store your bike up out of the way, but still allows you to pull it down quickly and easily when you want it.

9.  The extension ladder deserves the same treatment.  In eight years, I've used it THREE times - and technically, *I* have only used it twice, and then I loaned it to my neighbor once, too.  But man, when you need an extension ladder, you need an extension ladder.  At the moment it's hung on the wall above my workbench, on some L-brackets.  I'd rather have it further up and out of the way.

10.  La piece de resistance:  a rolling island for the garage.  Extra work space!  Extra storage!  Easy to move around for various tasks, or out of the way for big projects!  :D  (Read: extra place to stack extraneous shit).

Hey, a girl can dream.

.

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.

.

Garden Plan Sketches!

I just love making these.  I finally figured out how to get my scanner to understand that they're drawings and not "documents" in plain black and white. What? I never claimed to be good with machines (well, power tools, but I digress).

Anyhow, you saw the garden "floorplans" last week that I made with Icovia Space Planner:

The following sketch is what you'd see if you were standing behind my Mulberry tree (the big green thing above) and the tree was invisible.  Small (2x2') raised garden beds in front of the bedroom windows, the patio shade thing I'm going to be putting up in the next few weeks, and the two (full-grown) Chastetrees - one of which I planted last weekend.

from the west, behind the M. tree.

 Looking at the yard from the east - which, technically the perspective here is from my next-door-neighbor's yard, and I certainly hope he can't see this much!  (That's what the shade, the vines on the side of the porch, and the Chastetrees are for).  The letters in the picture go to a key on the actual drawing, that I cut because my handwriting is atrocious.
A.  The existing patio area is 10x11'.  I need to remove a whole (2' wide) course of stones to make the space the size I want it to be for future plans.
B.  10' 4x4 posts, planted 18" deep in the ground, to support a canvas canopy that will swing over to the eaves of the house over the porch, to shade the patio.  Painted black.
C.   I'm thinking of putting a Bouganvillea by the eastern post (the west side already has my big Mexican Orchid Tree behind it).  It's one of my very favorite sub-trops, and my favorite color of Bouganvillea seems to have made a comback - it's all over the nurseries this season!  I'd better grab one before it's too late. Again.

from the east

There's a wee 6x4' section of lawn that sticks back behind the side of the porch, and is the only place in my yard with shade.  It's a bit of a pit of dead grass at the moment, but it's perfect for some fluffy, shade-loving things I don't normally have spots for.  The trellis out in the yard (near the Chastetree) is going to be hung on the corner of the fence (thank you, Ikea, for flat-packing this thing so that it hinges in the middle, making it REALLY versatile), and will become home to, I hope, a beautiful red "Niobe" Clematis.  Underneath will go some Lady's Mantle, Bird's Nest ferns, and maybe a Bleeding Heart. 

here's my little Chastetree!    ^                     

I have a LOT of digging to do this Fall.

.

Yes, have some!

My backyard, in pictures: 

YAY! 

Ok, not really. This is what it actually looks like.

But then there was a tree* planted, and under that did I get all muddy.

Yes, that's this same area.  Stupid drought. That's a big weed behind the trellis.

So now it looks like this.

Plans for the next couple of weeks include:  removing some of the stones from the patio surface, clearing the brush pile in the southwest corner, planting a second Vitex tree, erecting the shade/roof over the patio that you see in the very first picture, and raking up the dog poop from the yard (not pictured).




*Chaste Tree, aka Vitex agnus castus, the one I bought on Monday.  A Mediterranean/north African native; extremely hardy, evergreen, water- and pest-resistant, covered in purple flowers and bees in most seasons here. Not really a "tree", rather a large shrub, 15' max. 


(Also, the house:yard ratio is waaaaay off in the drawings - the house is basically just there to show where it IS; but in the picture it makes the yard look huge, and it's really only about 36x23').




.

The Planning Stages

Flowchart brought to you by yours truly.

Eureka?!

Work on the MiniCouch proceeds apace:  in addition to having fixed the arm, it is now [fully] cleaned and ready to be covered and footed.  Whee!  That'll happen next payday.

In related news, this little bit of Ikea that popped into my life a few weeks ago seems to have solved all my furniture placement problems in the living room.  I picked it up off the curb thinking I'd stash it in a corner or under a window and make it sort of nook-y, but, well...

made with Icovia Space Planner                 

This is my living room as it stands right now.  There's an office/music area at the "bottom" (North), a main seating area kind of central, and my little meditation corner under the windows at the "top" (South).

The seating in the seating area is complete bollocks.  Don't get me wrong, I love my little Ektorp couch that I re-covered last year; but aside from that, the only seating I have in there is that little green-and-black rattan chair (also refinished last year)...which isn't terrible comfortable or supportive--it's only there in case of extra butts.

Also, and I think I've mentioned this before, I hate that the seating area  is arranged parallel to the room itself.  It makes the whole thing seem more like an indoor football field.  It also has the effect of having nearly all the furniture in the entire room up against the walls, except for the couch floating out in the middle of nowhere.  Hate.



 But then...

Enter the Minicouch--that's it there on the left against the wall, where the tv console used to be.  The TV console is now perpendicular to that wall, backed by a turquoise fabric screen that separates the area from the office/music area.

The Ektorp sofa is still opposite the tv, now perpendicular to the wall, back to the windows, rendering the little meditation area back there a leeetle more private (awesome) - and I'm thinking of doing an art wall above the Minicouch, too.

Couple of floor cushions...and a rug? I have a rug.  There was a dog accident if you take my meaning, a couple of years ago--I took the rug outside and rinsed it off, but all the dye came out of it and it ended up looking like it'd been in a fire.  I still have it, and it's in great shape (it's one of those hand-woven cotton "chindi" rugs)...I was thinking maybe I could dye it again?  Can't hurt to try, right?





The first step will be to finish the Minicouch, and then to re-arrange the furniture.  I'm thinking the art might end up being my own art - I have a billion untouched and half-finished canvases I could whomp up into one big sectional thing, I think...hmmm...


.

Secret Beer & Other Plans

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (I think...?)  Kress and I have recently joined the SCA.  Very simply, for those of you who might not know what that is:  the folks who get dressed up in Medieval and Renaissance costumes and fight with sticks in the park.  This is why I'm so busy this week: I'm up to my ass in alligators with costuming and putting together gear for our first event, which is in two weeks!

The SCA involves camping, and camping involves, amongst other things, brightly-colored plastic coolers...which don't exactly add to the ambiance.  My friend Nan sews cushioned slipcovers to drop over hers, to turn a plastic cooler into an ottoman!  Camouflage and additional seating! Awesome.

So in addition to three full adult costumes, I'm sewing an "ottoman" disguise for my rectangular, rolling cooler this week, based on this pattern:

And since we're on the subject of me sewing things, here are a couple more ideas I'm planning to put into action as soon as I'm done with all this costume business:

That's:

1. another cooler cover, this one to turn a cube-cooler into a Moroccan pouf
2. a drop-cover for the old desk chair that I use at my sewing table, because it's FUGLY and scratched and stained and torn
3. a canvas "tent"  cover for the wire shelving units that I currently use to hold up my sewing table top (1), which will eventually be replaced with nice shelving, once I have the extra funds and the time to build them, paint them, and fill them with baskets (2)

2 and 3 actually use fabric that I already have in my "Storage Pit" which is what Kress has taken to calling my craft room closet, which he swears has an entrance to Fabric-Narnia hidden in the back behind the stack of spare pillows, LOL.

cube-cooler pouf:  yeah?

.

For My Closet...FML

Ugh.  My closet.

Remember this, from September?   Yeah, me either.

Actually, I did get rid of the step-shelf.  And I moved the heavy wood shelf in, on the main wall (under the mirror, which only exists in the sketch).  I stuffed it with baskets; but the baskets I had were WAY wrong for the shelf - wrong size, wrong style, wrong color, just...WRONG.  And a pain in the butt to use, too. 

However, since my last aquarium went belly-up and I no longer needed the little mini-dresser I had refinished to go under it, the mini-dresser got moved into the closet instead:

It works great - in the space, and as...wait for it...a dresser.  Imagine that.   It's a bit short, but I've got an idea for a little hutch-type thing to place on top of it (if I can find it in the garage).

My clothes are actually pretty well contained within the arrangement of shelves and rods I have now (especially since earlier this month I got rid of like half of them, finally).  The sketch above called for a small bar to the left of the dresser/mirror area for long coats and dresses, and a secondary dresser-type storage unit on the left below the shelves made of these modular cubes I have sitting around. But since linen-closet items are actually the biggest problem at the moment, I'm thinking of stacking the cubes vertically in the same space for more of a linen-cabinet type of thing for towels, sheets, rugs, etc. 

a similar tower o' cubes in my living room

If that ends up working, then the only thing missing will be the shelf running around the top of the room, and the mirror over the dresser.  Here's hoping!





(And I may or may not get around to this.  I've spent all week getting ready for a party tomorrow night, so that'll take up my entire day tomorrow; but usually Sunday after a party I like to unwind by doing something like this that just for me.  So we'll see). 

.

♫ Toniiiight, Toniiiiight...♪♪

Plans! Yay!  This is me trying to get psyched about the next thing I need to do in my sewing room!  It's totally not working!

You know what is working? My bedroom closet...which is completely NOT working, which is why I'm excited about the sewing room.  Confused yet?  Me, too.  There are two bookshelves in my sewing room which are crammed full of crap, and there are two newly-updated/painted shelves in the garage that need to be moved into the sewing room, and there's a stair-step-shelf in my closet which doesn't remotely work for my storage needs in there and needs to go live in the garage where I can use all the storage I can get, no matter what it looks like.  (And we're up to four rooms now, if you're counting).

The next step in the sewing room - and if I can just get past this one (going on two weeks now!) I'll be OVER it and can move on to the fun part - is to unload all the crap from the shelves in there, and replace them with the newly painted shelves. 

And then I can move one of the old shelves from the sewing room into my bedroom closet, which is the part I'm excited about.  Because, at the moment, my bedroom closet looks like this:

wikimedia commons

When what I want is for it to look like this:

arhzine.com

Just kidding.  (That's cool, though, isn't it?  Just a little bit goth-y. I like it). 

My master bedroom, bath, and closet are all done in the same color scheme and style (more or less, I've been tweaking recently)...but the closet "organization" is just awful.

Here's a mini-before (top left), along with the basic floor plan (lower left) and planned "after."    The shelf with the baskets on it is the one from the sewing room (which I originally built to hold shoes in the entryway, and which has also served time in the dining room as a junk magnet buffet).

Which brings us back to the sewing room, because that's where this shelf is right now, holding up some dangerously unstable cardboard boxes full of crap.  Yay, crap!

I tell you, if there was EVER motivation to go home and clean up my junk, it's this blog right here (which I'm enjoying thoroughly, but, YEESH).  Tonight: shelves!  Tomorrow: the world.


.

Sewing Room Plans & Wish List

My sewing/craft room needs...well...a bomb, actually.  UGH.   It's the Crap Repository of my house - you know, that room where everything gets stuck when you don't have time to deal with it, or to keep it out of sight when guests come over.  That room with the boxes and baskets full of junk you'll deal with "later" and never get around to.

I've been working at it in bits and pieces over the course of the past few days.  Mostly cleaning and re-organizing, throwing out old junk that couldn't be salvaged or re-used, and painting a couple of small shelving units to coordinate, until I can replace them with something nicer.

This is the mood board for the room.  The walls are grey (a different gray from the rest of the house, but, this room's wall color was actually my inspiration for the living room),  the cement floor is painted this soft, celery-sage green, as are the sliding closet doors.  The idea with the various patterns - botanical prints, damask- and toile-like prints, in greens and greys and black/white - is that it all coordinates, style-wise, but in a totally mismatched, fun kind of way. 

This is what I'd like the room to look like when it grows up: 

.

The long sewing table is already in place on the West wall (left), as is the tall corner shelf.  The wall unit with cubbies for storage is, as yet, a figment of my imagination - one day I'll build one or maybe buy an EXPEDIT from Ikea or something similar. 


On the South wall (bottom), I plan to one day build a large flip-up cutting-table that will fold out from the wall on a pair of gate-legs, and fold back down when I'm not using it so that I don't pile CRAP on top of it.   Place your bets now.  *eyeroll*




Other wish-list ideas for this room include:

Ikea's MALLA fabric storage boxes, for my closet and for the shelving in the room, for fabric, art, & craft supplies

Ikea's ALLAMALA canvas-and-wire storage baskets to hang in the entryway for quick-grab notebooks, sketchpads, magazine clippings, and idea books.

  This little ceramic doodad box from Target, by Dwell Studios, for...you know, doodads. (It's intended for bathroom doodads, but I can put any doodads into it that I want, tyvm). 

Lumber, for making shelves for the closet! 

Ikea's UNG DRILL picture frame, to make into a mirror, or possibly a little sewing/craft-related collage? 

Some sort of comfy little office-y swivel chair for my sewing desk (my chair is great, but it's old and falling apart) that I can re-cover in a green-white fabric to go with the room  (this one is Ikea's SKRUVSTA)








...But that's "someday."  For the time being, I'm working on stuff I already have - which includes, starting tonight, a chalkboard/corkbard over my sewing table, a "new" clock, a window treatment, and a couple of other bits and pieces that I'll be working on throughout the week.  "After" pictures starting tomorrow. 



.

The Best Part of Redecorating

...that would be the planning stages, in case you're wondering.  Don't get me wrong, the shopping and the execution are pretty freakin' awesome - but I'm a die-hard list-maker.  I write instructions for myself when I build things, I draw pictures for weeks, even months before I actually begin to work on a room, and I can't function without a to-do list to work from, most of the time.


Yeah, I'm a big dork.  But I'm an organized dork, so :P 

Dining Room Redesign, Part the First: The Table

After hemming and hawing and trying to figure out what to do with my dining room for a couple of years, I finally realized that the main problem was the table.   It was the Wexford table from The Roomstore, which you see here on the right (although mine wasn't counter-height, it was standard dining table height).


I had two of them, actually - the second was used for a while as a coffee table, after I'd taken the legs to Home Depot and had them cut them in half for me (this was years ago, before my adventures with Serious Power Tools began).  Both tables were 2x4' and open up to 4' square, with a built-in leaf that slides under the tabletop when not in use.  Pretty nifty.

And don't get me wrong, I loved my dining room table.  But it was WAY too big for the space that I have now, which is only about 10x11'.  Last week I sold both tables on Craigslist to make room - and money -  for a new one.

 The original plan was to build a copy of this one, which is the "Hemnes" side table from Ikea.  Clean and simple, with a nod to and twist on the traditional - and easy to make out of plywood.  I figured I'd double the thickness of the base pieces for stability, and enlarge the top (the original Ikea piece is only about 27" across). 






Paging through Craigslist ads, however, I managed to find a little round table that was perfect.  It's almost identical to this one (which is World Market's "Charlotte"), but it's black.  It's solid wood, 40" across, which fits my space better.  It's also practically brand-new, as the woman who sold it to me had never actually used it.  Best part?  Fifty bucks!






 

Part the Second:  The Plan

So where does this fit in?

This is what my dining room, up until this week, has looked like:

 
Made with Icovia's Space Planner, found on the website of Lane Furniture.  

I love playing with this thing. 

You can see here what that large, rectangular table was doing to the dining room space:  there's barely enough room to walk around it, to say nothing of actually seating people at it  Almost nothing else fits into the room except for my china hutch (the cabinet-y looking thing at the top next to the dog food bin). 

(Part of the reason the dining room is so small is that it isn't actually a dining room.  According to the people who built my house, this is supposed to be a "breakfast nook", and they intended for me to put my dining room table in my very long living room.  I've never liked that idea, and since I usually eat in the living room in front of a movie or with a craft project spread out on the coffee table, I decided to use the "breakfast nook" as a dining space, since it wouldn't get used much.  I use the "dining room" portion of my living room as an office).

Here it is with the round table I've just purchased - as well as another new addition that I plan to begin working on in the next few weeks: a window seat.  I haven't decided yet whether I'll build one in permanently, or if I'd rather just stick a pretty bench under the bay window.

This is a sketch I did a few weeks ago when I was just sure I'd be building the Ikea table and a full-on window seat.  Here you can see the idea for the rest of the bay window space - ultra-sheer curtains hung across the entire bay, making the bench a little secret place behind the room.  The curtains can be pulled back to use the bench as seating at the back of the dining room table.

I probably should have drawn several cats on the bench, since that's probably who will likely be sitting there more often than not.  Hee.

I'm not entirely sure what that big rectangular thing on the west (left) wall is - a mirror? Large piece of art? At the moment I have a pretty Indian-looking paisley scarf up there on a carved wooden tapestry hanger.  It may or may not stay. 

I'm not sure how quickly this will all take shape.  I'm busy preparing for a six-day camping trip that I'll be going on next week, so I'm certainly not working on it before then.  I have some tweaking to do with my dining room chairs and that big china cabinet; and then there's the window seat and sheer curtains to deal with.  I'll post photos as I go, though, so you can see the progress and final result.  :)