Category Archives: decor

10/1/10

the endless cycle

With the discouraging news about our foundation, I haven’t had much motivation to keep our house clean and decorated. I’ve noticed this is a vicious cycle. Because I don’t stay on top of housework, and I feel ashamed of my house. Because I feel ashamed, I get frustrated with the amount of money needed for major repairs. Because I’m frustrated with lack of money, I have no motivation to clean or decorate. And so on and so forth.

I know that the best way of stopping the cycle is to stay on top of housework, even when I don’t feel like it. There is a site called Habithacker which I discovered a little while ago. She has daily posts meant to inspire and encourage people to get into the habit of daily housework. All last month, I tuned in daily to the “Days 1-31” for nesting (home management). At first I did well, but fell off the bandwagon shortly thereafter.

Since it’s the first of the month again, I am determined to do better this time! The first day’s assignment is to “polish your place” – in my case, I decided my place is my kitchen sink. The kitchen is probably my least favorite room, after the upstairs bathroom, as far as layout and how it looks. So the least I can do, the dishes, will probably help with my perception of the kitchen. I’m hoping, anyways. :-)

Here is what my kitchen looks like right now. My goal is to either load the dishwasher or wash all the dishes before I go to bed tonight. Hopefully, I can keep that up. :-)

09/29/10

new look for the guest room

New bedspread

When we got our guest bed a year ago, I went to a local discount linen store to get curtains, bedskirt, bedspread, and pillow shams. I thought the bedspread especially was beautiful! I still think so. However, after a year it has *not* held up. The stitching in the quilt is coming undone, and raveling to the point of being impossible to fix. I’m disappointed, especially because this was a guest bed, and not something that was used with any frequency. (A lot of people think that my cats tore up the quilt with their claws, but I just wanted to mention that this isn’t true. Their claws have done their fair share of damage on things around our house, but this quilt isn’t one of them.)

I decided to get a new bedspread/quilt for the guest bed. Since the bedskirt and curtains are still fine, I wanted to match them. I like the look of a quilt because me using the room for my sewing projects. It kinda puts me in the mood.

I’m pretty happy with the new quilt. I feel like it has a fall feel, and looks as warm and inviting as the other quilt. I hope this one lasts much longer!

(Pictures of old quilt here.)

Guest room

09/24/10

a few baby-related changes…

The one negative thing about having a split level and a baby is the fact that there are two sets of stairs we need to protect. Savannah isn’t climbing up stairs yet, but we did have to go out and buy gates for the top of the stairs. For the top of stairs, it is recommended to have baby gates that mount on the wall (instead of the kind you can step over). After Savannah fell down the stairs and broke her leg, we realized that we needed to take care of it ASAP. So over the past few weeks we picked up two baby gates for our house.

For the stairway going down to the den…
Babygate

And at the top of the stairs by the bedrooms…
Babygate

So far they’re working out pretty well. I’m not a big fan of the one by the bedrooms, but it does its job. It’s just not very pretty. :-)

07/27/10

Savannah’s room, updated

I posted some pictures of Savannah’s bedroom a while back. It didn’t change too much from when we moved in, except for the paint. At the time, the only thing we kept in her room was a changing table and her clothes. Now, we have a crib and she sleeps in there. (We keep most of the toys in the playroom downstairs.) Also, I organized her clothes last January and never took a picture! So here it is finally. :-)

Savannah's room
Savannah’s room. I really, really want a glider so I can rock her! I have been scouring Craigslist but have not been very satisfied with the prices.

Changing table
The changing table & dresser of sorts

Closet
Savannah’s closet. In January I got that bookshelf and that has been PERFECT! I really like having it. I also got some rubbermaid containers for her clothes that she’s outgrown. I put all the “outgrown” stuff on the top shelf of the closet.

Crib
Savannah’s crib (Ebony is demonstrating where Savannah sleeps)

07/11/10

kitchen pantry

Our kitchen needs a definite facelift! I naively thought, way back a year ago, that we would use our $8,000 for that project. Ha, that’s funny to think about now! I think it will be at least 5 years before we’re able to put money into aesthetic things, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking and dreaming. I will have to detail my thoughts about the kitchen in a future post.

However, there is an issue that we’re going to have to address before 5 years. And that is the lack of a pantry. Currently, this is what our pantry looks like:

Our kitchen (after)

That’s the only open space we have in our kitchen. The previous owners had a table there, but we decided to use our baker’s rack as a pantry. We keep cookbooks on the top shelf, pantry items on the middle shelves, and pots on the bottom shelf. It works pretty well, but there are two problems.

The biggest problem is that it is sitting over the only HVAC vent in our kitchen. We have one of those plastic deflector shields to try and encourage the air to go out instead of up, but I don’t know how much it helps. I like that the baker’s rack is pretty open; hopefully that helps.

The baker’s rack would be fine except for the other problem. It is impossible to baby-proof an open shelving unit like that! So far we haven’t had to worry about that, but I know that won’t always be the case, and I’m in the process of trying to figure out what to do. I don’t want to be constantly cleaning up everything Savannah takes off the shelves while I’m trying to cook or wash dishes. So I’m in the process of finding something that can be closed, doesn’t block the air vent, and isn’t too expensive. I don’t want to put a lot of money (or effort) into something when we’re going to just redo the kitchen in 5 years.

Tonight we were walking through Ikea and I saw this cabinet. I thought it really met our needs. It is the same width as the baker’s rack, and just a few inches less than the depth of the fridge. It can totally be babyproofed, and I think would hold our pantry stuff really well. It also has legs and is raised off the ground, for the air vent. Paul doesn’t think it is raised high enough – he liked a different unit that I’ll talk about in a minute. The other negative is that it’s a little on the expensive side. I’m not saying it’s not worth the price, but it was more than I was hoping to spend. However, this is something that we’ll be using heavily for the next five or more years, and once we redo the kitchen and solve the pantry problem (which might incorporate this unit, who knows?), it can totally be repurposed to another area of the house.

There was another possible solution at Ikea that Paul liked better. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of it, but it’s basically a tall wall cabinet that is much less deep than the other one. This one would attach to the wall, and can be hung as high or low as we wanted. I didn’t like the look and feel as much, and it wouldn’t fit in as well with our current kitchen (not that that matters a ton). When I got home and measured the space, I think it might be too wide. So all this might be a moot point.

Anyways, I think we’ll see if Home Depot or Lowe’s have anything similar. Maybe we can find something that fits our needs that is less expensive. Besides, the one I want is sold out right now at our Ikea, so I have to wait anyways.

01/27/10

accomplishment

Originally posted at twentysixcats.com

I feel such a sense of accomplishment! Our house is disorganized at best, and I have found it hard to summon the energy to tackle the mess. (It’s so overwhelming!) Savannah’s bedroom was no exception – it had become a storeroom for all things baby related, to the point where I simply just found a space on the floor for her clean clothes. Part of the problem was that her wardrobe has grown considerably, and I didn’t have a good system for the new clothes so really all the sizes were mixed together. I had a shoebox I was using for her too-small outfits, and I’m sure you can imagine how that was overflowing. :-)

I had been trying to figure out what would be a good solution to the disorganization, and I finally decided some large plastic bins for storage and a bookcase for the closet would do the trick. We got both yesterday and tonight I spent several hours cleaning her room.

The biggest challenge was getting the clothes organized enough that I could easily see what was there, and that her current size was the easiest to grab. I had no conception of what exactly her wardrobe consisted of. For example, a few weeks ago I went out and bought two packages of 6 month size onesies. Then tonight I discovered a whole pile I didn’t know I had! Included in the pile was a set of 5 that are now too small. She never even wore them. :-(

With the help of the bookcase, the clothes are much more accessible now. I also hung up as many as I could, and arranged them in size order – smallest to largest. The bookcase also houses a shelf for her books and a shelf for her toys. Everything is much neater and more accessible now!

I’m so excited about how it all looks. I would take photographs but I’m not quite done. I still want to hang a few pictures, and I’d love to get the crib set up. (It’s in pieces right now.) We don’t have a mattress for it, which is why I haven’t set it up yet. I also am not sure what to do with the stuffed animals – perhaps a net thing hanging from the wall? Overall, I am really happy with the improvement!

Now if I can only accomplish the same in other rooms…