we are here we are here!

We are in our house!

We have approximately 2500 square feet. Most of the living space is on the upper floor - the living room, kitchen, and all the bedrooms and bathrooms. The master bedroom has its own bathroom - hooray! That seems kind of rare here in Connecticut because of all the old houses. This house was built I think in 1967 and is "newer," since a lot of homes were built about 100 years ago and a few even date back to the 1700s. The basement is really well-lit with a ton of windows so it doesn't feel like you're in a dungeon. The family room/play room/rec (wreck) room is downstairs, where ALL the toys reside! No more toys in my living room - hallelujah! Or in the bedrooms. There's also a very large storage room that includes the laundry area, and the garage is downstairs as well.

Our yard is huge - we have 3/4 of an acre. The side and the back property line are all trees - I stopped counting them when I hit 40 because I couldn't tell if I'd counted some of them already or not. Unfortunately, the groundcover growth under the trees gets really tall really fast and you can't play in it because of the bugs (ticks and slugs and tons of other things I've never seen). We're going to try to clear a lot of it out so we can string up the hammocks. There are bushes all around the house - azaleas, hydrangeas, rhododendrons, and some other kinds that I don't know.

We're on a corner in a really friendly neighborhood. Before we even moved in, we took a walk on a Sunday afternoon to check things out and some of the neighbors (who had already heard about us from the previous owners) came outside to meet us. We ended up talking with them for over an hour. They have a daughter who is between our oldest 2 girls, and they're already great friends. RG says that she is "fond of" MB. Too funny! And a number of other neighbors have come over to introduce themselves when they saw us outside.

We closed on Friday June 28 but continued to stay in our temporary place until Tuesday (July 2) when the moving company brought our belongings out of storage. So that was the date we actually moved into the house. We've of course been unpacking ever since and still have a long way to go. The thing that keeps going through my head is, "I can't believe we crammed all this stuff into 1000 square feet."

Don't worry. Pictures are coming. I have to do all the "before" shots for when I really start working on this place!

January "pretty projects"

I'd like to think I can work on sewing and crafts every single day for a month, and maybe I'll be able to later this year or at another phase of life. Right now, my daughters are not particularly cooperative with letting me work on things during the day so I have to sew late at night. Even that's a hit and miss because I have punk children who refuse to go to sleep until darn near midnight sometimes. So I'm going with doing something pretty for my house and life every week for this year. Hopefully I can finish something every week, but as long as I at least work on it, I'll be satisfied. So here's what happened in January.

Project 1: hook racks for behind the girls' bedroom door. They were scrap pieces of wood left from making their bunkbed 2 years ago. I painted them and got the little hooks at Walmart. I made others here for their coats, which are under the stairs. Mindy beat me for the first project done for the year because even though I had them painted, it took me awhile longer to get to the store for the hooks, and get them actually onto the wall. This is just one of them, but there are three.

Project 2: I went through ALL of the children's books and reorganized the whole bunch. There are hundreds. An entire box went to the recycle bin because it was random loose pages, torn up books, children's magazines that had been pulled all apart ... it was a mess. It's still a mess because the girls are constantly pulling books out and not putting them away, but at least it's less of a mess. All the trash has been cleared out - that alone made a big difference. It wasn't making something - it was organizing stuff we already have. But occasional organizing projects are necessary to keeping my house livable at all, if not more pretty.

Project 3: I started my quilting class and made a scallop banner thing to hang up over a window or doorway or something - this is also my January project for the 12 Months of Christmas because I made it out of Christmas fabric.

Weeks 4 and 5: Nada - we were out of town for a week for my mother-in-law's funeral, and the next week was spent unpacking and putting the house back together. Why does it take so long to get cleaned up from a trip? It was just unpacking suitcases, for pity's sake. Sheesh. Anyway, I need to rewind back to the of my quilting class (it's all online and self-paced so I can do that - hooray! because it's, um, over now) and I want to get back on track with that at least a little bit. It's a 5-week class with 3 projects per week - it's not expected that you do everything. You can choose. I'd like to at least try everything since I paid for all the lessons and patterns but it's going to take me the better part of the year rather than just a month. Some of the projects are pretty substantial and require quite a bit of time (making more than one full-sized quilt, if I'm reading it right), and I don't have days at a time to devote to sewing. I have a few minutes here and there.

And for my weekly project deal ... I will make up these 2 weeks of missed projects! I will! Maybe not in February because of being at the very end of the pregnancy, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Also - going through everything from someone's life was an major eye-opener on what to save and what not to save. For example, photos. If Nancy wasn't actually in a photo, we chucked it. We had no idea who these people were, and the photos had been sitting in a box for literally decades. I have no interest in hauling things like that around when we move, or leaving it to my children and grandchildren to say after I die, "Who is this person, and why did Mom have a photo of them?" If there's a reason for me to have someone's photo, I'm sure I can find something that has me in the shot with them, and I need to journal/ID everything now (before I forget myself) of why this person is/was significant to me. I did a big photo album sort and purge 2 years ago when my parents brought me all the stuff I'd had stashed in their storage room for 7 years, but I feel another one coming on.

simple storage

Not being able to breastfeed means having a bajillion formula containers around the house.  They are perfect for storage, so I don't complain too much.  Tape a strip of paper around them and they are even decent looking.  I've used wrapping paper and scrapbook paper and both work great with a little bit of double-sided tape.  What can go inside of these things is absolutely endless - toys, food, sewing bits, etc.  I'm using one for my headbands and hair things. 

Headbands on the outside, everything else (ribbons, bows, flowers, clips, etc.) on the inside.  While I was organizing my hair stuff, I took a small canning jar and put all my ponytail holders around it (wouldn't work with little ones), and all my bobby pins inside of it.  Much happier with this than anything before. 

mini coat racks

Adam was getting really tired of the girls' coats always being on the floor by the front door - we had just 4 hooks on our coat rack and were trying to pile more than 10 coats and sweaters up there (2 or more for each of us), plus scarves and a couple of bags. Not working. So we got some scrap wood from the bunkbed - a 1x6 about 12 inches long, one for each of the girls.

I had paint samples from Home Depot for the bunkbed - the Glidden brand paint has little bottles of already-mixed colors and when you take the lid off, there's a little brush attached to the bottom of the lid. PERFECT for small projects like this! I didn't use primer so I put 3 coats on instead of 2. SM and RG were both very excited to paint their own coat racks - it took just a few minutes one afternoon, sitting on the front porch. I sanded them, and the girls painted the first coat. SM decided they should all be decorated with hearts, so I mixed things up a little with the patterns. I used a tiny crafting brush for the hearts. I got the hooks at Walmart, and voila! Coat racks for the girls!

I helped RG get all the strokes in the same direction.

But SM had to do it BY HERSELF!!

Signature colors: SM - pink, JE - yellow, RG - purple. The paint colors: sexy pink, freshcut honeydew, violet shimmer, and the hearts in pink lemonade.

the coat cubby under the stairs

binge and PURGE

13 years from when I graduated from high school to when I met Adam - the entire decade of my 20s plus a little extra. I cannot believe how many pictures I shot, and printed, and put in albums in those 13 years. I have 14 albums (I think), not including the hundreds of pictures in binder photo sleeves from my mission. I apparently saved Every. Single. Picture. that I took in those 13 years, including ones that are very dark, very distant and you can barely see the faces in them, out of focus ... you name it, it's in there. I'm dumbfounded at the amount of money all of this represents - 6 bucks for a roll of film, $8-12 for developing (depending on if I used 1-hour printing) ... and that was just for 24 shots. I have thousands of pictures.

And now I'm going to throw an awful lot of them in the recycle bin.

I recently found the Small Notebook blog, which I love. And it had these two posts this past week about dealing with a plethora of pictures, both digital and print.

Essential Tool to Organize Your Digital Photos
What to do with Boxes of Photos

And those posts got me brave enough to crack open the boxes that have been sitting under the stairs since my parents were here in May. One album from 1999-2000 was dated for a 9-month span and had over 500 pictures in it. Just that ONE album!!! Having the band Colors come to Oregon was really fun and a key moment in my life because it affected how I thought about myself ... but I don't need 50 pictures of that weekend. Really, I don't. A dozen will be just fine.

Sooooo ... I'm tackling the photo albums. I should take a picture of the pile of albums before I get too far into this project (I've gone through 2 of them), and then another of how many albums I have left when I get done rearranging everything. And a shot (which I will not print and stick in an album) of the pile of pictures that is getting dumped. So far, I'm just stacking them off to the side for the fun of seeing (and counting - about 250 so far) how many I'm getting rid of. Then I let SM attack them with her little scissors to cut me out of some of the shots to practice her cutting.

I'm doing pretty well at keeping the digital photos under control and I rarely print anything anymore (much to Adam's annoyance - the picture he has in his office of RG is when she was 18 months old and she's 3 now). But whoa. These boxes of albums. Crazy.

To be honest, this purging stems in part from this past spring, when I helped clean the house of an elderly couple when the husband died. The children all live out West in Idaho and Utah, and took the wife to live with one of them. Someone came out here and got their personal paperwork like geneology and journals and things like that, and the rest of the house was just left as is. The family asked someone in the ward to clean it out, dispose of everything, and get it ready to sell. I don't know what all happened with it because Jenna was born a couple of weeks later ... but I cleaned out ONE bathroom with FIVE full-size garbage bags. It was ... indescribable. And not in a good way.

So with my albums, I'm thinking - "What are my kids going to want to see when I'm dead? And what do I really truly want to haul all around the country as we move over the next 20-30 years?" And the answer is - Not nearly this much.

And now I will go through another album.

inventory

First of all, April - where's a picture of the headboard? The nightstand looks great!

Mindy - yes, rearranging and organizing your spice rack is a worthy post. Very creative of you to use a cereal box and scrapbook paper! Even more creative than using scrap wood and a power saw, if you ask me.

And speaking of organization, I've been having some related entertainment at this end of the pipeline. When my parents came to Mississippi for Jenna's baby blessing, they brought all of my stuff that had been sitting in their storage room for the past 7 years. (For the first time in 6 years of marriage, all of our stuff is in our own house instead of scattered about the country in various storage rooms.) I thought it was mostly books, and it was ... if you count 4 large boxes of just scrapbooks and photo albums. There were a bunch of knick-knacks like my travel souvenirs (my boomerang from Australia, for example) and a number of things that I'd forgotten about, as well as my collection of picture frames and carousel horses. I need more shelves before I can even unpack a lot of it, so I'm back to boxes stashed in corners. *sigh* I hate having our bedroom as a landfill, but most things have to get stashed there so Summer and Marnie stay out of it.

I also had:

~ a 2-inch binder full of just wedding announcements. That's it. I don't even remember a lot of these people. I'll pull out a few of them, like if I introduced the couple and/or was in the wedding. But the rest are getting dumped.
~3 or 4 t-shirts with signatures all over them. Again, don't remember anyone specific. Those will be painting shirts for Summer and Marnie now, until they're completely thrashed and then they'll get tossed.
~ beat-up ribbons and silk flowers from corsages from ... somebody's weddings. And maybe senior prom? I think? Gone. I have pictures.
~ the little black velvet boxes that Adam's and my wedding rings came in. Really?

What on earth was I thinking with saving some of this stuff? At least I didn't still have a 6-inch stack of newspaper clippings of the 1991-92 Portland Trail Blazers. I did find that in my stash when I got home from my mission. I went through it, remembered games that Eric and I spent screaming at the TV, laughed, and threw it all away.

Moral of the story - I'm still a packrat but I'm definitely learning to purge.

spice shelves

I'd been wanting to do this for a while, and an enrichment activity at church was the final push in the right direction. We have a small cupboard above the stove the holds all our spices. And we have a fair amount of spices. It's always difficult to find what we're looking for up there, so I figured some little shelves were needed. If this were any other crafty blog, I'd be expected to whip out some scrap wood, my power saw, and a few coats of paint. But what I did was fast, easy, free, and only used a pair of scissors, packing tape, and a cereal box. That's worthy of this blog, right?

BEFORE

AFTER

I was planning on doing it slightly different than it appears, but Aaron had to add his two cents and reinforce and all that manly stuff. It's mainly his spices, so I guess that's alright. I also rearranged my living room and reorganized my linen closet/bathroom storage.