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the great clean up

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A gift of rubber gloves from a concerned friend

Now that my daughter has been shipped off to college, I have begun the dirty job of cleaning up her room.

And it is a dirty job!

Gross, in fact.

My daughter is not the cleanest of people and I gave up on fighting that fight a couple of years ago, knowing that eventually she would be going to college and I would have the opportunity to scour her room!

In fact, last month when I took the kids to the dentist, I was telling the hygienists, Christa and Ginger, both of whom I love, about the tough task ahead of me. Christa, who has a younger teen and can relate to giving up the fight, gave me the rubber gloves pictured above, to help keep me clean and healthy!

As you can see, I’m going to need all of the protection I can find!

The view from the door

This was after she spent a lot of time “cleaning up”…

A table ruined with nail polish and who knows what else…

Gross.

Found at the foot of her bed…

…a stale Diet Coke, a washcloth, and a scientific calculator – just in case she got thirsty, needed to wash up, or do some math in the middle of the night.

There’s a lot to work on, so I’m going to take it slowly. However, all of the health department violations have already been addressed!

Wish me luck as I don the rubber gloves!

Updates of my progress to come…

motivation

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Motivation.  Or lack thereof.

Unmade bed. Laundry to be done. Floor needs vacuuming. Dishes in the sink. Projects sit curing.

Sometimes I suffer from lack of motivation.

Blame it on a demanding full-time job and being a single mom.  Or on a collection of health issues that result in lingering chronic fatigue. Or that often I just need to sit and do nothing to recharge my creativity.  Or all of the above.

Whatever the cause or collection of causes, I’ve grown comfortable with it.  It’s part of me and who I am. That’s not to say that I don’t envy people who seem to have a much higher energy level than me, because I do.  But at the end of the day, I have a nice life and plenty to be thankful for and so I’ve decided to get real with myself and recognize that I’ve got a lot on my plate and this is my pace.

So how to do I get anything done?

A couple of years back, I worked with a personal growth coach who encouraged me to get rid of my to-do lists. Sounds counter intuitive to get rid of lists of things to do when one wants or needs to do more or gain some direction in life. However, his theory was that a to-do list self-imposes a lot of unnecessary pressure and that the things that I feel are important will automatically rise to the top and will be the things that I choose to do. So I’ve dumped the to-do lists and let things happen as I feel them.

I also do a lot of project start and stop.  I don’t always just push through a project until completion. Probably not the most effective way to work, but the way I see it is that I work effectively and efficiently all day at my day job.  In my creative time, I want to feel it…I want to do what moves me, and so I do. Not always efficient, not always logical, but always inspired.

Inspired.

Now that’s motivating!

abducted by zombies?

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My daughter at the scene of the latest zombie outbreak in our area

Even though it may seem like it, since I’ve been gone for so long, no, I haven’t been abducted by zombies.

It’s been a busy summer, both with work and getting my daughter packed up and off to college.  All consuming, in fact. So much so that I haven’t been doing much around the house, except laying around in utter exhaustion when I have a few free moments.

Now my daughter is moved into her dorm at college and I’m finding more time for projects again.  At least time for thinking about projects.

The dorm room experience was a great reminder of how little each of us really needs to get along. Just a small space with some personal mementos and other daily necessities is plenty to get us through the day. Not saying I want to move back into the dorms, but it was definitely food for thought about how many possessions we really need and prompted me to reconsider my own version of minimalism again.

I have started the much anticipated cleaning and sanitizing of my daughter’s room, now that she’s gone.  Began that project today, but didn’t get as far as I had anticipated.  This is going to be a multi-weekend undertaking. Eventually, I will provide pics.  Even before pics.  Now that’s blogging audacity!

If you’re wondering about the Zombie Outbreak pic, the weekend before my daughter went off to school, we were driving around running errands as we prepped for this life-changing adventure called college.

Suddenly my daughter started shouting that there was a zombie construction sign and that I had to turn around. I promptly turned around, but was thinking that someone tagged a sign with graffiti, no big deal, right? Imagine my amazement when we saw an actual lit construction site sign, right next to a church and an old cemetery, that said “ZOMBIE OUTBREAK”.

We couldn’t get over it and, of course, I immediately pulled over for a photo shoot! Whoever pulled this little act of rebellion made our entire weekend!

curing

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If you’ve read about more than a couple of my projects, you’ve probably noticed that just about every project involves an important process that I lovingly refer to as “curing”.

What is curing, you may ask?

Perhaps some of you are familiar with this tried and true practice. It’s when you bring home a fabulous flea market or dumpster diving find and let it “cure” in your garage or basement for weeks, months, or possibly even years.

(OK, let’s be honest, it’s really a function of procrastination, but doesn’t curing sound so much better?)

Do you let projects “cure”? What was your longest curing time?  I’ll fess up…I’ve got a project in my garage that’s probably been there for 4 years.  Hopefully it’s almost fully cured. Never can tell.

vintage gym baskets

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A while back I bought 3 vintage gym baskets from EveryEskimo a seller on Etsy, who has great vintage treasures.

I’ve always liked the cool look of vintage gym baskets, even though I wasn’t much of an athlete back in school…I class-clowned my way through gym class!

They weren’t particularly inexpensive – in fact they were costly – but I was very attached to these because they were from Republic Steel in Canton, Ohio.

I come from a long line of steelworkers, several of whom worked for Republic Steel in the Massillon-Canton area, and I didn’t know if I’d ever come across gym baskets with a personal connection again, so I sprang for them.

This project cured for at least a year, but I knew what I wanted to do with these the whole time.  My goal was to hang these in the kids’ bathroom to store towels & toilet paper.

So I drilled a couple of holes in my newly painted bathroom wall…a risk for sure, just in case this project didn’t work as planned, since I was ruining a perfectly painted wall. (In case you’re not familiar with various literary devices, this, my friends, is foreshadowing.)

Apparently there are absolutely no studs in my bathroom wall, or at least none where I needed them, so I used anchors to attach the screws and washers that would attach the basket to the wall.

FAIL.

Every time I’d tighten the screw close enough to hold the basket to the wall, the anchor would pull out from the wall. Plus, if I left enough room between the baskets to actually reach in & get the towels or TP out of the basket, the top basket would be at average adult eye level.  Perfect for hitting heads and knocking already not secured baskets out of the wall.

PROJECT FAIL.

Yeah, so that was a disappointment after curing and planning for a solid year.

Back to the drawing board.  I patched the newly painted wall (so sad) and I brainstormed.

Since the baskets are just shy of 12″ x 12″, I realized that what I needed was a stackable cube-type system, and I could use the baskets as the drawers.  So I ran out to Target and bought this ClosetMaid 3-shelf stackable organizer…

I put it together & voila!  A viable solution…

It’s not an ideal solution for a couple of reasons, but it will do the trick for now.  First, the middle shelves are adjustable, so they move when I pull the drawers out.  And the baskets fit pretty tightly and will eventually mark up the white laminate.  But for $20, I solved the problem and got the vintage gym baskets out of curing mode and into action.

Maybe someday I’ll go all Ana White on you guys and make my own cube shelving system.  But until then, this works.

(Keeping it real with the toilet brush in the pic!)

Showing off at Funky Junk Interiors Saturday Night Special and Remodelaholic link parties and…


and…

score!

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Remember the chandelier that I bought on Craigslist a couple of weeks ago?

You know, the one that’s still curing in my garage waiting for a paint job, the one I thought I might have paid too much for at $30?

This one…

Well, imagine my surprise when I was perusing the Ballard Designs catalog and saw one that looked very similar to the one curing in my garage!

Page 36 in the current catalog for those of you who want to follow along by hard copy.  Yeah, that’s right.  It looks very similar to the 6-arm Talia chandelier with a suggested retail price of 179 clams!  In fact it looks sturdier with slightly nicer scrollwork. And I thought I might have overpaid!  Ha!  Total score!

things i hate

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Actually, I don’t spend much time at all hating anything or anyone, so this is more along the lines of really hot decorating trends that I’m not particularly fond of, but what kind of headline would that make?!

There are two trends that I find particularly irritating, but that are on fire in magazines and amongst bloggers – the chevron pattern…

and the pouf…

First, let me say this about the chevron.  To me, even in small doses, it’s too busy.  Sorry, I just must not be cool enough for the chevron pattern. Or perhaps it’s that I get headaches too easily from patterns like the chevron. Or maybe it’s the shabby chic in me coming out. I just don’t like the internet-beloved chevron.

Next, the pouf.

Come on…how can you even take the pouf seriously with a name like that?  Sounds more like a brand of tissues than a piece of furniture.  I can’t even get myself to like the cool silver Nate Berkus pouf. OK, maybe a little.

Now, this is not to say that at some point in the future you won’t see me placing either of these poor, hate-listed items in my home.  Especially since my overarching karmic lesson in life seems to be to say “I’d never…[fill in the blank],” and of course I end up doing it.  Just wanted to float that disclaimer out with my hate list.

Any trends irritating you today?

the capiz! saga continues

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Recently, I became infatuated with these from West Elm…

…but not so much with the price tag, which was $14.99 per strand.  Almost as if West Elm heard my decorating prayers, they’ve now lowered the price to $9.99 per strand.  But that would still cost me $60 for the 6 strands I would need.  Sixty clams that I don’t really have for capiz!

Somewhat coincidentally, this past weekend we ended up going to the Easton Mall to meet my daughter’s new college roommate, and a great time was had by all.  Plus I happened to spy a West Elm, so I thought I’d swing by to see if they had the capiz! strands.

While they didn’t have the exact capiz! strands that I was looking for, they had several different capiz chandeliers, all of which were gorgeous! And extremely thin and delicate. Super thin and very delicate.  Probably too super thin and delicate to withstand 2 dogs, 1 cat, my 2 kids, my sister’s 3 kids, and any assorted other friends and relatives.

The moral of the story is, don’t just think about the beauty of a particular project, but also the practicality.

Usually I’m pretty good about factoring in practicality, but every now and then we all get blinded by beauty.  And further blinded by a second reduction in price.

Bottom line, good thing I didn’t spend money I didn’t have on this particular project, because it just wouldn’t have worked.

But I still love capiz!

lookee what i found!

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Lookee what I found on Craigslist for 30 clams!

 

A beautiful chandelier that I’m going to paint and put in my bedroom.  (That is after it “cures” for a while in my garage with my other projects-in-waiting.)

Can’t decide…white, black or other?

Don’t want it to be too shabby chic.  We’ll see…

Edited to add: My friend Claire says silver.  BRILLIANT!  Silver shall be.  (After adequate curing time, of course.)