Another Home Update

This one is probably even less interesting to anyone else, but I have to brag a little and I don't think I've done it yet.

Our little house is on the lot backwards, so instead of walking into the living room, guests have no choice but to enter at our laundry room. This is not ideal, but it's nothing we're able to control right now.

Initially, the laundry room was two side-by-side machines and a single open shelf -- which collected a bunch of our stuff, but was disorganized, ugly, and just a mess to welcome people.

Before:

Ugh. I do not miss that look.

For a few months, we lived with a temporary fix that in retrospect wasn't too much better...

Yeah. We just covered it with a curtain. Okay, it was a little less messy to walk into... but it still wasn't good.

After a few months of hunting, we finally turned up some stacking machines in our price range (thank you craigslist) and did a machine swap. This gave us basically half the laundry room for machines, and half for a new storage cabinet.

After/Now:

My amazing father built this storage unit from one of my rough sketches and it is perfect. The three upper cabinets each are just large enough for a laundry bin (one for baby stuff, one for towels, one for our clothes), with room to store things on one side as well as behind the baskets. There table portion you can see just at the bottom of the picture is on glides and actually rolls back into the cabinet when we're not using it for folding or stain treating. Under that is a big cubby that holds the litter box and a trash can.

(True, entering the house to a litter box isn't the nicest feeling either -- but this means we were able to get a dining table, so for us the trade off is worth it. It also means we clean it more regularly, which I'm sure the cat is appreciating too.)

I'm in love with the storage unit -- and I'm managing to fold the laundry directly from the dryer, so no more massive piles of clean laundry just waiting for attention. This has been a complete change in how we do laundry, but it is such an improvement. Thanks Dad!

Later
Having lived with this a few more months, I'm even more in love with it. The clean laundry isn't getting folded quite as quickly as it should be, but this still keeps us organized, and gives a central place for keeping clean spit rags and swaddle blankets for the babe. The curtain is still balled up at the top of the shelves -- only because I haven't had the time to take it away. There is just enough room between the machines and the shelving unit to store our air drying rack -- on the rare times when we put it away; these days it spends most of the time outside drying diapers! 

I thought I was making the laundry room better for the sake of our entryway looking better, but now that I'm doing 2+ loads of laundry a day, I realize that I did it for me. Fortunately, it worked out for both looks and functionality. Woohoo! 

Some House / Nursery Updates

I think it's been a while since I've posted anything about the changes we've been making around the house... and since I'm still not up to basting that panda quilt, I guess this is about all I've got to share for the moment!

Master Bedroom Changing Area:

Finding frames for these two pieces of art (okay, a piece of art and a puzzle) was a bigger issue than it should have been -- and we wound up going with things that don't quite fit because we didn't want to bother going custom -- but we've finally got the changing area set up finalized. I'm sure this will change somewhat as we actually use it, and at some point it'll move out of our bedroom, but for the moment, one more thing crossed off the list!

The art, Purrmaids print by ArtbyVW via etsy, is something I bought pre-pregnancy. So whether it's for me or the baby is still up for debate, but I'm still so happy to finally have it up on the walls. It reminds me of my favorite kids' book, The Color Kittens -- which I'd always hoped to use as inspiration for a nursery back when I thought I would have lots of time and space and energy to make one work! -- and the print just makes me happy every time I see it. The puzzle -- which I couldn't get a great shot of thanks to all the glare pouring in from our bedroom window -- is a Ravensburger puzzle called the College of Magical Knowledge which was a gift to my husband. We knew we wanted to assemble it and hang it in the nursery, but for the moment, it looks pretty good over the changing table.

My homemade mobile -- which has not held up to this spring and summer's massive humidity uptake -- is looking a little wilted from the side, but the important view still seems to be working:

I've read that high contrast simple shapes will be interesting for the first few months, so for starters, we're trying this. I figure the height needs adjusted, but again, that'll happen once we're actually using the space.

The two open shelves are actually vertical planters we're stacking diapers in... but I think they work -- and they aren't too heavy, good news for both our walls and any future incidents! Hidden just over Momo's head is the very first thing we intentionally bought for the baby, about the time we decided we would try going on this adventure:

A rather rustic looking winged pig lamp. It's sort of our way of acknowledging my old answer of 'when pigs fly.' It's another thing that might never make it to the actual nursery, but it makes me laugh -- and these days, laughter is pretty important.

Trying to Organize

We've been rearranging the house again. It's not a process I enjoy, although usually the outcome is worth the effort. This time, I'm less certain -- I'm losing my sewing room and moving into a bit of the living room -- but I suppose it'll be worth it in the end to have an actual space for the baby instead of just a bit of floor space in our room... I just need a few days to adjust, and mourn the loss of my own personal space. I love my husband very much, but we have some very different interests and being within three feet of his 'Walking Dead' marathon is pushing my patience -- even with his headphones on. I'm going to try though.

Rearranging the house usually calls for some reorganizing. I've refolded my stash of fabrics and changed things up a little -- though they are nowhere near as neat as the perfectly organized shelves I drool over on pinterest! It's not much of a change, but I think it looks slightly better, and hopefully it's a little easier to access.

The real change has been in my scrap storage areas. Yes plural. Because I am a scrap-a-holic and I keep every tiny little piece I can possibly imagine using. It's a problem, but one I'm not really taking an issue with yet.

I picked up some photo keeper cases from Target, a larger plastic bin with six photo sized plastic bins inside. Yes, I know, real quilters avoid plastic, but in this house I've got to do what I can to combat the dust and cat hair, so plastic it is. Three of the little bins have tint to them (blue, green, and orange) while three are perfectly clear. This seemed as good a sign as any on how to organize my scraps by color instead of size like I have been doing.

The little clasps on the small bins aren't perfect -- one out of the 12 is a little faulty -- but otherwise this seems like a perfect way to keep them sorted.

I wound up with two bins each for blues and greens, one very full of brown, one that is split between red/pink/purple, then one each for orange, yellow, white, black, grey, and anything so colorful it didn't fit anywhere else. This cleared up my previous storage system to become a home for orphaned blocks, flannel scraps, and itty bitty pieces that should probably be chucked (smaller than 1 inch in all directions). One large bin for big scraps, fat quarters, and leftover bits of binding, with a second large bin for abandoned projects I haven't figured out what to do with. Then one basket for selvages and a plastic-ware bin with a lid (liberated from the kitchen) for traveling -- bringing scraps to or from quilt group. It seems like a lot, but I could use one more of the large bins for scraps of minky/cuddle fabric. Either that or I need a bit of an intervention!

It's still a long ways from perfectly organized, but it is a step in the right direction. Organizing by color was inspiring and has my fingers itching for a new project -- even though I know I have things to do instead -- but most importantly, going through all but the littlest of my scraps forced me to think about whether something was likely to get used, a weird fabric, ugly, or any of a number of other flaws. I was surprised at how much fabric I parted with, but I am feeling the pressure to start using some of them -- especially blues, greens, and browns.

One of my initial quilting goals was to make a ticker tape quilt from my scraps -- probably in the raw edge quilt-as-you-go style -- and it seems like I may be approaching a time to start getting more serious about that. I'm both excited and nervous about the prospect.

But other projects first. Other projects first.

Probably.

Almost a New Room

I've been thinking about rearranging my office / sewing space for a long time. I don't think of myself as the kind of person who needs to rearrange the house every few months, but things need to find their right place before they can settle in and stay that way for ages. My office space has just never found that order.

I'm still not sure it has, but it is different...

With the help of my patient husband, we flipped the big desk units from the longer wall to the shorter wall. The gain was floor space -- with the sewing desk on one edge instead of in the center of the room, things feel larger even if they really aren't. The loss? Well, I'd say the biggest issue is that I now spend most of my time facing away from the window (which is next to the ocean painting). Before I could at least see the window if I was sewing (though it required about a half-rotation if I was at the computer), now it's a half-rotation from the sewing station and a quarter from the desk, but it feels farther than that. It also seems a little creepy to have the big dark window just over my right shoulder at night -- but I'll probably adjust to that.

My hope had been to set things up with the sewing station on the far side and the file cabinets on the near side, but that is backwards for my sewing machine and I didn't want to be fighting fabric into the desk's cubby when I could turn things as they are now and have the extra fabric drape off the desk into open space.

There's enough room before the corner for a little bit of storage space. Right now I've got a lamp there, but I think I'll end up moving that and putting my plastic drawers of flannel and minky fabric in the opening instead. That should help open the 'entry' area -- and mean no more moving things around before I can drop my over the door ironing board!

I'm still not sure this is the way things belong, but I'm going to take some time to adjust to the new-ish space. I am really enjoying the new sewing set up, and the more open floor space, it's more the computer area that just doesn't feel right yet. Moving the lamp to the darker side of the room should help a little too.

Oh -- and, one surprise gain in the process is that I now have a space that might be workable as a small design wall. I'm not sure that's something I need -- I might use it for basting small projects instead -- or there's a chance I'll find some more art to fill the space instead -- but I'm excited about the possibilities. In a house like this one -- with ugly walls I have coated in pictures and art -- a bare bit of wall is a rarity and I want to make sure I use this one to it's full potential!

Spring Cleaning Plus Plus

I'm holding nothing back today. It's not going to be gory or gross; I'm just a little embarrassed to share these very unedited and uncropped photos of how we've been living...

Long story short - we're coming up on our fourth year of living in what was supposed to be a very temporary place. The goal was always to stay here a year or two, get some savings, then get a bigger place. Well, despite over two years of chasing after bigger places - from buying a house, to moving a bigger place in here, to building, to getting a giant metal dome and building a house inside it somehow - we're realistically no closer to getting out of here than we were two years ago. Sure, we've got some paperwork filled out, we have a Realtor, and we're in talks with a builder - but none of those steps feel like progress. And every one of those steps has been painfully difficult and fraught with what feels like a hundred things to stub our toes on.

Earlier this week we ran face first into yet another of those stumbling blocks - and I just couldn't take it any more. Nothing seeks to be going the right way for us to get out of here, and I'm tired of living such a temporary-don't-toss-that-we-might-need-it-when-we-move-don't-decorate-we-won't-be-here-long-just-live-with-toilets-that-require-opening-the-tank-to-flush-because-fixing-them-is-out-of-the-question-after-three-failed-attempts-and-you-know-the-second-we-install-working-ones-we'll-get-word-we're-able-to-move-life. While I desperately want to pop the oh-so-hated seam covers off the walls (if you've been in an older modular/trailer, you probably know what I'm talking about), cover every inch of this hideous faux-wallpaper in primer, then drown the walls in paint colors I like -- I settled for going on a major purge of the house.

Do I love this? Is it sentimental? Is it valuable? Is it something I've used in the last 4 months? If none of the above, it pretty much went out the window. I can't say the house is down to only the things I love most or the most useful things, but there is a whole lot less being stored in precious inches of extra space just in case we need it down the road. I might regret being so harsh if we ever do move, but unless miracles happen, that'll be so far down the road I just can't live for that day any more.

Ready for the bad and the ugly? I can't promise there's much 'good' - but what's happening now is certainly better, even if it is still 'in progress' and a long ways from either an 'after' or a 'done.'

Here's the office/sewing room/library before.

Looks messy and cramped? Yeah, it was. We each had 32 inches for our chairs at our desks, and I had another 32 x 30 space for my chair when I was at the sewing table - but that was it for free space. We basically had a walkway through the room to the bathroom and desks, but every other inch was filled with furniture. Since my fabric stash didn't all fit on the black baker's rack right inside the door, I had stacks of projects on every possible surface (except Greg's desk and chair).

Now:

Obviously the rug needs a vacuum (what's new) but look at how much space between the back of my sewing desk (left edge of the first picture with the denim sewing machine cover on it) and Greg's dresser (which doesn't fit in our bedroom no matter what we do). We've gone from 32 inches or less there to 60 inches. It is only 44 between the dresser and the bookcase - at the lower left edge of the same picture, but still, it feels like way more room! The black baker's rack went to another room, which freed up space for the dresser on that wall. The most exciting change of all though was taking the two big bookcases out and bringing in the green hutch for all my fabrics and projects.

How much better is that!?

Most of my stash of cotton/quilting fabrics fits on the top shelf and a half - though minky, bolts, and my box of fabric from my grandmother and great-grandmother (mostly fashion polyester, but I'm not willing to part with it) are in other places. Almost the entire bottom shelf is dedicated to projects I'm currently working on, with a little stack of further out but already sorted projects on the top right (Christmas stuff mostly).

Part way through I reorganized so my iron, as well as a red box of other in progress (but not right now) projects had a better home. The other cubby is full of vintage sheets. I should really use more of those...

And since making this many changes in the office impacted other rooms in the house, here's what happened in the living room:

Both the bookcases and the piano are going to be so much more accessible now than they were. I've already used both more times in the last 24 hours than previously this month -- and not just while moving everything over! You can barely see it in the first before photo, but off to the left of the piano wall there's a hallway that leads to the room we use for sleeping (which contains our king size bed centered with 12 inches of walkway on either side and not much else). Surprisingly, this whole hallway feels better and bigger now when we walk out to the piano music stand rather than the side of the hutch -- even though the music stand is closer to the opening! I've lost track of how many hours this took, more than six, but rehanging all those pictures took about an hour in this room alone!

I'm exhausted and the whole project has taken several days just to get to this 'in progress' point - but I am feeling so much better about living here another few months (or years, if I have to). The house feels a good 12 feet bigger overall - and in this small of a place (with this much junk), that's huge.

Now, I'm off to finish a book and enjoy my improved living room!

Only 'Afters'

I'm skipping any photos I have of the 'before' areas of my office/craft organization. It just wouldn't be fair to frighten you all with the amount of dust I had going on a few hours ago. Or the lack of organization. 

I resorted my entire collection of scraps. It might not look more organized to anyone else, but it is much better. The little blue and white organizer was previously holding hair supplies I hadn't used in more than 4 years - which were mostly sorted into give-away boxes - and replaced with piles of small scraps. The larger pieces are in the clear plastic bin (I can't believe I lost the lid to that thing after only one use), and ones I have yet to sort are in the self-painted bowl. The next shelf is a massive stack of large scraps, as well as stacks of things that have been cut, but are waiting for a little more attention. I promise it's an improvement in the organization - and the shelf is probably two pounds lighter after the dusting I gave it!

I also sorted out my latest button haul from a full shoe box into the larger, but emptier, glass jar on the top shelf. It's not completely functional - but again, a big improvement over what I had going on yesterday. When I'm short on inspiration, I love twisting the jars like an eye-spy game, searching the buttons or colors for some ideas or inspiration. That was one of my favorite things to do when I used to sit in my mother's sewing room, so whether there's a more organized way of keeping buttons or not, the jars stay.

Feedback (Flexible Menu Planning)

Whoops! I thought I posted this a couple weeks ago! So, this is kind of old news, but since I don't really have anything else ready to share tonight and I'm about to crawl into bed, here you are anyway! 

It's week two  FIVE! of using the flexible menu plan boxes and I'm back with a report.

The short: This is a win. It's easier. It's faster. And yes, it's fun. Really.

Picking a box to work out of was much faster and easier than looking at the entire fridge, entire freezer, and entire pantry. Even without explicit instructions being written on the boxes, it was easy enough to know what each box needed - possibly because we went with familiar meals for the first shot. It also helped to know that instead of trying to look at ingredients and make something out of them, all we had to do was pick a box that already had a plan.

So what about the fun part?

I was actually excited about 'refilling' the boxes. So, not only was I planning menus - I was actually excited to go grocery shopping.

So we're starting out week two  five of the box plan - and we're even more ready to go than last week: chicken stirfry, Mediterranean hummus dip, soup, pasta, roast beef crescent rolls with sweet potato puffs, egg salad, sandwiches with potato salad, chicken Caesar wraps with broccoli, buffalo chicken pizza with broccoli, and at least one more that's slipping my mind at the moment! This week we're looking at pasta with rosemary asiago and broccoli, hummus dip, soup, buffalo quesodillas, roasted corn Caesar salad, stirfry with pot stickers, meat loaf, hard boiled eggs or egg salad, and English muffin pizzas.

Going into month two of this and it's working well. We're also using it as an excuse not to go shopping specifically for our Saturday movie night dinners. Instead of putting in extra cost, we're just going with whatever box we have ready - assuming it feeds the right number of people! So, yes, I basically love this. And that's saying something.

Flexible Menu Planning

You might have noticed that one of my goals for August was to plan menus for at least one week this month. After several months of unofficially having that as a goal, and failing, this time I've jumped completely in and made some changes that I hope will make the process easier.

One of the greatest issues with our menu planning is that we eat lunch out almost every (work) day, and have little control over where we go on those trips. In all honesty, what we have for lunch is determined by what's nearest when we get our chance go break. So I might end up having pasta for lunch on the same day I planned to have pasta for dinner. I'm not the best when it comes to eating pasta, a little bit goes a long ways for me, so that doesn't work.

So, this time around I'm making more of a guideline than a plan.

I bought six of these Rubbermaid boxes with lids (some have been scrubbed out already, but I didn't have time to attack all of them) and filled them with most or all of the ingredients for one meal. It's my goal to find a way to label the boxes (at least with what other ingredients go with that box), but I haven't put much effort into that yet.

Also, you might have noticed the box containing pickles and sugar cookie mix? Those are going to be used on the same day, but they are not going together.

Five of the boxes are sitting in the fridge, holding the tools for Slow Cooker Korean BBQ Tacos (2 days worth), Stir fry with spicy basil chicken, bbq pizza, buffalo chicken pizza, smothered burritos (2 days worth), plus the box with pickle dip ingredients and the beginnings of the birthday dessert ingredients. The sixth box is sitting in the pantry with our 'I cannot cook today' options: a couple soups and a pasta idea.

So, in theory, we've got at least ten meals and some snacks in the fridge, hopefully divided up into ways that will be easy for us to make a choice, grab and go. I'm hopeful this will be useful - especially after spending for the boxes (though to be fair, they were less than $1.50 each, which is why I went with the purple ones, rather than the clear which were more).

Feedback to come!

Quilt Storage

A few months ago I was given a glass/wood quilt storage chest. Unfortunately, there is honestly no room at my house for another piece of furniture at the moment. So, my mother agreed to temporarily keep it in her living room for me.

Last weekend I finally showed up with some quilts to go in it - and Mom was thrilled to know that it was her house that would be getting decorated.

My full/queen duvet (a high school graduation gift) folded in perfectly, but Great-Grammie's queen-size quilt only barely fit in!

The works of my own that I added (for now) were all fairly small (baby sized), so it was no challenge getting them in - but you can see how much space Great-Grammie's quilt takes up. If I put a little more work into cleaning out the cedar chest (one of the other things I inherited from Great-Grammie), I think I'll move this quilt over to it (along side the other quilt of hers I have).

Both of the quilts I have from my great-grandmother use scrap pieces from outfits she used to wear. The other quilt is blue sash, white blocks with appliqued butterflies made of pieces of dresses and blouses. Neither quilt is a pattern I would want to make (I have a fear of applique, among other issues), but I love having these tangible reminders of my Great-Grammie. She was an amazing woman, and a huge part of my childhood. I consider myself incredibly blessed to have anything of hers - but to have two quilts and a cedar chest is beyond anything I could have expected (that side of the family is not sentimental, but I certainly am). 

I ought to refold the top one (the gift duvet) to show a little more color, but I thought I'd keep this one on top since it's more in keeping with Mom's decorating style than anything else in the chest at the moment!

I hope someday to have enough room - whether here or in our next place (whenever that happens) - to bring the chest to live with me, or to come up with another option of storing the quilts I have, but for now, I'm glad I can bring a little more color to Mom and Dad's living room.

Reader Cleaning (again/still)

In these last few weeks of being overwhelmed, things like quilting and crafting are spending more time sitting in 'to do' piles than on the work tables. It isn't fun, but the thought of sifting through my mess to get to the work table requires more energy than I have - and I don't want quilting or crafting to feel like something I have to do. I want them to be things I choose to do for fun, and only occasionally be things I push myself to do under pressure of deadlines. So, while I'm disappointed not to be doing anything on them, I'm not terribly disappointed.

Things like checking my email, facebook, and Google Reader are much harder to ignore. Most days, the only way I'm able to keep ahead of my email inboxes is through my smart phone. Checking my emails on lunch breaks or long elevator rides lets me keep on top of things (especially since 9 times out of 10 all I need to do is hit delete). Facebook gets checked two or three times a day, at breakfast (I usually eat at my desk), at lunch (on my phone), and sometime before bed. Fortunately, it's a pretty quiet place.

I can't/don't check my Google Reader on my phone. I don't think the poor little thing has the space capacity left to do that, and honestly, I don't want to.

For the last couple weeks, I've been coming home to a massive list of things waiting to be read (400-800 posts on weekdays, 200-300 on weekends). There's no way I've got the time or energy for that business. So I've been picking out a few favorites, then clicking 'mark all as read.' I hate doing that - not only does it take longer to load individual subscriptions, but what's the point of following blogs if I'm constantly deeming them not worth reading?

So last night, after an hour-and-a-half of picking had only reduced my total by 45, I decided to get a bit more ruthless in my subscription cleaning.

I started with 325 subscriptions.

Which, after a spring/summer of constantly attempting to delete 5 a month, is better than my all time high (which seems like it was approaching 700). But it's still beyond what I'm capable of following if I'm going to be working this many hours.

I'm not good at purging my own stuff, so I made a few guidelines for myself:

Delete it if:

• it hasn't been updated in more than one month 
• the content (or majority of the content) no longer matches my interests
• duplicate subscriptions/dual content - I had at least three sets where I was following an 'address.com' and an 'address.blogger.com' or something similar
• anything I've consistently skipped reading for the last two weeks 
• if the Reader display is only a preview and I never click through to the actual site
• photo heavy to the point of being difficult to load or something I usually 'next' over

Keep it if: 

• it belongs to someone I like to pretend I know - the ones where I find myself starting stories with "my friend on the internet, well, not really my friend because I've never talked to them but..." 
• it inspires me
• anything I consistently choose to read when my time is short

After an hour, I was down to 264 subscriptions. 

It's not a huge difference, but I'm going to give it a couple days and see if this is a better number for me to deal with on a regular basis. I felt like I was being fairly harsh in what I unsubscribed from, but I know there are still a few more I could cut; yes, those are ones I'd miss, but they're also ones who post 20+ items per day. 

(I don't just follow house reno, diy, and sewing/quilting. I also follow some political things - which can easily blow up into a good 20+ posts a day - and some fashion submission things, and some tv/movie/book fandom things. And while these are the kinds of things I will continue to skip over on a crazy day, I'm not ready to give them up. And at this point, the only way I'm unsubscribing from those funny cat/cute dog posts are if I also unsubscribe from all the political things. It's all about balance between things I feel I ought to be aware of but make me cross vs. things that are utterly silly/cute and make me happy.)

I didn't manage to go through the whole list of subscriptions from top to bottom - in part because of time constraints - but it feels like a good start. I'll be curious to see what my unread numbers look like tomorrow when I get home. I'm hoping to see a noticeable improvement. 

Fingers crossed!

Update:
This was my 'to read' pile the next day:

Only 188 items to read. It's only been one day, but so far I'm feeling much lighter. 

Thread Shelf

A few weeks after I hung the perfume shelf the first time, I acquired an interesting thread shelf and some old thread. I've been dying to get it up on the wall - but that's not quite as easy as it should be.

While I'd love to hang this near my sewing machine, the room isn't arranged for that. This room holds four book cases, two computer desks, my sewing machine and it's desk, a cat tower, a dresser, a large shelf of fabric, the cat's desk as well as three chairs, two lamps, and a few other assorted pieces. Yes, a desk for the cat. He sleeps on it, and it keeps him off the computers or sewing machine (most of the time), so I'm hesitant to remove it. Yes, the cat is pretty much in charge around here.

Here's a very simple sketch of our office space:

Obviously, it isn't the best layout for use - although the cat has a pretty good layout. I've spent more than a year trying to rearrange the room to serve all these needs better, but so far, no luck. So there's no wall space directly near the sewing machine. The nearest space is the wall over the top of the cat's desk:

A quick rearrange of the photos gave me this:

The top most picture does seem a little too high, but I'm holding off on lowering it until I've decided if I'll be putting anything on the top shelf or not. I thought it might be inconvenient to have my most used threads on the shelf (rather than thrown in one of my sewing desk drawers), but the step or two from sewing machine to shelf is certainly easier than digging through a messy and tangled drawer. It's also been fun to see a constant reminder of projects I've finished or that I'm supposed to be working on.