On the Shelf

I am ashamed to say that my closet is not the most organized area of my house.  At least, not usually.  My amazing and wonderful husband has helped my organizational efforts by offering to build a shoe shelf for me!  Yay!  The difference it makes is HUGE!  I am forever indebted to him for this thoughtful piece of furniture!

Okay – here it is, my seriously, shamefully, messy closet. {blush}

Some of my shoes were in boxes, some just kicked into the corner, but it was always a grief of mind to find a pair in a hurry.  This was a painful lack of organization…

Enter the shoe shelf…

While it is not extremely fancy, it is intensely practical and functional.  I love it!  You will notice it is my favorite shade of red, too.  Love this color!  (Spanish Tile 1010-5 from Lowes/Valspar paint)  Within ten minutes of this beauty entering my life and closet, the disorder and chaos of my closet was gone!  Voila!

The good news is that all my shoes fit on the shelf… for now.  :)

Just Call Me OCD…

Patterns, symmetry, balance, schedules, organization – all of these make me happy.  I do not do random well.  Normally, this randomness is never an issue, but this week, I am working on my quilt.  Having bought my fabrics and gloried in their lovely patterns and hues, I set about cutting the pattern pieces (very tedious work, by the way) painstakingly and precisely, so as not to mess it up.  Once the whole Quilt in a Day  was cut out (what a joke that is – it took me two days just to cut it out!), the laying-out process began.  I was at a total loss.  The eight different fabrics were to be laid out in a random pattern (is that an oxymoron?).

I got out a piece of paper, and sketched the quilt as it should be, leaving blanks for the blocks to fill in with the proper fabric.  I could see a pattern emerging.  I began to panic.  This was supposed to be random, right?  No patterns!  In frustration, I erased it all.  How was I going to do this? 

 

In despair, I did a google search for “random quilt pattern” (don’t you dare laugh!) and actually found a program that will determine your layout for you.  It did mention that it could take several hours for it to figure out your individual quilt layout. “Ummm… that’s probably  how long it will take me,”  I thought.  If I was a math whiz, I could use the probability formula to factor in four fabrics of 24 pieces each, and four more fabrics of 16 pieces each, divide it by the Pythagorean theorum, multiply it by my age, and divide the total by the number of gray hairs I was acquiring as I sat there stressing over the quilt pattern.  But I am not that awesome.  It would have to be done the hard way.  Lay it out, piece by piece on my spotless(ahem) laundry room floor.  *spotless in this instance means that the floor had just been swept, and all the large specks of dirt were gone – mostly.

I did figure out the number of pieces of each color that I would have to include in each row to avoid having a plethora of the same fabric in one area.  From that figure, I began my random pattern layout.  I told you I was OCD!

No two pieces of the same fabric could be long sides together, so it took some work.  Thankfully, I had a friend who helped me with this first row.  We laid out the blocks as random as we could.  It was a mental workout.  I never knew randomness was so hard! 

The next morning, after I had recovered somewhat from all the mental strain, I went back to my creation.  I figured that if I rearranged the block order, keeping the same fabric combinations in each row, that I could have the randomness that I needed while not establishing a pattern (my one weakness).  I set at it with a vengeance, determined to be random…

This is what I ended up with.  Of course, it actually is random, because in rearranging the block order, I had to switch swatches (say that ten times fast) in order to keep same fabrics from being next to one another.  Sometimes I had to change them up in order to get a more pleasing combination.  All in all, the very randomness of it is quite pleasing, because it was such a challenge for my pattern-oriented brain! :)

After getting it all laid out, I quickly filled in my chart so that I would not lose my pattern, and picked up the pieces and put them in piles of rows replete with post-it notes.  Now this I can do!  Organization reigns supreme in my workshop once again!

Now comes the fun part – sewing it all together!  It will take more than a day (I wonder if I can sue for false advertising), but I am so excited about this project!  I will keep you updated on my progress. 

Are you a pattern/symmetry person or a random person?

School Room

I have long desired a room that is totally dedicated to home-schooling.  For years, we have used the table to get the homework finished.  I hated clearing off the school books to make room for lunch, then clearing off the lunch dishes to make room for school books, and so on.  In our Indiana home, we had a schoolroom in the basement.  It was rather cold in the winter, but it was open and well-lit, so we made it work.  I got used to not having to shuffle books and dishes several times a day, and it spoiled me!  :)

In the trailer, we do not really have an option – everyone has to squeeze in at the table.  A school room was on my list of “wants” for our new home.  It kept trying to scootch over to the “needs” column, but I kept shoving it back, somewhat reluctantly, I must admit!

The Lord was so good to give us a “bonus room” that we can dedicate to our school needs.  I am so grateful!  So, here are the before and after pictures of this wonderful world of learning!

This was the bonus room as we first saw it.  The walls were painted a neutral beige, but were so full of holes and punctures, that we had to do some serious patching on the drywall.  That meant we had to repaint, too.  There was a wallpaper border around the top, rather appropriate for our purposes, with the whole “library” look, but since I am not the world’s biggest wallpaper fan, I decided that it would have to go as well.  You can see in this picture the nice, spacious closet – a huge plus in my opinion (this house has the nicest closets, and lots of them).  The floor was bare plywood, but other than that, it was in pretty good condition. 

I painted this room my lovely Seamist and we had new carpet installed in the entire upstairs (and in the downstairs bedrooms).  Along with a fresh coat of white trim, it gave the room an entirely new look. 

I was so excited when I found a giant white board at a local consignment shop.  It was a high-quality, 4’x6’ board with a marker trayand it was only $24!  Paul helped me hang it, and it really adds to our classroom instruction!  Over in the corner is our “children’s library,” a collection of books that I have gathered over the years.  They range from my childhood favorites to solid classic children’s literature.  I always encourage my children to read good books – it helps to develop the mind!

Right now, this is where we spend a great deal of time each day.  Since it is such a great part of our lives, I wanted it to be a relaxing, serene atmosphere, too.  I feel that I have accomplished that to a small degree.  Later, I plan to add some pictures of great American landmarks that we have visited as a family.  My ideas are boundless, but so are my pressing priorities, so the photos may have to wait a while! :)

Cleaned Out

I have been a little under the weather this week, and therefore, decided that I could exert my limited energies to doing some long-delayed chores in the trailer.  One of these was getting rid of the sock box.  You may wonder what a sock box is, but I know you have one, too, although it may not be called a sock box.  When we transferred our belongings from our previous trailer to the new trailer, there was significantly less storage space.  Due to this, my sock collection (which is not really that impressive – maybe a dozen pair) did not fit in the drawer with all my other unmentionables, which will continue to be unmentioned…  I decided I would just stick the socks in the top half of an apple box until I could find a place to put them.

Fast forward seven months.  The sock box was still there, sitting in front of the dresser, and impeding not only our access to the drawers, but also blocking the narrow walkway at the foot of the bed.  Although it was still called the sock box, it had grown in usefulness, and now held not just socks, but hosiery, jewelry, pens, papers, photos, picture frames, important papers, excess folded laundry, and a few sweaters.  Suffice it to say, the sock box had become a major pain in the foot, probably due to the number of times I kicked it while trying to squeeze past to the other side of the bed.  It had to go.

In reality, sorting through the box was not nearly as bad as I had dreamed.  It took about thirty minutes to clean out the clutter and I was on to a much more formidable task—the kid’s toy box!



I am a nice mom, and so the toys all survived the purge.  However, the great majority of them will be put in storage until we have space for the kids to play with them.  The children are still amazed at how nice their room looks without toys strewn from one end to the other.  They still have plenty of toys to spread around, but the ones they rarely play with have gone on vacation for a while.  Maybe permanently! Mwahahahahaha!  Here are the toys I decided to send on an all-expense paid vacation to the storage unit!  Impressive, huh?

What task do you dread more than any other?  Take the challenge today and tackle it—you can get rid of your “sock box,” too!  :)