Projects and more projects 05.12.20
Are you working on long overdue projects at your house? When I can motivate myself, I am. This extra room in our house has had many, many purposes over the past twelve years that we’ve lived here. I had thought that I would turn it into an extra bedroom, which is probably what we will make it before we ever sell our house sometime in the nebulous future. But right now, I am giving it over to Liv as a studio space. 
As you can see: it needs some help. For the past six months I have been cramming Christmas stuff here. I didn’t want all of my Christmas stuff to go back into the attic, because Denton and I have many “conversations” over it when I need it around Christmas time. Our attic access isn’t one of those handy dandy, pull down jobs. Oh no, the builders of our house, along with all of the others in our neighborhood thought it would be better to have to drag a giant ladder from the garage every time you needed to find something you have stored up there. Sigh.
This past Christmas I informed Denton that he didn’t need to cart everything back up into the attic, which he was very pleased about. Instead, I am taking over our Harry Potter closet. Which has been a black hole of random things for more than a decade. I have been putting this task off for MONTHS. Would you like to guess how long it took me to empty the Harry Potter closet? Thirty nine minutes. My life if ridiculous. I just knew it was going to take me days, to pull everything out of there and find a new home for it.
In actuality, it took a mere 39 minutes. Crazy town. That’s where I live. The shelves are going to go serve their purpose in my laundry room, which will be another project, the guitar cases went to live in the den. Denton hasn’t notice yet. 🙂 Most of the other things just needed to be recycled. Do you keep your boxes from things you’ve bought, just in case you need to move and you’ll need the box? Example: Our router and a drum kit seat. I called Denton at work and asked him that if we needed to move tomorrow would we need the box that our two year old router came in? No and no. Problem solved.
I love my vacuum. Another inanimate object that has my devotion, because it does what it is supposed to do. After emptying out the Harry Potter closet, I vacuumed it out and declared it sufficient. You will see later that I should have mopped it too, but I will tackle that task at Christmas when I take all of this stuff out to determine what I am keeping and what is going to grace someone else’s home. I would have decluttered it now, but my Salvation Army isn’t taking anything right now, so I decided if it all fit, it would be decluttered at Christmas this year.
Then I started on the extra room. I started making piles of like things. Such as: 478 empty boxes. I have been keeping them so that when I finally get up the energy to list things in my Etsy shop I won’t have to shell out money for them at the post office. But they can’t live in this room anymore.
I started carting Christmas stuff into the closet…..
And it all fit! With room to grow! hahahaha.
Now that the Christmas stuff is out of the spare room, Liv and I can start assembling her studio, which will free up a LOT of room in her bedroom. Does your house go through transformations like mine does? When one space isn’t working anymore, we just shift and change and make it into what works for us at the time. I wish I could go with the flow in my everyday life, like I do with shifting my furniture around!
I hope that your projects are going smoothly! Stay safe and healthy! You can see all of the other projects I’ve worked on here.
What are you working on right now?
I also replaced another light fixture in my downstairs hallway. 
And that’s what I’ve actually gotten accomplished over the last couple of weeks. I have other projects I’m working on right now, and as soon as I get them completed I’ll show you here!
But its done! Yay! Don’t look at the stairs, just don’t. It’s on the list. 
While I had the paint out, I thought to myself, I should get that small bookcase painted. I had bought it ages, and ages ago. I think I may have paid around $3 for it, more than likely because it looked so bad.
Liv wandered through about the time I started to paint and asked, Don’t you need to clean that thing first? And I told her, This has been cleaned! Pitiful little thing. 
I had the perfect spot for it outside my kitchen where I had been piling my number one “to be read” stack of books, a la Martha Stewart style. It always looks so much better at her house, doesn’t it?
It’s amazing what a coat of paint can do.
I’ve had one hook outside my shower for years now. And I constantly put way too many things on it.
I’ve also had these two cute ostrich head hooks floating around my house for a couple of years now with no real purpose. Now they have a purpose…
And my shower hook isn’t overloaded anymore. This project took approximately 49 seconds to accomplish. Sigh.
My dresser. You’ll have to use your imagination and “see” this poor thing piled as high as the sky with clothes, random bits of things that did not even belong in our bedroom, because either I forgot to take a before or I deleted it by accident. It wasn’t pretty.
I have been resisting doing this project, because I knew I needed to take EVERYTHING out and do a major purge of all the things. I hesitate to do things KonMari style because I get so overwhelmed with how much stuff I still have. And probably do NOT need. But I set aside an entire day and worked drawer by drawer.
I LOVE having my t-shirts folded this way. It’s so easy to see what I have and what I don’t. I’m also going to try this with my pajamas too and I’ll let you know how it goes.
I took out everything, and anything that said NO way am I ever putting you on my body again, went into a bag to dealt with another day. Everything else needed a designated drawer or things like swimsuits that I only wear once a year went into a basket to live on the top shelf of my closet. Why in the world I was letting them take up space in my drawers is beyond my comprehension.
It was a long, tedious day, with many, many breaks for my mental health, but at the end of it all my bed was clear and everything was put away where it belongs. Also yes, that IS another “to be read” pile of books! Which is another project to add to my ever expanding list, because this pile drives me bonkers. It was a great idea at the time, but I constantly knock them off and have to pick them up again.
Another project I need to check with my Mama about. I want to change out the pulls on this dresser, but I don’t know which ones are the originals on this piece. It was my Mama’s Mother’s dresser and it has two different styles of pulls. Wooden ones and metal pulls on the bottom drawer.
And this is the point that I forgot all about you guys! I’ll try to walk you through the rest of what I did. On each side of the mounting hardware there are two smiling faces – see them? Two round holes with a rectangular hole beside it, on each side? Those are the slots for the ceiling fan motor and light kit to hang from. You slide them, carefully into those slots and then you can wire everything without having to hold the whole shebang in the air the whole time. Genius.
