Organizing The House When It Gets Out Of Control: a house log

That is me these days. At least I like to think it is. Checking off those tedious and lingering to-do list items that I have been meaning to do forever, and taking names. So how about a Friday smorgasbord post? The funny thing is that simply a few days ago we got a comment that said “hey I miss your Dude Get On That Already updates – will those ever come back?” Do you folks remember those? Where I’d at last get around to tackling something that had been sitting around waiting to get done (typically simply painting or hanging something) and I’d share a little update – like this wall plaque, this box, this coat hook, and this high chair? Well, the funny thing about that comment is that as I read it I was thinking… I have in fact gotten on a few things. What has come over me? Is this nesting? Has my body been snatched? So here are those details…

#1: Ding dong, the dining room table is cleared. You might remember this recent house-tour video which revealed that our dining room and guest room were looking chaotic and cluttered (it is fairly much a promise that when we work on one room, another room nearby pays the price). Here is a still shot from that video to refresh your memory:

Well, I at last got my act together and found better spots for stuff. It truly helped to get a bunch of the craft stuff that had collected there into my newly organized craft closet upstairs. And I tucked the decorative items into the two bottom cabinets in the living room where I store other vases and cloches and stuff like that. It is pleasant to see the wood of the table again. (I will not tell you how dusty it was before I wiped it down for this shot.)

A few folks asked if I thought I’d use this table as a workspace if it were clear since I admitted to using the kitchen table until we get the office whipped into two-people-can-work-there shape. But I have found that even with the dining table cleared off I still prefer the kitchen table. I think it is because I can see Clara playing in the living room more easily from there (the dining room is a lot more isolated due to its layout). But it is pleasant to know I can run in there if I want a little more solitude. And that we can in fact host people for some fancier-than-the-kitchen-table dinner if we’d like to throw a Downton Abbey-ish ball sometime.

The bad news is that the kitchen counter still fairly much looks like this (minus the crockpot full o’ stew), thanks to our in-progress pantry re-org (everything’s painted, so we are simply waiting for it to dry so we can load in some pleasant new systems). Sigh. It is a vicious cycle.

#2: I hemmed Clara’s comically long curtains. You can sort of see them in this picture below (I typically tried to simply curl them under so it was not as noticeable) – but they were about 6″ too long and although I liked the drapey affect, they were borderline sloppy with so much extra fabric going on at the end.

So last weekend while Clara played with her dollhouse in the middle of the room and we listened to some tunes, I got to work hemming them with some Heat N Bond hem tape. It likely took me about a half an hour to cut them all and then hem them (I still left them drapey, so they skim the floor a little for that casual vibe) and it feels so GOOD to have that done. Seriously, I have asked myself if there is something wrong with me that hemmed curtains make me feel so accomplished – but I think it is simply one of those things that I thought a million times in the last eight months (“I should truly hem those curtains” would pop into my head each week as I put away Clara’s laundry), so it feels strong to at last check that box.

#3: The extra pieces of our sectional have been sent to greener pastures. Remember how our full Karlstad sectional did not fit in our cozier living room, so “honey, we shrunk the sofa“?

Well, the random extra pieces that we we have not been using (the corner piece and the loveseat-sized end) have simply been sitting in our attic under a drop cloth for the last eight months. I even mentioned that we thought about craigslisting them, but “we simply figured selling the corner and loveseat to a sofa that is incomplete without another end piece that someone would have to purchase might fetch us $20 tops” so I said we’d rather hold onto them and see if we had a use for them in the future. It was a fully surprise when someone emailed us months later, and offered to buy them for $250! We hadn’t so much as looked at them at all in the past eight months, so… sold!

The funny thing is that it was not a journal reader who hoped them. A woman was simply googling around to locate these exact Karlstad pieces (they do not sell them separately, so she thought she’d never find them) and came across our old post about storing those in the attic. She’s not from around here (lives in Florida, in fact) but she had items in a storage unit in New Jersey that she was going to be driving down to Florida in her SUV, so on her way down she swung through Richmond and (miraculously) fit them all into the back. So now we have an extra $250 in our pockets and Karl – er, well the unused portion of Karl – is living a sunnier life in St. Augustine!

#4: I donated/gave back/handed down/consigned a bunch of Clara’s old clothes. There were four large bins in this video that I explained were being sent in a bunch of directions (some items were being returned to sweet friends who loaned things to us, some were being donated, some were getting handed down to other prego friends and relatives, and I hoped to try consigning some things as well).

So after they sat there for months, I at last got around to donating and passing along everything I had set aside, and I trekked the leftovers to Once Upon A Child (a little secondhand baby store here in town) simply to give it a try. Forty five minutes after dropping them off I returned to get a pleasant little check for $141!

There were a few things they did not end up taking, so I swung by another donation box on the way home with the extras, and at last that Corner O’ Bins in the living room is no more. The funny thing is that I dragged those downstairs from the storage room at around 18 weeks pregnant (in anticipation of finding out if this was another girl or a boy, so I could sort through everything). Which means they sat in that corner for over 10 weeks simply waiting to be dealt with. Better late than never, right?

#5: Clara’s birdcages are no longer birdless. That is right, I put a bird on it. Make that six. I noticed that West Elm was having a large ornament sale about a month ago and they had these vivid little colorful birds on clearance.

So for $20 I got six of them, and when they arrived I reenacted Snow White and put them all over my arms used their clips or their ornament loops to make them cozy in Clara’s birdcages. A few of you folks noticed them in this picture on Instagram/Facebook, and I promised an update, so there you go.

I even brought in a little wood dowel to the grey birdcage since it did not have one and I hoped to create a spot for one to perch and another one to hang. You can simply barely make it out in this shot (the cut off bird on the right is sitting on it, and the flying bird under that one is hanging from it). That is what I get for trying to be artsy with my photography.

Clara’s go-to is this one right here. She named him Prince Sam Bluebird, and we say goodnight to him every evening.

And in other update news, our new washer came bright and early on Saturday morning (some of you folks have been asking about it, which is beyond sweet) and it is a LARGE relief that it is at last here. I now sing and occasionally pirouette while doing laundry. I am sure that will not last for more than a week, but it truly is one of those “you do not know how good you have it until an appliance conks out on you and you live without it for a while and then the new one comes and it is broken so you have to wait another week and a half” things.

So those are a few of those “I in fact got on them!” updates, along with a little Washer Status Report. I still have a bunch more should-have-done-that-yesterday things bouncing around in my brain, so perhaps I should set a future check-in date with you folks to force myself to attend to them. Wanna get stuff done with me? And then we can all reconvene and attempt to hold ourselves accountable to the internet at large? What is your “gotta get on that” list looking like these days?