January Cure 2014 – Day One

It’s that time of year again for Apartment Therapy’s January Cure. If you haven’t heard of it, I strongly suggest checking it out. It’s a great way to start off the year whether your home is a room, an apartment, a condo or a house. It’s very cleansing and fulfilling and –bonus!- you don’t have to think of what to do next. It TELLS you.  But not in a bossy way and I still feel fairly autonomous doing it. So great. Check it out here.

Day One (which was yesterday, but you can start now, too):  Walk around, make a list. 

This one’s the easiest… and most disturbing. You walk around your home and take a good look at what carnage has been wreaked and changes you want to make. If you don’t know exactly how to fix something today, that’s ok. Just put down “the bathroom wall is a hot mess” and you can expand upon that point and come up with a plan of action later. This is sort of a brain-storming session. All the things on the page. Don’t like that doorknob? On the list! Wondering how that corner became the clutter center of the Universe? How and why are tomorrow’s problem, today, we just note it on the list! Today is sort of a procrastinator’s dream. Of course, later in the month will bring ACTION, Jackson, but today, we’re just some list-making fools. 

Once you've made your list (and had a glass of wine), go through and highlight 3-5 items for each room that REALLY should be seen to.

Ok. Ready for my list?

Notes on the list:

Entry: Well, sure, I COULD ask my landlord to do this. And I AM going to ask them for the paint. But they’re the ones who did such a crap job in the first place, so I feel like maybe I’ll give it a shot. Plus, I want to paint the rest of the living room anyway.

Living Room:  Nothing too groundbreaking here. I will need to figure out what color to paint it. Tar-stain off white is just not in it. And my cat insists on destroying the edge of the carpet. So.

Dining Room: It and the Bathroom are the closest to being “done”. I have been looking for the “right” curtains for over a year now. I think I should just accept that 1) curtains are changeable and 2) This is becoming an illness, this curtain-judging. Also, the shadow boxes that I made 2(!) years ago. That sit next to my husband’s desk.  Might just put those up this weekend.

Kitchen: I need a backsplash and I came up with the best plan. I’ll tell you all about it in another post. Mostly, the kitchen is just basic cleaning and tidying.

Bathroom: The white paint needs touching up again. And I still need to put art in there. And, you know, standard cleaning.

Bedroom: We have picked colors. We have been staring at the swatches taped to the wall for months. It is time to just DO IT. And then decorate. Like an adult.

Den: You know that space where you just throw everything? Yeah, this whole room has become that. But long-term, we’d like it to be a nursery someday. So the rows of bookshelves have to go… but I think if I built-in a shelving system in the far end of the closet and secured the door, I think it would be a legitimate solution.

So, what's on your list?

 

Happy 2014!

Once again, in my constant journey toward self-improvement, I am re-committing to my blog.  I love my blog, but I get busy and forget about it. Writing this does a few things for me : 1) I get to write, something I really love doing but often lack the time to do (see: 3 started and unfinished books). 2) I get to look back on my own personal chronicle of stuff (narcissus, party of 1?). 3) I get more motivated to DO things because I’m (sort of) held accountable here. To you. Or me. Or the internet. Anyway, it’s a good thing to do. So here we go again. 

So I think I’ll summarize what I did with my 2013, since I sort of dropped off the radar. In the summer, I got certified as a  Dance It Out Instructor.

I even started teaching a class. It’s been a bit hit-and-miss, but we’re going to hit the ground running in January. Occasionally, I take part in Dance Fitness events and have gotten amazingly positive feedback from the participants (serious love). It’s so great to be dancing again. Much like writing, it feeds the soul. I have a very hungry soul. Also, I work in an office, which while comfortable and good-paying is not very soul-enriching. I lucked out and don’t have a soul-crushing job, but it’s important to lift yourself up, not just avoid crushing your own spirit.

I’ve kept a plant alive at my office for a year now, so that’s a new record. 

The arrow plant, not the orchid.I will
almost certainly kill the orchid in a year.

My husband and I have had a great year together. We get better and better at communicating (which is an exhausting and challenging task, but well worth it), and went on TWO vacations this year. True, they were both about 4 days long, but that’s more than we’ve had in years. We went on a road trip to see his best friend and then flew out to see his family for Christmas (my family lives nearby).

I’m working on a few things and expect this to be a very busy year. I’m going to start working on opening an Etsy shop so I can create things and have some side income. I’m going to spend a LOT more time on Dance It Out and teaching (another side job). I’m going to sort out the apartment. I think we’re going to commit to one more year here so we can save up and buy a house. (!)

Today starts the Apartment Therapy January Cure, which I’ll begin posting about tomorrow.  Or tonight. Either way, I need to wander around my apartment to do it, so. 

Happy New Year, my dears!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-CHANGES!

Hey there! I’ve been doing things. Not, you know, writing, but things. So the Hubs and I have been discussing THE FUTURE. And doing all kinds of grownup things.  Like possibly buying a house. And/or  having a kid. (Note for any family reading this: we are in the planning stages, not in the creating stages of the kids thing. Don’t get too excited yet).  We looked into buying a house, but decided that this was not the moment, so extended our lease another year.

Anyway, as I obsess over things I had, incidentally, come up with a plan already about how to integrate a nursery into our home. Since the den/library was already in the large bedroom and we were in the small one, we would just divide the large room in two with a clever curtain and a rug and… voila! Except. Then one of the shelves fell off of the wall. Wall-mounted shelf, properly mounted, fell right the hell out of the wall, taking a tiny bit of wall with it. So I re-evaluated the whole baby-in-the-same-room-as-bookshelves thing. Later, I was reading about the whole Montessori thing and thought a 100% baby-proofed room would be a good plan.  And then… thinking about it…. For the first few months, the kid will be in our room… no room for that in the 10x10 bedroom. So the Hubs suggests that we switch rooms, making the 11x14 ours and the 10x10 the library/den/future nursery. So… I worked out a floor plan for that. Then we did nothing about it for 6 months (those of you who are regulars here know this is an integral part of my process). 

Then, last weekend, the Hubs says “Let’s do the room switch this weekend”. And I look at him and go “Sure!” So we did. We moved all the stuff out of the den into the living room, took the remaining shelves out of the walls, and Rug Doctored the carpet in the den. Waited for it to dry. Moved all the stuff from the small bedroom to the new, large bedroom and thought “wow, look at all the space we have for activities!” Rug Doctored the carpet in the bedroom/hallway. Went to sleep as we waited for it to dry.  

In the morning, I took a photo of my lotus mural so I could get a large photo of it printed and framed to put in our new bedroom. Then we left the house for a bit because if you’ve ever seen 2 rooms worth of stuff packed into one room… well, it looks like a “furniture edition” of Hoarders. It stressed me out. And I like confined spaces.  Finally, we removed the stuff from the living room back to the new den and felt SO GOOD about ourselves… or you know… worked on not getting into petty arguments over where to put a book shelf. It was day 3, we were tired, it happens.

So now, we basically have 2 new rooms to decorate. Yay and boo. To be fair, neither of the spaces were ever “finished” to begin with, so it’s not a major loss. Just in time, Apartment Therapy decided to do an “August Cure” where you focus on one room! (I joined a week late. Le shrug.) So…. I have plans for this bedroom. Big, green-and-gray plans. Involving furniture! And paint! (Not painted furniture). And draperies!  You’ll be getting a “before” picture in the next post, along with some teasers of what’s going to be happening re: decorating the bedroom. So excited!

Plants - a short-term commitment

Hi! I’m still alive, I’m here, I swear! I just… got busy. And kind of depressed (maybe we’ll go into that someday. I’m not feeling up to it just now).

Mostly I was busy? Let’s go with that. So busy, in fact, that we kind of let the porch get entirely out of hand and the landlords left us a note about it on our door. Because they don’t believe in mail. And…. Maybe it was a little justified.

I killed the plants. Again. We need new patio furniture. Or, you know, ACTUAL patio furniture. Also we gave up on sweeping the damned leaves off the porch for a few weeks (months).

Plants: You know how some people are so good with plants, they seem to have a green thumb? I have a black thumb. I’ve kept a little desk plant alive at my office for a year now. That’s a lifetime record for a potted plant. And I think it’s due more to the plant’s tenacity than my care. You go, little plant!

Our porch gets NO direct sunlight. Which is maybe good in a porch? But bad for plants. I keep trying to buy  “shade” plants, but mostly that’s gone badly. I had rosemary originally that my dad bought me because “you CAN’T kill this stuff”. Um, no. YOU can’t kill this stuff. I was clearly up to the challenge.

Then I got night-blooming jasmine because, hey, night-blooming must not be too keen on sunlight, right? Nope, turns out it needs lots during the day.

Then I got what I REALLY wanted, which was lavender. That died the fastest. So I looked up shade plants and was told that Arabian Jasmine was a shade varietal and would looove the shade. I love Jasmine, so I got them. And killed them. Apparently, they also like water. And attention.

Ok, I need a live plant that needs no sunlight, little water, and only passing attention. I settled on… Ficus Trees! I figure that if they can survive in a dentist’s waiting room, they’ve got a shot on my porch. After almost an hour of sweeping up those damn leaves (the big trees around our complex dump them on the ground) and planting the trees in the pots we have with some shade-loving impatiens for color… it looks nice. I like it. 

The pot to the left are back-up flowers. In case the main
flowers die. Really, the odds aren't good for any of them.

Now I just need to refinish the table and get some actual outdoor chairs (instead of unloved, starting-to-rot, falling apart at the seams wooden dining chairs) and I think we’ll be in business!