speakers and wires and tri-pods, oh my!

I promise I'm not slowly trying to turn this into a fashion blog or anything, but I was so blown away by the amazing prices at H&M recently that I just had to mention them to you guys, in case any of you are in need of some cute basics! This skirt was only SIX DOLLARS, and the shirt was only 8 dollars! Crazy, right? I got the skirt in stripes and in black, and I got the shirt in gray and in white. And just for the record, H&M isn't paying me to say any of this ... I just get really excited about cheap, cute clothes, haha:)

And I just wanted to say again: thank you guys so, so, so, so, SO much for all the kind words about my hair. You guys have nooooooo idea how much your sweet compliments meant to me ... I read them all over and over and over! Cutting all that hair off wasn't easy. When they put it up in the "donation" ponytails and got ready to snip it off I closed my eyes and buried my face in my hands until it was over! But I'm so excited to be able to donate alllllll that hair, and thanks to all of you I'm feeling very secure about my new 'do! And, as you can see in the photo above, I can even ditch the Audrey look and style it into a pretty sweet 'hawk when I feel like it;) LOL

And now on to something more house-related, I have a confession to make: While I'd love to be able to claim that the wall behind our sofa looks this picturesque all the time, the reality is that it most often looks like this ...

We don't have an entertainment center, so all of our DVDs and video games stay in this library dresser you see below, our TV stays in the guest bedroom....

and we use a projector to watch TV downstairs. Which is AWESOME, because it's like having a 100 inch TV screen in our living room whenever we want, but the problem is that without an entertainment center, the shelves behind our couch are constantly covered in speakers, tripods, etc.


What do YOU guys do with all of your TV-and-movie-watching gadgets? Do any of you have pictures of your living room set-up on your blog that you could link me to in the comments? I'm looking for solutions, here!

I have good news, bad news, and dilemmas.

This post is going to be chock-full of doom and gloom, you guys! Project Make-the-Guest-Bedroom-into-a-Room-We'll-Actually-Use (Project MtGBiaRWAU, for short?) is off to a rocky start. I'll begin with the good news, though, which is that it only took about 30 minutes of carrying coat closet junk upstairs, and carrying jackets and hangers downstairs, to take the coat closet from this:

to this:

Yayy!

The bad news? Well, for starters, there's this: I decided that there's no sense in planning out a room and hunting for furniture if I'm not even sure what exactly my storage needs are, so I pulled everything out of the two junky-closets to get a better idea of what we're dealing with here. I'm sorry to say that what you see in this picture below is probably less than half of it. Where does it all come from?!? Looking at all of that makes me wonder where on earth it's going to go, if not right back in the mess of a closet from whence it came. I feel a little in over my head!

My second piece of bad news is really only bad news to Jemima, who has had her whole little world turned upside down. You see, quite a few months ago we had a relatively minor earthquake, but it shook Jemima to the core and she took up temporary residence under the guest bedroom bed. She hardly came out for days, and while I believe she has recovered from the emotional stress of the quake, underneath the guest bed has been her favorite place to spend time ever since. She uses her lair, or her "clubhouse" as I like to call it, as a place to hide treats, store special toys, and get some time to herself, away from her annoying parents.

Apparently, by moving it over a few feet, I have ruined everything. Now she won't set paw under there, and she's been in a state of emotional turmoil ever since ... a state she hasn't been in since the unspeakable horrors of the month of the rat.

How the situation appears to us (i.e. the bed has moved over a few feet).

How the situation appears to Jemima (i.e. the world, and everything in it to which she holds dear, has been destroyed)

And now for my third piece of bad news: when I posted this post, I had several ideas (labeled A through D) in mind for how I could make Project MtGBiaRWAU a reality. Sadly, I somehow overlooked a major detail while doing my planning:

There is a large radiator/heater/unit thing sticking out from the right-hand wall, right smack-dab in the middle. I guess I could still put furniture there, but it would have to be sitting at least 6 inches away from the wall, and that would drive me crazy. So which of the ideas does this rule out? Pretty much all of them but the "B" plan. And yet another thing I didn't really consider?

It's going to be hard to make a pillow-lined, daybed-ish bed out of this when the only place in the room where the bed can really go is right up against a window. (Side note: doesn't Jemima look despondent?)  I don't like the idea of half the window being covered by pillows, but I also don't like the way the bed looks with all the pillows at the head of the bed.

And after reading all of your comments in my last post, I started getting really excited about the idea of having a home office (plan A, shown here). It would be great to have a place where I could set up crafting supplies in a permanent spot, as well as have a work-space other than the kitchen counter. And when one commenter (Anon #2) mentioned that she and her husband have double desks and chairs, I got super-excited about that idea. I really, really like the thought of having a long, antique work table or something to serve as a big "His and Hers" desk.

Which brings me to this: it doesn't look like it in the picture, but the space between the bed and the right-hand wall is actually pretty long, so there's definitely room to bring in a big desk without having it pushing up against the bed. I could still put the bookshelves on the left-hand wall, but (unlike in plan A up there) the bed can't go against the right-hand wall because of the heater. If the bed is not in the middle of the room like it used to be, the only other place it really can be is running along-side that window. But, like I said earlier, that sort of rules out lining it with pillows to make a day-bed sort of thing. And I'd really like to keep a full bed in there, rather than have to get rid of it altogether and bring in a pull-out sofa.

What's a girl to do? I don't know yet! 

badly drawn sketches of an un-loved bedroom

Doesn't the name of this post sound like a great, pretentious title for a best-selling memoir? Badly Drawn Sketches of an Un-Loved Bedroom could totally be the new A Million Little Pieces. Haha, anyway ... several months ago I posted this picture of our master bedroom closet. I had worked hard to get the space ridiculously organized, and I was proud of it! Lest you think all of our closets look like this, however, allow me to show you this ...

Yikes! That is the coat closet, and it is much too full of junk to make room for, you know, coats. BTW, in case anyone is wondering why the sofa is covered in blankets, it's because Jemima was a bit pukey (she's fine now!) when I took this picture, so I'd covered it up to ensure that she didn't leave any vomit-colored spots on our crisp white sofa. Hope you aren't eating as you read this!

Let's zoom in on the more problematic section of the closet, shall we? Here's what we have here:

• camera equipment
• a grill/smoker
• camping tables
• suitcase stuffed full of books (don't ask)
• weights
• patio rug
• violin
• scarves
• box full of odds and ends that we need to return to people. If we've borrowed a book or DVD from you and haven't given it back yet, chances are it's in that black and white box!

It feels a little funny calling a picture that looks like a second grader drew it my "ideal" anything, but here is how the coat closet would ideally end up looking. The smoker and the patio rug stay, as well as the boxes on the top shelf, but now we have room for scarves, coats, shelves for the camera equipment, as well as another one of those handy shoe-holders that you see in the master bedroom closet up there. We always end up with a big pile of shoes downstairs anyway, so we might as well have a place to put them! 

Where will we put the suitcase o' books, the weights, and the violin, you ask? Well, that brings me to my point:

This is our guest bedroom, and while it's a lovely place to host our guests, it's not very practical for daily use. Back when we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, I daydreamed of having an extra bedroom. I had visions of us using the extra space as a place to read, watch movies and drink our coffee. When I heard other people say they never set foot in their guest bedroom I thought "that would never happen to us!" But, sure enough, we hardly ever set foot in there. Which is a shame, because it's a nice, sunny room, and we are letting a large portion of our square footage go unappreciated!

Here is a (very) rough sketch of the current layout.

 And here are four options I've come up with to allow us to not only get more use out of this room, but also allow us to bring in new furniture (such as bookshelves, desks and entertainment centers) giving us new places to store a lot of that coat closet clutter.

A) The main thing we need in this guest bedroom is a place to store our books. This layout includes bookshelves, as well as a little "home office" area, which would be nice, but realistically I'm not sure we'd actually use it that often. But maybe we would? Do you any of you have home offices, and if so, do you actually use them?

B) The only big change in this layout is that we'd swap the giant nightstand for a sitting area. Hopefully that (might?) entice us to spend more time in this room. But something tells me we'll still just go straight to the downstairs sofa when we want to chill. Plus, it doesn't give us any furniture that could be used to store things like the violin and the weights.

C) This one is the least guest-friendly, as it would involve getting rid of the bed all together and having our guests sleep on a pull-out sofa, but it would allow us to bring in an entertainment center, which could mean a second TV and a place for the video game stuff to stay out, as well as bookshelves. It would more or less become a family room, and I'm pretty sure we would actually use a room like this on a regular basis.

D) This one is the easiest of all the options, because it involves a minimal amount of furniture buying/selling, and still gives us that family room/game room feeling. For this option we would push the bed against the wall, line it with oversized pillows, and bring in an entertainment center and bookshelves. This would leave us with a sofa-ish place to hang out, but still provide a "real" bed for guests. This comes with one big problem, though ... is it okay to use a double/full bed as a daybed? I tried to Google this to see if it's "allowed" or not, but I couldn't find anything! I know traditionally daybeds are twin beds, so is it a huge no-no to make a double bed into a daybed? Someone tell me, because I don't know! 

Which option do you like best? Do you have a guest bedroom, and if so, do you ever use it, and what do you use it for?

two down, three to go!

As I mentioned yesterday, I have three big organizing projects I wanted to complete this summer. They are:

1. do something to fix the monstrosity that was our utility closet.
2. put all the stored items in our closets into matching containers.
3. put all my pictures in order by date, and into big, matching photo albums.

I'm happy to say that I'm done with both #1 and #2, and I'm so pleased with the results. I'm sorry to say that I didn't get a before shot of the utility closet, but it had all of this crammed into it:

It wasn't pretty at all. Just trying to get the vacuum out was a stressful event! My husband installed a shelf for me...

And now it looks like this! Whew, so much better.

Next up, the upstairs closets! Most people try to trade in their cardboard boxes for nice, plastic containers, but I did the opposite. Our closets were filled with clear plastic containers, and I hated them. They were always cracking, the handles were always breaking, and the fact that they were clear bugged me because it looked so messy. I bought 14 big, sturdy boxes from the Container Store, and made labels using the American Typewriter font. Cute, right?

I love how sleek and streamlined they look! It's exactly what I wanted:) Next up, the photos! I have boxes and boxes of them to go through, so I'm afraid it may take all summer. Oh well, it will be done eventually!

Jenny from Jenny Free Style wrote a very sweet little feature about white waxflower:) Make sure you click on over and check it out! Thanks again, Jenny!

a fine frenzy

In case you haven't noticed, I really like to clean and organize! I've got three big, last projects that I'm working on and I'll be done with all my C&O projects for the summer. I'll post a full post about two of them tomorrow, but here are three picture previews:

letters & love: organized!

I'm happy to say that in only about 2 hours, I went from this:

... to this: (the colorful boxes)

Much better, right? Here's what I did:

I wanted to use the Container Store boxes, rather than a big, ugly file box to organize all our cards, letters and memorabilia. I went to Walgreens and bought an aqua-colored sharpie and a few sheets of poster board, and made my own little index cards. I made up my own categories to sort them by, and divided them up!

It took three boxes to store them all. The boxes are for:

1. letters and cards: thank-you notes, Christmas (and other holiday) cards, "thinking of you" cards, etc.
2. wedding: notecards and greeting cards given to us, misc. items like our wedding video and a CD of all our professional pictures.
3. our memories: memorabilia between me and my husband, such as ticket stubs from movies we saw together (we've saved all of them!), notes we've written each other, flight ticket stubs from trips, etc.

The last thing I wanted to organize was my decor file. I had one started in a binder, but it was tedious to put them in the pages, and it was getting really stuffed. I cleaned it wayyyyy out (it's funny how my tastes have changed and a lot of the images I'd clipped no longer appeal to me), and sorted them into categories. I felt it was only fitting to use something decor-related for my container, and this vintage traveling case was just thing.

I couldn't believe how little room the papers took up once I was done. They used to stuff an entire binder, and now they take up less than half the traveling case. But, I'm sure I'll build it back up to stuffed in no time;) I love magazines!



PS I'll draw a winner at 4:00pm Pacific time, so if you haven't entered in this drawing, it's not too late!
UPDATE: The drawing has closed. Thanks for playing!

buried in love

For some reason I had the crazy idea that going through and sorting out two boxes marked "letters and memories" would be an easy task. Not only have I been brought to tears more than once by reading old notes from my husband, family and friends (who are all so unbelievebly kind to me!), but I also have no idea how I'm going to organize them once I'm done sorting.

If you know of any cute, yet effective solutions for this sort of thing, feel free to share! Meanwhile, I'm diving back into my pile of letters and memories:)

PS to anyone who has sent me a birthday card, anniversary card, Valentine's card, thank-you card, or Christmas card in the last three years, (you know who you are!) I read all of them today and they touched my heart! Thanks, everyone for being so great:)

clearing the clutter

You know that feeling you get when you've gotten your house all spick-and-span for a party? Everything is clean, fluffed up and put away, and you feel like life is just a little more perfect? There's no reason to wait until a party to start enjoying that life-is-beautiful feeling! Here are a few of my favorite tips.

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1. Only Keep the "Loves" and "Needs": This one comes courtesy of FlyLady. When deciding what stays and what goes, ask yourself "do I LOVE this?" and "do I NEED this?" If you can't honestly answer yes, throw it out or (better yet) donate it so that it will go to someone who will love it or need it more than you do. Rather than dwelling on yourself and the good memories you have associated with the item, imagine it's new owners and how happy they'll be to have it.

PS Another question I ask myself: "did I even remember that I had this?" If you had forgotten all about it, it probably doesn't mean that much to you!

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2. Use Technology: Computers can help get rid of a lot of your clutter. Just think: CDs are probably taking up 3/4 of the storage space in your car right now, when they could be taking up no space at all if you imported them and uploaded them to your iPod. Throw away the burned ones, donate the store-bought ones. Also, taking digital pictures of sentimental items can be a great way to remember them without having to keep them. If you're sentimental about things like the writing on the burned CDs, or your child's old toys, take a picture of it - then throw it out!

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3. Buy Boxes: I love the pretty, old-fashioned looking letterboxes like these from Container Store. I once bought 6 for $6 at Wal-Mart, so this isn't something that has to cost a lot. I have one for stationary, one for batteries and cords, one for office supplies, and so on. They're great because you can label them, and they look pretty on a shelf!

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4. Move It: Sometimes just moving stuff around can make all the difference in the world. You may find that you have a lot of extra room once you re-box, re-stack and shuffle items more efficiently.

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5. Twice a Year and Once a Month: Twice a year, go through every box, drawer, closet and cabinet you have and get rid of as much as you can. We do it every March and September, and it gets easier each time. Mark your calender and join us!
Once a month, take on one small organizing project. You could put a big stack of photos into albums, or take on my project for this month: go CD-less! Just pick something and tackle it.



Bonus tip: I was going to leave this one out, but I think it's important: just dive in! Don't try to whip up a huge master plan, or overwhelm yourself with a long to-do list. Just start de-cluttering something. It gets addictive!


Feel free to leave comments or shoot me an email with your own de-cluttering tips! I'd love to start a monthly feature like this one:)

Some favorite sites for getting inspired and equipped to organize:

• Real Simple: Organizing
• Fly Lady: De-cluttering
• The Container Store: Tips