My New (and Organized!) Space

Hey guys. I didn't think it would take nearly a week to get this done but that's the way it goes, I guess. Will worked really hard this weekend to get my shelves built and painted and I've spent the majority of the last two days trying to get everything organized and into boxes. The boxes are from Ikea and I LOVE THEM! Yes, I'm shouting! Aside from being time consuming to assemble, they are perfect! I love that they come in so many sizes and that now everything looks neat and organized! My room is about 95% complete. I still have a few minor things to finish (like hiding cords) but otherwise, it's done and I am so happy! Pictures are below.

Looking into the room:



And the opposite side of the room:



One of the new bookcases:



The desk area in the middle of the two bookcases:



The other new bookcase:



The wrapping/weighing area




And some of my shelves over in one corner that hold some of my seasonal items and some of my other favorite things



I'll try to take more pictures once it's all put together. These pictures are kind of dark and grainy but hey, at least I finally posted pictures!!

My Office is a Ridiculous Mess

And I cannot take it any longer! I have been struggling since last November to get this place set up in a functioning manner and I have failed miserably. Today, while I was emailing back and forth with my mama, I had one of those light bulb moments. I think I've finally figured out how to set it up in here so that I can actually keep it neat and organized AND be productive! Part of this light bulb moment included the realization that a couple of my favorite pieces of furniture that are currently in here just aren't going to work for this space. And that leads me to the second half of my day:

I'm switching out the two guest rooms upstairs. Currently, we have a larger bedroom which has two twin size beds and a chest of drawers. And then there is the smaller room that has the full size bed and a chest of drawers. Now, this probably seems like a ridiculous set up, given the sizes of the rooms, but last year when we moved in, I was certain we'd need to keep the two twin sized beds and I wanted to have more room in between them so I put them in the bigger of the two bedrooms. Having lived here for almost a year now, I'm realizing that we don't really have many guests and it's pointless to take up that much space when I could better utilize it by switching beds/rooms and taking away one of the twin size beds! Yay for that little insight!

Additionally, once the bedrooms are switched, I'll then have enough room in both rooms to put one piece of the furniture currently in my craft space! So, I'll have more space in the bedrooms plus I'll be able to take the furniture in my craft room and repurpose it to work in the bedrooms, thus freeing up some much needed wall space here in my office/scraproom. I should really stop calling it a scraproom. I haven't scrapped in forevah! Like at least a year! Okay, I think I'll go with craft room. Or maybe just office. I don't really do much crafting either! lol Decisions, decisions!

In other news, Will made it home safely late last Tuesday night and he came bearing a huge Leonidas box *and* some chocolate covered Belgian waffles! We relaxed a lot on Wednesday and Thursday and then headed to the beautiful Amish countryside in Pennsylvania on Friday. Of course I was hoping to leave rather early, giving me plenty of time to explore the area but we didn't even get on the road until a quarter til noon! I visited some antique stores, found a Salvation Army where I bought a couple of cute old suitcases and then found a fabulous Goodwill. We stopped for dinner at Cracker Barrel on the way home that night and all in all, had a very relaxing day! It was great!!

I did some thrifting yesterday and had a little bit of luck. It seems that the thrift stores are getting kind of slim though. And what they do have to offer is so much more expensive than it was a year ago. I always get good laugh at some of their prices! Oh, and I roll my eyes a bit too!! I'm quite ready for some yard sales and church rummage sales. I always find good stuff at those places.

Well, I need to get back to the reorganizing or I'm going to lose my motivation. I promise I'll have lots of pictures to share once it's all complete. And yes, I realize I've been saying that for 5 months!! I'll do much better this time around.

Another little peak...

Would you all believe my room still isn't finished?? Good grief!! This is taking a lot longer than I had anticipated! Oh, we're through with painting, thank the good Lord but now I'm dealing with the nightmare of where to put everything. See, Will built me a big ol bookshelf thing which you would think would offer a lot of storage. I mean it does offer a lot of storage but at the same time, I'm losing another piece of furniture that I had a lot of stuff stored in. I guess I could keep it in here, but the whole reason I wanted to re-do my room, the whole reason I wanted Will to build me a bookshelf was because I felt very cramped in here. So, now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to store all of my stuff! It's slowly coming along though.

Check out this picture. It's a shot of my wall color and the valance that I initially bought for the twin size guest room, before I even knew I wanted to paint my room these colors. It matches perfectly! It's just like the picture of the curtain I posted last week, only it's a valance. Of course now Target has stopped carrying these so I'm forced to go on Ebay and order 2 more so I can have matching treatments at each window. I looked at several fabric stores and couldn't find anything I liked nearly as much as these so I'm just going to go ahead and buy 2 more and be done with it. The curtains are $20 a panel, and I found 2 valances on Ebay for $12, so I'll stick with the valances!




Oh, it's 25% off day at the Value Village and I found out last Monday that they open a full hour earlier than I thought! I got there right at 10:00 last week and I couldn't figure out how so many people were already in the store with full carts and then I saw the hours on the door. They open at 9! So, I'm going to be there at 9:00 today and maybe I'll snag some good deals. I have a TON of stuff I need to get posted on Etsy today too. I made another sale last week, so in a weeks time I made 2 sales so I hope my luck continues!!

I'm hoping later today that I'll have a chance to catch up on some of my favorite blogs too because I haven't even had the chance to do that lately and I'm dying to see what you all have been up to! Hope everyone has a fabulous Monday!

A Sneak Peek

I haven't had much time to get online these last few days but I'm taking a break from painting to hop on here for a few minutes and catch up on everything! The painting is almost done and hopefully by tomorrow I'll have my room put back together and organized. I never realized how much I'd miss having my own space until it was gone and lemme tell ya, I miss it A LOT! Sure, I've got my laptop that I could be using to update, but it's not the same. Anyhow, the room is almost finished and I'll definitely share pictures when it's all done, but in the mean time here are a couple to hold you over! I cannot get a good picture of the paint color on the walls. It's a light robin's egg blue. At least I'm guessing that's the best way to describe it. It's definitely not baby blue. I love the color. And my desk...my fabulous PINK desk. Yes, pink. I love it so much! Both colors are a lot lighter in person than they are showing up in the pictures so just pretend that you're looking at them in person!





I have that fabulous chippy green cabinet I bought at an estate sale back in the summer that is going to come back in here when I'm done painting and then Will is building me a huge bookshelf that's painted a pale green too. I found some drapes at Target that would match this room perfectly but I'm trying to resist buying them because they are pricey and I could make them cheaper.

My $5 estate sale cabinet from this summer:


And the curtains at Target that I really want for this room but don't want to spend $80+ dollars on. I couldn't find the picture of the actual curtains on Target.com so I had to "borrow" one from an ebay auction:


Wouldn't those look great in here? I may break down and buy them!

I took a couple of hours yesterday to run to the Value Village and I bought a ton of amazing stuff. Except for 3 items, all of it is for resale and I'll hopefully get to list it soon. Speaking of resale, I learned a very valuable and expensive lesson this weekend. Don't list on Etsy when you are only half-awake. Because if you're like me, you'll put the wrong price on shipping for "Everywhere Else" and someone will buy an item and you'll be out of pocket when you pay almost eleven freaking dollars to mail something to France! So, don't do that! And if you discover you made a mistake on several other listings, go back in and change the price on shipping before anyone else makes a purchase. Yes, I learned the hard way, but it was nice to get a sale within a week of listing something on Etsy. Of course the timing could've been better, seeing how my entire scrap/craft room is turned upside down and it was a PITA having to find the product and then my mailing supplies but hey, a sale is a sale and that's cool!

Oh, crap, I almost forgot! Last week I was browsing through some other blogs and I stumbled across this amazing place: Lisa's RetroStyle. Well, I was reading through some of her posts and saw where she'd recently bought a mannequin and was needing a name. I offered up the name "Veronica" and at the time I don't think I even realized that she was having a *CONTEST* to name the mannequin, but I received a comment from Lisa over the weekend telling me that I'd won the contest and she was naming her new mannequin Veronica! How cool is that? I really want a mannequin of my own and I've been searching the thrift stores and craigslist to no avail! Maybe soon. So, a huge thank-you to Lisa for the brooch that is coming my way!! I can't wait to see some of your other fabulous clothing on Miss Veronica!

Well, I suppose I should get back to work. What I really want to do is drag myself and my doggies upstairs and take about a 3 hour nap, but I must persevere and get this room finished. Look at this weather. Isn't this perfect sleeping weather? This is the view from my windows in my craft room. It's rainy & cool outside and I just want to go snuggle up in bed with my dogs and a book at relax!

Happy Halloween!

Last night while Will and I were out on the porch hanging up our spider webs, we noticed the neighbor across the street dragging out even MORE of his Halloween stuff and we decided that I needed to do a little more shopping today and buy a few more things. LOL I feel a little friendly competition beginning between our houses. I can't wait to see what Christmas is like.

So, today, instead of going to Home Depot and buying paint, I'll be schlepping across the Baltimore metro region looking for more spider webs, some strobe lights, more tombstones, a couple of spotlights and then costumes for the two of us. Nothing like last minute preparations, huh? Oh, and I still need to go buy candy and fill up the treat bags.

Last year I filled almost 100 little treat bags and we sat at the house for the entire night and we didn't have even ONE trick-or-treater come by. Talk about disappointing! It was our first (and only) year in that house/neighborhood and we just assumed we'd get some kids. Hahaha I finally threw away all of that candy when we moved back in April. I've seen several houses on our new street that have decorated for Halloween though so I'm guessing we might get a few trick-or-treaters tonight. But, if we don't, it'll be okay because I'm buying all chocolate and well, I wouldn't complain if we had leftovers and I were forced to eat them!

And lest you think I sat around all day yesterday scheming up ways to out do the neighbors decorations, allow me to provide proof to the contrary:





That's right, folks. I emptied my craft room (minus the big furniture) yesterday and everything is now sitting in the middle of the dining room. Yeah, that's lovely! I absolutely HAVE TO paint tomorrow so I can get my stuff put back in here ASAP because all of my crap in the dining room is just not working! The husband offered to help me by putting everything in boxes & trash bags. lol Think he's trying to tell me something?!

Well, I should go get dressed and start running my errands so I can get back here early enough to decorate, fill up the treat bags and dress up! Hope you all have a frightfully fun Halloween, be safe tonight!

My latest Ghetto Thrift Goodies

Boy did I get some fabulous things at the GT today. You know, sometimes when I go to the Ghetto Thrift, I leave almost empty handed. Never completely empty-handed though because I always find at least one thing I just can't live without, but there have been times I've left rather disappointed. See, the drive to the Ghetto Thrift takes me through some of the 'hoods of Baltimore and I get kind of nervous driving over there. So, when I go to the GT, I like it to be worth my drive and I like to buy a lot of stuff. If this thrift store was in a different location (say, not in the hood) I'd probably go more often but I am just not that comfortable driving there more than once a week. It takes me about that long to get my courage up again!!

Anyhow, so yesterday I had to run some errands and I decided I needed to stop in the GT to see if there were any new treasures that needed to come home with me. And I wasn't disappointed at all. What I was disappointed about was the fact that the GT only has like 5 carts and the rest is hand baskets. Now really, how much stuff can you fit in a basket?? That is the most stupid idea ever! If you want people to buy a lot of stuff, at least have somewhere for them to put all of their crap while they are shopping. So, I wasn't lucky enough to get a cart because the store was crowded and I had to settle for a basket. That sucker got loaded down though and I thought the bottom might break!

Here is my little rant for the week. Last week I stopped into the GT and picked up a few things and the lady running the register told me I couldn't use my 25% discount because I didn't tell her in time. That kind of pissed me off because the first thing I do when I get up there is put my military ID on the counter. Basically, she didn't take the time to enter the discount and she would've had to ring my order up again so she just told me she couldn't take it. Ugh! So, yesterday while I was checking out, I asked if they were still giving the discount and the guy told me they were. Yay for my discount! I was counting on receiving the discount because I bought a couple of things I normally wouldn't buy if I had to pay full price for them!!

So, on to my fabulous purchases. First up, a couple of vintage children's books. I don't know why I've been drawn to these old books lately. Maybe it's because of the cute covers or the colorful illustrations on the inside. These are for resell though and I hope someone on Etsy will find a good use for them, either to read or to use in crafts.



I also picked up this vintage box of hosiery. The box says "Bakers Dozen" but there are only a couple of pairs left in the box. Either way, the box alone was worth the purchase price and if there are any retro-dressing ladies that need some new hose, well, here ya go!



And then I found this adorable twin size flat sheet with two pillow cases. I love the yellow flowers but more importantly, look at that ruffle! These linens are SO soft! I love nothing more than to crawl into bed and feel soft, cold sheets and these feel like they'd be heavenly to sleep on. Honestly, I prefer vintage linens to anything you can buy today. There is just no comparison to me, not even with the 12 million thread count sheets you can get these days. I'm torn on what to do with these though. One of our guest rooms has two twin beds in it so I could always keep these to use on those beds. On the other hand, we hardly EVER have company and those beds are almost never used.



And my absolute best find of the week is this little beauty below. I think I almost dropped my basket when I saw this hanging up. I couldn't wait to get my greedy little hands on it before someone else spotted it. Check out this full/double size blue with white flowers chenille bedspread.





Isn't it gorgeous? And in fairly good condition too! I noticed a small section of the fringe unravelling and one section on the back side that the stitching is coming undone but that looks to be an easy fix. I was just so excited to find this thing! You hardly ever see chenille spreads around here and usually they are white or beige. I love the bright blue color. Last year at the VV near the base I found a fabulous double peacock chenille spread that had a green background. It was only a couple of dollars and was shoved under a rack of linens. I'm thinking someone else wanted it and had put it there to come back later and buy but too bad! I'm debating if I should keep these for our other guest room or if I should sell it. Hmmm so many decision!

I also picked up a couple more milk glass candy dish things to hold more of my crap, er I mean very valuable items, here in my craft room and a cute drinking glass with a picture of a blue warbler on it. I swear I saw someone else post pictures on their blog not long ago of a set of glasses with birds but I cannot find the post now!

So, that was my day at the GT. Quite a good haul, I made it out of the 'hood safely and bought a ton of good stuff. Now I need to work on emptying out my room because I finally decided on paint colors and I'm painting this place ASAP! I can't wait to show you the new look. I have a few pieces of furniture that I want to paint but I feel guilty painting it. Someone please tell me to not feel badly for painting this stuff. I mean it's not like museum quality furniture. Just stuff I've picked up at thrift stores or estate sales and I want my room to match and look cute. Tell me it's okay to paint this ugly brown furniture!

Saturday. It Sucked!!

I remember when Will and I used to spend rainy, stormy weekends cuddled up in bed, listening to the thunder and dozing in and out of slumber. Ah, fond memories those are. Because we cannot do that any longer. Oh, sure, we still *want* to do that, but our lovely house has some issues. Like the basement which leaks in about 50 different spots. I wish I were exaggerating.

Saturday morning we were up at 7:00 to check on the basement. Earlier this summer, we noticed a major leak during a storm. As in, a pencil sized hole in the wall and water pouring in like a waterfall. So, we knew the basement leaked, we just didn't realize to what extent. Uh, yeah, we have some major issues down there, which we discovered as we spent the entire freaking day moving stuff out of the basement, and sucking up water with the shop vac.

The man we bought the house from only owned the place for 2.5 months. He bought it in January, fixed it up and then sold it to us in April. Evidently the people he bought the house from failed to disclose the fact that the basement had major leaks and I doubt the man we bought it from knew because it doesn't rain a lot during the winter so there's no way he could've known. Also, the people he bought it from had started to finish out the basement and there are 2 walls with studs and drywall. Guess where the majority of the water was coming from? Uh huh. I told Will to break the drywall so we could see behind it and sure enough, water was pouring in through several areas.

Our area easily saw 5+ inches of rain on Saturday alone. That's not counting the rain on Thursday afternoon/night and then most of the day on Friday. The ground was just so saturated that water was even seeping up through the cracks in the basement floor.

Needless to say, Will and I were both in extremely pissy moods Saturday. It was such a mess down there. I mean we probably sucked up several hundred gallons of water. Just as soon as we'd empty the 16 gallon shop vac, we'd fill it right back up. And the stairs going down into the basement are kind of shoddy, the treads aren't very wide and I just knew I was going to fall and break something as I tried to walk up/down the tiny stairs carrying a ton of crap and wearing wet sneakers.

Thank the GOOD Lord that the rain stopped yesterday though because I.was.done! I could barely walk yesterday. My legs were so sore from walking up and down stairs and carrying all that stuff. My back hurt from being all hunched over vacuuming the basement for like 8 hours. And mentally, I was just exhausted. I suppose if any good came out of this whole fiasco, the basement is finally empty and now Will can get to work on plugging any holes and then start finishing it off the way he wants.

So, in other news, today is 25% off day at the Value Village thrift. I skipped last Monday because I just didn't feel like dealing with the crowds but I'm going to go today. It's been over a week since I did any thrifting so I need to go get my fix. I also need to make some stops in the craft store, the grocery store and TJ Maxx or Marshall's. I also need to remember to get my battery charger for my camera out of the husbands truck so I can recharge the batteries and finally take some pictures of all of my new goodies.

Those are my plans for today. Well, that and trying to catch up on the 400+ items I need to read on Google Reader. Yeah, I'm a little behind on that!

An update...

I am finally home again here in Maryland. Techincally, I've been home since last Wednesday but I have been busy/tired/relaxing since I got back. Will flew back on Wednesday too and we had an extremely laid back weekend. If any of you watched the news over the last week and a half, you probably heard that Dick Cheney was visiting Georgia, Italy and a couple of other spots. Well, that's where Will was too. He flies with the Vice President. Exciting, huh?

Anyhow, since we've been back, we've unpacked all of our luggage, done tons of laundry, went grocery shopping, stopped into Home Depot, started putting away summer stuff and pulling out our fall accessories, spent countless hours on the sofa watching tv, taken a couple of naps and caught up on about 30lbs worth of mail!

I managed to sneak away for a few hours today since Will was at work and I went to the Goodwill a couple of miles from my house. I found one box of vintage ornaments for a dollar so that was nice. I also stopped into Jo-Ann's and Target and I have to confess -- it's nice being back home and having so many shopping options. Jackson was nice, it was beautiful but there was no Target, no craft stores, none of the places I love to shop at. So, while I enjoyed my time in Wyoming, I'm very happy to be back here where I know I have tons of shopping options!

I spent a good hour or so earlier trying to clean and organize my craft room again. It became the dumping ground this weekend and I could barely even walk in here. I have a ton of things on my to-do list that I want to start on this week so I had to try to clean it up a bit before I could do anything else. It's definitely a constant work-in-progress though as I'm still trying to get things organized and into some sort of usable system. Right now it's just not working that well but I hope that I can figure something out soon.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to make it over to the ghetto thrift. It's been about 7 weeks since I've gone and that's much too long. I'm hoping I can find lots of goodies because I certainly haven't had much luck at the other thrift stores I've been to recently!

Finally!

It really feels as though I've been neglecting my blog. I've wanted to sit down and write a couple of times but life has been very busy around here. Heck, I haven't even read any blogs in almost a week. I've got a lot of catching up to do.

First, I want to say thanks to Lisa from Confessions of an Apron Queen. I won a contest on her site a couple of weeks ago and received a FABULOUS apron & a big, huge World Atlas! Both came in the last week or so and I've thoroughly enjoyed them already!! She rocks- be sure to check out her blog and also her apron store at Rickrackattack.com. She has the best selection of vintage aprons anywhere!

My Apron:


My Atlas:



In other news, the husband was off for a couple of days last week and we made some progress outside. We planted some flowers in our naked little flower beds and did some stuff around the house too. I still need him to pressure wash the rockers so I can get those painted. Our porch looks so sad right now. It's a big ol' wrap around porch but it's really naked. I need more flowers and plants and just to spruce it up some.

This past weekend was very busy also. We've been trying to empty the basement and sort through all of the boxes and put aside things for donation or a yard sale and taking the rest of our stuff up to the attic. It's a slow process but we're almost done. The husband is going to try to get the basement empty so he can waterproof down there and then finish it off. We could use the room down there for exercise equipment or maybe put a bar down there. I also want the office moved out of my scrap/craft room so I'll have more room for MY stuff!

Our yard sale pile is huge. Bags and bags of clothing and misc stuff that we've just been hanging on to. You would've thought I would've gone through all of this stuff before we moved from SC to MD 2 years ago but evidently I was convinced that I would shrink back into some of those old clothes. I've finally realized I'm not 18 anymore, I'm never going to be that size again unless my jaws are wired shut for 6 months and even if some miracle occurred and I was that skinny again, well, the clothes aren't really my style anymore. SO, I'm freeing myself of the clutter and I'm getting rid of it all! I'm going to try to have the yard sale in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll do well because I'm going to use the money I get from the sale to drive out to Wyoming later this summer.

Speaking of yard sales, I went to two fabulous estate sales on Saturday. I got up a little later than I had planned so I didn't make it to one until about 30 minutes after it started and the stuff had already been picked through. I did manage to snag this great little cabinet for $5. I didn't even realize it was light green until yesterday when the husband brought it inside for me. I thought it was white, but green is even better! I love the chippy paint and the wire on the doors. So, so cute. It's perfect for storing all of my card making supplies.

The cabinet:


The other estate sale I went to was much larger and I seriously thought I had died & gone to Heaven. The entire basement was filled, FILLED with bookshelves. Know what was on the bookshelves? Cookbooks. I'm talking literally thousands of cookbooks. There were more cookbooks in the boxes on the floor, every room in the basement had cookbooks. I was in.love. But it was also overwhelming. There were just so many to choose from. I spent a good hour down in that basement looking for books. The lighting down there was horrible though and it was hot and humid and really hard to see. I managed to pick up 8 that I just couldn't live without. I had picked up a really old Betty Crocker 3-ring cookbook that I really wanted but another lady had mentioned she needed one so I gave it to her. Still kicking myself over that one! It wasn't in very good condition though so that made it easier to part with. The cookbooks were only 50 cents and I really should have bought more. I hope they have another sale this coming weekend. I'll go armed with boxes to put the books into because carrying them the way I did was very heavy!

Yesterday I spent pretty much the entire day cleaning out my scrap room. It looks about a million percent better but I still need some more storage in here. Like a good bookshelf to put all my magazines on. Right now they are just sitting in files on the floor. And I need to figure out what I'm going to use as my ribbon storage because what I'm using now isn't going to work once I start actually crafting again. Right now they are in these big blue boxes from Ikea but I need to be able to see my ribbons while I'm working. The last couple of houses we've been in, I've used cafe rods and put the ribbons on that. It works really well except I don't have very much wall space in this room. Lots of windows which is really nice, but not a lot of room on the walls. Not sure what to do with the ribbons. I don't want to use jars because that would annoy the heck out of me each time I had to go through the jar to get to a specific ribbon. I may be able to use the back of the door though. I have to look into that.

Anyhow, here are some more pictures of my little scrap/craft room:




12 x 12 paper storage:


Ribbon Storage in blue boxes, pictures in the others:


Some of my vintage books, a train case filled with misc craft stuff and a cute cabinet I bought at the Salvation Army for $15:


Some of my favorite aprons. This little cabinet had one cup hook on the side and I added a few more. A great way to get my aprons out of a storage box so I can enjoy them:


My work table. It's never this clean so I had to take a picture so I could remember it:


And finally, my wall of embellishments- sorted by season, event, categories and completely full. I actually need another one for some of the overflow!


Now that I've caught up my blog, I'm gonna spend some time reading what everyone else has been up to this past week!! Thanks for stopping by.