organize my house

A while back, I mentioned that Jon and I had won a visit from "Major Moms," a professional organizing service. I told all of you that I would probably cry if they were mean to us or if they showed up in camos.

Well, they weren't mean, but they did show up in camos. I decided not to cry so that hopefully the first thing would remain true.

They gave us some good insight. It was nice to have an outside perspective on our space. They advised us especially to streamline our entryway, making it more open and inviting. Here is the result:

Still some work to do, like getting an actual rug, rather than using a carpet scrap that would probably work better in the garage... Oh and those fake plants to the left? That was #1 on our list of things to change when we moved in three years ago. Ahhh, life. 

I don't have a before picture, because who really wants to see piles of shoes and mail and a big bulky coat rack taking up half the hallway? (Well, you probably do, actually. But I forgot to take one. Oopsies. Just trust me. It looks better now.) The big changes were clearing off the bench to the left and putting up hooks to hang coats and my various bags. We also cleared off the ledge where all the mail usually hangs out. We also moved the stroller out of the hallway so now it lives in the sunroom. Oh and don't you love our little shoes all in a row? This picture was taken weeks ago and I just looked over and the shoes are still lined up. Probably thanks to Jon.

Reworking the entryway has been the first step on our process of simplifying and organizing. I confessed a few weeks ago that Jon is really championing our efforts, but I have made some steps too. Like I cleaned out a lot of clothes. And I was willing to get rid of said big bulky coat rack that I bought at a garage sale and loved. AND, perhaps most impressively, I willingly sat down with Jon one Saturday afternoon and made a budget (more on that tomorrow).

In addition to the entryway, we have cleaned out a couple hall closets and the pantry, and are in a general state of declutter. If, when walking through a room, I spot an object that I don't really love, into the donation-pile it goes.

I've always felt a bit inadequate in the house decorating department. I don't have a knack for things. Like how to make a display on your bookshelf or whatever. I guess you could say I don't have a knack for knick-knacks. I like the sound of that.

Anywho, now that I'm committed to decluttering our house, it's actually a good thing that I don't have tons of useless objects. Yay me! I've been thinking a lot about that show Clean Sweep, you know where the people come into the other people's house and make the crazy lady get rid of half of her 400-pair shoe collection? I always laughed at the people not wanting to get rid of their stuff, but now I kind of get it. It's hard.

But not that hard. It's also kind of fun in a way.

So that's our status... Our visit from Major Mom wearing camo was fun and informative. And we're realizing the importance of having a clean(er) and more organized living space.

And one more thing... I know that the picture I posted about our messy house before wasn't that messy. I know. It was mostly toys. Our house really was messy, but I chose to take a picture that included Jonathan, which meant not taking one of probably the messiest room (our bedroom or the bathroom or the kitchen or the sunroom, take your pick). I just wanted to make sure you know that I'm not a crazy person who defines messy as a few toys on the floor. There. Now I feel better.

sitting by the pond

Jon fixed up our backyard and pond area, which is one of our favorite spots in the spring and summer. J was too little to really enjoy it last year, but loves it now! Especially because the grass is nice and soft and tasty. Oh and we have 25 new goldfish in the pond!

Picturesque

This grass is stretchy

Look at this cool stuff I found, Mom!

Oh my sweet blondy boy

welcome to my life

My house is a mess.

That's J in the middle of the mess playing with my library books. Cool.

Today in particular this fact is bothering me. I don't know why. Sometimes when it is a mess I start to feel irrational and emotional and like I am paralyzed. I can't clean it up because I don't know how. I don't know where everything goes. Because everything doesn't have a place.

The problem is, it's not that messy. It's not a total dump. It's just right on that line of "lived-in" and "cluttered." I don't mind lived-in--I've come to terms with the fact that my house will always have that look. But I do mind cluttered. Not picked up. MESSY.

Why did I not inherit the pick-up-your-towel-after-you-shower gene? My parents are so clean and organized. They have never left a towel on the floor or a bed unmade their entire life. When I was little, I just assumed that part of my maturation into an adult would include a magic transformation into Type A organizational genius.

It didn't happen.

Part of my problem is that I am indecisive. Where does this piece of paper go? Well, it is mail so it could go in the mail pile. But it's a catalog so it could go in the catalog pile. But I really should put it in the recycle bin. But maybe Jon wants it on his desk to look at first? But if I want to order something it should really go on my bedside table to look at later.

See what I mean?

Most of the time I appreciate my Type B-ness (there is one aspect of adult maturation that did happen as expected: learning to accept who I am). I like that I am laid back, go-with-the-flow, fine with gray areas instead of all black-and-white. Yesterday our housemate and I were talking about when Jon and I moved to Denver, when we didn't have jobs or a place to live and all our stuff was packed in a moving van parked in a church parking lot for a week before we found an apartment. "Did that stress you out?" she asked. "Not really," I answered matter-of-factly.

The trouble is, my mind refuses to think in an organized fashion, but my mind desperately wants a clean and organized house. If my mind looked around and was satisfied with its surroundings, there would be no problem. But I envision how things could be and I just can't find a way to get there. (I don't envision the particulars, of course, but rather the generalized clean-floors-labeled-baskets-good-smelling visions. These are the kind of visions that happen alongside dreams of perfect hair, tailored clothes, and the desire to cook dinner every night.)

Marrying another Type B does not help achieve my clean house fantasies, either.

So, earlier this week, I "confessed" that I don't want to invite the organizing gurus into my house for fear of their scolding. But I need to get over myself. We need their help. We need a vision, a plan, someone to make decisions for us.

The company that we have the gift certificate for is called "Major Moms." I like the mom part of it. But the major part scares me. Will she be barking out orders like a drill sargent? Yeesh. I'm a little scared. If she arrives wearing camo, I may start crying.

But we gotta do it. Now is the time. I'm hesitant to say something bold like "This is the year of organizing/decorating/changing-the-foundation-of-who-we-are." But maybe it is. Maybe whether I say it or not, since I am having such a crisis about the whole situation, this is the crossroads. The time to change our ways. The point of no return.

(Ok, Ok, I realize all I am talking about is cleaning up our living room, not planning to sail across the Atlantic. The melodrama is all just for blog effect.)

Major Moms: we need your help. Please come into our home and set us straight. And please don't make me cry.

Nursery Time!

I'll start our tour by saying that we LOVE this room. I always hear people say that the nursery is one of their favorite rooms in the house, and I think that is the case for us as well. So much hard work and joyful preparation went into creating this space. I have to say it actually turned out how I envisioned--something I've probably never actually achieved in a decorating endeavor. It is so warm and cozy but also bright and sunny. Peaceful and relaxing and yet fun and energetic. Perfect for mommy and daddy to enjoy and hopefully for baby as well!

A disclaimer: I know there are a lot of flowers in this room. I know, I know. When creating a gender neutral room, we chose gender neutral colors, and then of course I gravitate less towards geometric fabrics and more towards warm and cozy florals. If we have a boy, we will boy-up the room a little, and same thing with a girl--we will add some pink somewhere!

I guess the easiest way to show you will be through pictures, so here goes...

View from the door. This is the view I see every time I pass by the room. I'm so glad that we chose to put the tree here so we can see it all the time! Thanks Susan so much for painting this tree--it turned out just how I wanted!
You can see the crib bedding and curtains that I may have showed you in a previous post.

Moving towards the left. Here is our $200 Walmart chair and ottoman. We were looking for the perfect chair for the nursery and couldn't find anything that was quite right. I was seriously ABOUT to click on a final order for a $600 chair and ottoman when I decided to search the internet one more time, and came across this chair. I liked the look of it a whole lot better than any other one I had seen (besides the perfect $1000 Pottery Barn variety of course), but was a bit worried about the quality being from Walmart. It definitely is not as comfortable as some more expensive chairs might be, but for the money, and with the addition of this , we actually think it works pretty well!  You know how I love me a bargain...

Continuing left-ward. There is the "green" cabinet that is now gray. Susan painted this dandelion motif which looks great. The bookshelf is slowly being filled up :) Wouldn't be my child's nursery without a bookshelf.  Mostly it contains my old childhood books, including my entire Berenstein Bears collection that Mom just mailed us!
Cute little bouncy seat is from Mom. Elephant lamp is from Marshall's. Sunflower painting is also by Susan. Excited to use that sound machine on top of the bookcase. The frame with the ultrasound picture is not of our baby.

And we continue moving left. This is the corner across from the crib corner. Love this sweet little cradle/swing.

View of the changing table all ready for some changin! Do you like the hardware on the dresser? We think the lantern cluster is a nice touch and a nice way to add some light. On the shelf are some Ikea white vases from Kate, a white ceramic bird (random), 2 white ceramic elephants from our neighbor's garage sale, and an angel figurine that Jon and I got in Cabo when Baby B was only 20 weeks old. The baby pics of Jon will probably not stay there--I'll give them back to Betsy when she comes to visit! :)
To the left of the shelf there's a little framed-fabric collage. In decorating this nursery I developed a new love--for fabric. You can just do so much with it! So I decided to incorporate several of the fabrics used in the nursery into this element.

Close up of above the swing. These 2 cross-stitches (sp?) hung in my nursery and bedroom as a kid. We framed them and now they are a little piece of my childhood passed on to Baby B! The poem in the lower frame was written by my Gramps. Good for Baby B to have a little piece of Gramps here too!

Another view of the crib/tree corner. Don't you just love that tree?
And I made that pillow cover--my very first attempt at a zipper. I showed you the boppy zipper in the previous post because the zipper on this pillow case was not quite as pretty. But it works and I love this pattern and the touch of turquoise it brings!

Another one of my favorite parts of the room--the closet panels. I had originally measured the closet panels to basically cover the closet opening exactly, which was a mistake because that means you have to have them just right to cover the whole closet. I didn't have enough fabric to remake them, so I improvised and sewed scraps together to make a patchworky look and we like it better now!

 So there it is! Our sweet little nursery. There's still lots we could do, like add things on the walls. I'm sure Baby B will accumulate lots of personal touches that will continue to make this space special. Little one, don't you want to come out so you can see your very own house and very own room???? 

39 weeks tomorrow--I can't believe it. I'll let you know how the visit goes. Better yet, maybe our next post will be a picture of Baby!!!! A girl can hope.

Nesting

For any of you who have been reading this blog since its beginning, you know I have been nesting for the past 8 months. Honestly, pregnancy has been one of the most productive times in my life! To-do lists actually have checks on them. And, better yet, I really felt like I had been taking everything in stride--not getting stressed about getting things done, being realistic about what is necessary/worth the money, etc.

Well.

I had my first nesting insanity/breakdown on Thursday night. Remember on our last post I mentioned that we established a nice easy breakdown of the must-do vs. the nice-to-do lists? That concept kept my mind at east for almost a whole week, and then BAM! Hormones criss-crossed and banged into each other and suddenly I was in a frenzied emotional sobbing state.

It happened after we got home from our 36 week appt (Where we learned baby is still in excellent position and that these weird pains I'd been having are probably cervical changes...yikes!). We had gotten our bassinet in the mail (more on that later--this bassinet is very special to me!) and that meant we could rearrange our bedroom to accommodate the bassinet. Well, we rearranged. Jon was cutely trying to suggest ways to rearrange or ask what I wanted, but dear hubby don't you know I have been thinking about this for the past 6 months? So we set up the room as I had envisioned, only it didn't look like I envisioned. So I did what any other 8 month pregnant woman would do--I laid on the bed and cried. My sweet Jon laid there with me, rubbing my back and trying to determine what exactly was wrong (of course he knows me enough by now to know there is never one exact wrong thing). So after blubbering for a while about how the room looks so different, so much change is happening, our life is going to be so different, etc., I declared that what was really wrong was that the guest room and the sunroom were not ready for the baby.

Sweet hubby's eyes got big for a moment (when I'm sure all the schoolwork he needed to get done that evening flashed in his mind as he realized that wasn't gonna happen) and then got into action mode as I continued to lay in a lump on the bed.

So, once I gathered myself, we moved all our bookshelves into the sunroom to create a cozy library effect. Jon broke down all the cardboard boxes that had taken over the sunroom. He even moved his piles of school stuff out of the guest room so that I could get in there and clean a little better.

Somewhere in the midst of this unplanned house-rearranging he asked "Is this what they were talking about?" As in, in labor class we learned that some mothers have sudden, irrational nesting needs soon before the baby comes. I'm not sure if this was my official off-the-wall nesting escapade. I think things could get a lot worse. All I know is, this baby is coming soon! Can't wait!

Oh, and the top 3 things that MUST get done haven't quite gotten done yet. But we have a plan for doing them: we are going to do them this week. That is our plan. My wonderful Aunt Linda offered to pay for a diaper cleaning service for 3 months after Baby B arrives so this week we are looking into options for that. Thanks Aunt Linda!!

Happy Mother's Day to all you mamas and mamas-to-be. Our moms are so special to us and I surely feel closer to them during this time of becoming a mom. Love you both Mom and Betsy!!!

Our Weekend

As mentioned in the last post, Jon and I had a check-things-off-the-list kind of weekend. This is a big accomplishment for us, since often the option of lay-in-bed-and-watch-movies trumps check-things-off-the-list. Here is the story of our productive weekend...

Our good friend Barton joined Jon bright and early to start on the windows. We have 4 windows that we need to replace (2 in the dining room and 2 in the nursery) and basically had no idea how to get the windows out before starting. Once they figured it out, I think the boys had fun breaking glass and sawing through the metal frame and banging the window out. It turns out they had to cut the drywall on the sides of the windows to get them out. See that big whole in the wall on the side of the window? Yep, that's still there. The "Making Things Look Pretty Phase" will come later, I'm told.

  

Carl joined us later on for taking out window #2. I hope you can tell from this picture what a messy process this was... Our lovely dining room table doubled nicely as a work bench. And there is still a fine layer of dust covering half our kitchen and living room to remind us of the work that was done here. Doesn't that new window on the left look nice???

 

This is the nursery, which functioned as the holding chamber for the windows waiting to be installed.

Here is my handsome handy-man hubby working on taking the first window out of the nursery. AND here's a little shout out to the college roomies--recognize that big cabinet??? Last weekend it got painted gray and is no longer the big GREEN cabinet but now the big GRAY cabinet (although we still refer to it as The Green Cabinet). We will paint some kind of yellow sunflower motif on it and use it in the baby's room. Who would have thought that big clunky green cabinet would end up being in my baby's nursery! haha

Some instructional technique for ya... They first taped around the edges of the glass panels, and then hammered the edges to free the panel from the window. The tape held most of the glass in place so the shattered pieces didn't go all over... theoretically. Pretty smart huh?

Then once the glass panel is released, they just take it out.

Here was my project for the day--painting the crib. We found the exact crib we wanted on craigslist for a great deal, but it was light yellow. You can see the original color here. Pretty cute actually, but not the same yellow as we are using throughout the room, so it had to be painted. Luckily it was a beautiful day to be outside painting! Yes I used a mask while spray painting (although this poor child probably still got her fair share of inhaled fumes...oops!). I love how it turned out with the white--it will look PERFECT in the room!

Here is my project pile that got thrown into the sunroom because the guys needed the dining room for the windows. Yikes. You can see a few of the fabrics we are using. There are a couple panels of the bumper that are finished underneath all that fabric... the bumper has proven to be a looong task, but it is turning out really good. In the background see those little turquoise rings hanging from the white fabric? This was a result of a suggestion from my fabulous artsy designy sister--who suggested adding something turquoise to the gray and yellow curtains to bring all the colors together. So I decided to paint the curtain rings turquoise. She is brilliant!

So hope you are impressed by our weekend! Well, only be mildly impressed, because we still have one window to take out/put in and LOTS of clean up. And of course that pile of fabric is still sitting in the sunroom waiting to be finished. And of course 2 of the crib panels need another coat of paint. BUT PROGRESS WAS MADE! Getting our house ready for Baby B!!!! Love it!!!

Life...

It's just been life as we know it these past few weeks. Not much to report...

Jon finished up his big paper a few weeks ago--this paper basically summarizes all that he has learned in seminary. He will have to defend it in front of a committee at the end of March. So proud of him! Crazy to think the end of his seminary schooling is almost here.

This has been a productive few weeks--we finally picked up the windows we ordered about 3 months ago. (Now we just have to install them!) I bought and painted a dresser/changing table that I found for a great deal on craigslist. I think it will be great in the baby's room. I do love getting a good deal. Today we bought a crib off craigslist for another great deal! Oh how saving money makes me happy. All the fabric for the baby's room has arrived so I have some big sewing projects ahead of me. I have LOVED the fabric choices we made. So relieved--as you all know it was a big decision for this indecisive girl :)

Our dear roommate Taylor officially moved out today. Sad day. We will miss her so much and have loved sharing life with her. I know that this transition is for the best--she is on to exciting things with her move to Rhode Island, and we of course will use her room for a nursery!--but it was still a bittersweet day and it will be weird without her around here...

More exciting things will be coming the next few weeks--I will post a 27 week belly pic this Friday (I have grown so so much these past few weeks!!!! I'm actually starting to feel a bit uncomfortable with this huge belly!), Jon is competing in another chess tournament this weekend, and I get to travel to New York with my mom, dad, and sister this weekend. We'll keep you posted!