What a mess...

Organizing my bookcase with nothing but a coffee cup by my side at 7AM...

Five months ago, my last blog post mentioned I was getting a divorce and that I was keeping my condo with the pink carpets.  Well, that's all true.  Just when you think you've gotten into the groove of decorating, your spouse moves out and takes half your DVDs with him but leaves all the particle board furniture that I ABSOLUTELY HATE.  If there's one thing I abhor more than pink carpets and the divorce process, it's got to be sawdust-and-glue-with-laminate furniture that's disgusting and costs too much for the garbage it is.

So X moved out (and I edited his nickname in previous entries. January 2018 note: I edited him almost completely out because he's really not important).  Things got ugly so he left so much stuff here that we almost had to rent a moving van just to bring him the things he wanted, nevermind the things he didn't.  The things he didn't want mainly consisted of furniture that I didn't like anyway, so I hemmed and hawed for a couple months about putting it up on craigslist.

This is no Victorian dresser.  This has no history, no personality, nothing.  It did have a matching 9-drawer dresser with a mirror that I don't have any pictures of and don't really care.

In the end of March, I woke up at 6AM and decided all the furniture I hated was leaving my house.  Right then, right that second.  Couldn't be bothered with Craigslist, it had to go.  It wasn't just X's former office that was chock full of dressers and a kitchen table and some other stuff, it was also my entire ugly 1950's bedroom set that I always hated that he had purchased shortly after we got married when all we needed was a bed...and the wicker headboard that was just a white blob of sticks against the wall.

So on that fateful day in March, I heaved the entire 9-drawer dresser over the bed solo at 6:30AM and prepared to empty my home of every piece of furniture I didn't like.  Every. Piece.  I called my grandfather and he brought his truck, and by 10:30 we'd donated two truck loads of ugly furniture to Goodwill.  Sometimes you just need to purge and it feels so good.

Strangely, most of my purging ended around the beginning of April.  Or so I thought...and then I quit my postal job in the middle of June.  Faced with a plethora of free time...I started purging, again.

However, for all the purging that's been done, I've been making room to bring home things that were in storage that X never liked and thus, never put up.  Like these posters that had been sitting in storage since 2007:

I suppose that's a sufficient teaser, right? Here's a small bullet list of upcoming posts...

• Furniture Find of 2006: Once upon a time there was this circular orange chair that didn't match anything ever, and then it was given to me and I threw it in my car and then made my grandparents live with it for 5 years...
• Before and After: How my grandfather turned a free Craigslist find into a bench for my grandmother, which is adorable.
• Furniture Find of 2012: If you get divorced, you should splurge on a huge piece of furniture that you've had your eyes on for two years.
• Simple DIY projects (random ideas I totally stole and executed from Pinterest...WHAT. That's what it's for.)

Now, all that icky divorce stuff aside, life goes on, and life is good.  I didn't really want to write about it but I can't just skip to the next chapter without acknowledging that it happened and why, all of the sudden, my blog just omits a person who was in my life for years. Truth is, I didn't want to abandon this blog because I put a lot of work into starting it, and seeing as it was relatively new when dung hit the fan, I figured could just give it time and pick it up again when the timing was right.  It wasn't about him anyway, it was about home decor, and we never really saw eye-to-eye with that anyway, kitchen organization aside.  He took all the kitchen gadgets with him, which leaves me with like... a crockpot...and a blender and my mom's juicer from 1992.  Oh, and the coffee maker.  At least he knew better than to take that.

Anyway, there is a new character around, but I'll introduce him in the next blog post, and we have flea market adventures and it's going to be fun to include him in future posts, mainly because we have similar tastes. He's also part of the reason I've started purging more things I don't need, and why I now have an exercise room with a brand-new elliptical machine.  This blog will get there, but things are good.