Household upheaval, out with the old, and in with the...older...

I've decided I don't like wicker furniture, like at all.  I found a consignment store here in Norwich to sell it for me. Bye!

There's a whole bunch of excuses as to why I've been TERRIBLE keeping up with my blog, and here they are in bullets!

• My mom's household is gaining a member, which means all my mystery boxes of "I'll sort this later" needed to be dragged out into the woods and set on fire and brought to my place.
• Road trip to PA to visit Brent's family.
• Camera broke while on said road trip!
• My entire Etsy store needed to vacate the spare room because...
• My own household is gaining a member in December, which means all the crap I hauled over from my mom's needs to get the hell out of my living room gooooooooooo, as well as a couch and a bed and ALL THE WICKER FURNITURE and even more furniture...
• But then Brimfield happened.

• I came home with furniture.

My Etsy store, Blithe Button , has been causing problems in my living space since 2008.  I have a large amount of inventory including everything from an entire closet worth of vintage clothing to fragile glassware, and the list goes on, since I sell crafting supplies and hand made jewelry as well.  This all used to be crammed in my office--including a mannequin and four mannequin heads stuffed in the closet.  When I lived in my 450 sq. ft. basement quarters, it was right there with me for a year or so, until I finally rented a storage area.  Granted, this stuff has been collecting dust since mid-2010 because I didn't have time to work on photographing, measuring, & selling, while working as both a mail lady and photographer.  Now one of those jobs is out of the way, and I can work on this in my down time.  Question is, where?

Blithe Button found a permanent home!

 

My grandfather had the solution.  I'd been storing a good amount of the Etsy inventory I have yet to list in their home for a while, so he suggested building shelving and a workspace.  I can still create the hand made jewelry at my home on my custom built crafting desk, but now I have a place to work on the other 2/3 of that store.  I get to decorate that as well, because no one wants a boring workspace.

IKEA stool found at Goodwill for $9!  Just when I needed to find a specific piece of furniture...

The construction phase of that project was finished last week, and I spent all of last Saturday moving inventory and other things over to their place.

   Clothing rack on left= things currently for sale on Etsy.  Rack on right= my to-do list.

(January 2018 update: All clothing was sold to Civvies in New Haven in September 2017.  I really don't have the time to focus on clothing- I'd rather be focusing on buttons!)

Meanwhile, my home is not in any condition to be seen.  I have boxes of things absolutely everywhere downstairs while I wonder "what is all this crap" and "when did I throw everything up in the air and dump that on the floor" and "when was the last time I saw sunlight left the house?"

I think that's enough of a post for now.  I have a growing list of posts to write, including one about the crafting desk I've mentioned probably more than five times since starting this blog, and the orange chair, and the furniture I found while delivering mail, as well as seasonal posts.  Halloween will soon be upon us, and I'm decorating with all new decorations this year.

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. 

Get Organized: Tackling the Kitchen

The cliche "a place for everything and everything in its place" could not describe my kitchen more accurately at this very moment.

Saturday, on the other hand, was a different story. I don't have before pictures of my cabinet and that's a good thing, in case I ever run for President.

One of the problems that had plagued the kitchen since move in day was the abundance of storage--and how could that be a bad thing? It's a bad thing because the previous tenants envisioned it, and their space solutions created nothing but problems. Bulky built-in Lazy Susans in the cabinets took up more space than they were worth, and what was worse, I couldn't even remove them without dismantling the cabinetry. They compromised the height inside so much that standard spice jars couldn't stand up, and small things I placed on them (pudding boxes, just about the only thing that fit) fell over like dominoes and out of sight. I could never find spices, which always led to many profanities just before dinner and burned sauces, and that was just the beginning of it.

Coffee cups fit much better in this space!

The pots and pans didn't even fit in the kitchen cabinets, so all were regulated to the broom-closet-turned-pantry (previous tenants' brainchild, apparently, and there is nowhere to store the mop and broom).

I could go on and on, but it was a disaster. Canned goods and boxed goods and what-have-you ended up whereever they would fit, and that was just generally "anywhere but the kitchen counter", and I never knew what I had for ingredients, so dinner was whatever ingredients I picked up from the store that same day. (I'm a big fan of grocery shopping every other day, since there are three grocery stores within 5 minutes of the condo, and one within walking distance.)

I finally had it with the kitchen and decided the best way to tackle its organization was TO TAKE INVENTORY. Break out the notepads and pens!

Here's just some highlights of what I found:

• 3 jars of Peanut Satay Sauce
• 7 boxes of cornbread mix (I had JUST bought two because I thought I was OUT.)
• 7 cans of black olives
• 3 containers of ground white pepper
• 9 cans of chick peas (I like to call them garbanzo beans because it's fun to say).

So to avoid this nonsense, the inventory notebook is now consulted before making out my shopping list.  

And then, there were the cookbooks.

Several months ago, I purchased a wicker shelf at an auction, intending to put my life's work of journals on it, but it wasn't aesthetically pleasing in the space where I put it.

No, it didn't stay in my car all this time, but it did inspire me to buy an SUV.

No. It's bad enough my headboard is also wicker.

GAG.

Anyway, bookcase is now in a more suitable place!

It freshens up the kitchen and gives more storage though I was just complaining about having too much storage.  More workable storage, and that's important.