Quick Update

I'm still here! And I am painting, painting, PAINTING!

Today the little man went to his Nana's so we have been painting all of the pretty baseboards we got, and the back door, and the office shelves. So busy! I also need to make a smash cake today because my little man's 1st birthday party is tomorrow! So basically my life has been revolving around party planning... but don't give up on us! More home transformations are coming!

House Wish List

I have a book I carry around with me with my “house wish list.” These are things I want to do to pretty up the place. Each room has a page, and each page is full of ideas. Some are things to do immediately (like I have the stuffs… just do it already!). Some are things to do asap. And some are just hope-to-do-one-days. I want to share my list with y’all, since my blog will mostly be checking off the list anyway. So here goes! And don’t’ be alarmed, this isn’t a “today” list, or even a “this year” list! I know this is going to take a while but you gotta have dreams, amiright?!

Kitchen:
Paint cabinets
Clean sink
New countertops
New backsplash
Clean stove
Clean oven
Clean hood
Clean inside cabinets
Clean out drawers
Clean all vertical surfaces (cabinet/drawer faces, front of fridge, etc)
Paint
New cabinet/drawer pulls
Clean inside fridge
New window sill (ours is the same gorgeous fake butcher block laminate that is on the counters AND backsplash)
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Window treatment
Clean the floor
More shelves for the pantry
New (white) baseboards
Paint the pantry door/frame white

Dining room:
Window treatments
Paint
Paint & finish my gorgeous hutch!
Paint window sills
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)

Living Room:
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Paint back door
Touch up wall paint
Finish mantle
Wall art
Can lights
New fan
Crown molding
Sell oversized arm chairs
Get small storage/seating bench
Window treatment for door
Carpet re-stretched (1/21/11)

Entry:
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Crown molding
Door window treatment
Paint mirror
Paint door frame (white)
Clean floors

Hallway:
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Crown molding
Touch up wall paint
Paint cabinets
Put up cabinet frame (taken down the last time the plumbers were out to tear up the floor)
Fix carpet (1/21/11)

Hall Bath:
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Clean bath tub
New tile (shower & floor)
New sink/counter
Paint vanity white
New knobs
Clean faucets
Paint door/frame

PlayRoom/Office:
New (white) baseboards
New switch/plug covers (white!)
Paint door/frame
Drop router cable @ outside wall
Move router to shelf
Move table to corner
Wall art
Window treatment
Closet door drapes
Organize closet
Memo board
Braden’s chalk board
Mail station
Paint window sill
Desk cord covers (Velcro fabric to back wall)
Cord wraps for cords to upper shelves

Master Bedroom:
Baseboards
Crown
Paint doors/frames
New plug/switch plate covers
Window treatment
Paint
Paint windowsill
Wall art
Bed! (we sleep with our mattress & box spring on the ground)

Master Bath:
Paint vanity
Paint window sill
Base boards
Tile borders (where the tile hits the vanity and the carpet there are gaps! Ick!)
Clean the shower
Clean shower door
Tighten fixtures (my TP holder doesn’t hold TP!)
Plug switch plates
Window treatment
New sink/vanity
Clean faucets

Baby’s room
Paint windowsill
Paint doors/frames
Baseboards
Wall art (it fell when we put the shelves in the office/playroom)
New plug/switch plates
Clean in general! Ugh! So much stuff!
organize closet

Front porch/yard
paint front door (don’t remember if we’re done or not)
sweep
new light (or patch the hole in the base of our old light)
plants
door mat

Back porch/yard:
Sweep
Grass
Plants
Furniture?
Fix plexiglass on cords
Paint doors
Fix chimney

Laundry Room
Paint?
New white baseboards
Paint door frame
New (white) garage door
Décor (something small but cute for me!)


So there you have it! Unless my dear husband adds more to the list!

And lest you think I'm over-exerting myself already...
1) we already have the baseboards for the living room, hallway, entry and master bath. They just need to be painted
2) we have the can lights for the living room
3) we have the cable to drop in the office, just a matter of doing it
4) we have the paint for the back door
5) the cleaning just needs to be done (no excuses... nothing to buy)
6) we have the new knobs for all the cabinets, but to be honest I might wait until we paint to put them on the get the big (ta da! effect).
7) we have the paint to get the window sills
8) we have touch up paint for the walls in the living room and hallway
9) we have the ability to put up the cabinet frame in the hallway... just haven't done it
10) we have the ability to tighten the knobs in the master bath... just haven't done it.

So that's more than 10 things on the list (ie. cleaning is on the master list like 30x) that could be done right this second if I had the time. So it's not so bad!

Decorating for Valentine's Day

I'm not one to go overboard. I'm not a huge fan of giant red, pink & white balloons and garland. If that's you, great! But it's not for me. So I usually do not decorate for Valentines day.

This year is different. This year I came across an absolutely adorable idea over at Craftily Ever After! I'm a big fan of subway art (although I don't have any in my home), and this piece is just adorable! It's sweet, it's romantic, it's Valentines, and... IT'S ME!








Don't you just love it?

Paper Project Update

Ok the last few steps have been a little simpler and so I haven't given them each a post. So let's just call this the steps 3-5 update!

Step # 3 - Receipts

This is not a huge issue for us. We use the Dave Ramsey envelope system and the receipts are kept in there. I like the idea of keeping them elsewhere, but I worry that might be a bit too much of a change for us right now. For the time being, I vow to work hard to actually keep track of my reciepts and to actually record all of my purchases. Then down the line we can see if there is a better system to implement.

Step #4 - Maintaining

This is a big one, however not something I acn do on my own and write a cute post about! I did talk to the dear husband this weekend, and we have come up with some plans.

Here is our "before" routine:
- he's home at 5:30
- grab mail on the way in
- open mail and leave on chair
- leave pile of mail for me either in the diaper bag or on the floor next to the diaper bag
- I'm home at 7:30
- don't see the piles
- assume there's no mail
- wonder how the house got trashed

So I asked my loved one if he minded NOT bringing in the mail as soon as he got home. It had become part of his routine because "I'm outside anyway" but he understands why it's best to leave it in the mail box until we need it. I want to invest in a mail center for us where I can put things "to file" and "to do" etc. Then once a week I can go through and get it all put up. My logic says "put it up as you go" but this is not a reasonable expectation from my husband. I think a good compromise will be to have a place for him to put it, and then I can deal with it Friday on my day off.

Today is the first mail day since this discussion, so we'll see how it goes! I think that having our clean office space will be a big help with this as well. I receive so many free samples every week, and if I have a clean desk, he can just plop them there for me to go through.


Step #5 - Going Paperless

I need to come up with a POA (plan of action) for this one. We do not get paper bank statements, but we do get statements from most credit cards/utility companies. What I need to do is make a list and then go company by company requesting to go paperless. This shouldn't take long, but needs to be done. Maybe a good Friday project.



So here is my step 3-5 gameplan (so y'all can keep me honest!):

1) Get better about tracking cash payments and keeping reciepts
2) Work with husband to get our new (less paper-piley) routine going
3) Contact anyone who sends me a bill to ask them about paperless

From Dream to Reality...

Well...we're getting there! I won't have a grand "reveal" for a while because there is just SO much work that needs to be done to this room (and the house in general). But so you don't have to stay in suspense much longer, here we go!

My dream:

My reality (so far):

(The GORGEOUS floating shelves my lovely father-in-law threw together in about 15 minutes... I swear he can make anything)

(Pardon the mess... Mr. IT needs room to work)

And so, instead of a "Before" and "After" I give you a "Pretty-paint-drawing-of-what-I-want" and "What-I-got!"

TA-DA!!!!!!

Not too shabby for my first project (if I don't say so myself... which I do...)!

To Do List:

Paint shelves and windowsill (white)
Install new (taller & white) baseboards
Put router up on shelf (need longer cord)
Make memo board
Make chalkboard for the little dude
Re-upholster chairs
Learn how to upholster chairs (heh...)
New (less black) drapes
Hide cords behind computer desks
Hide cords dangling from new GORGEOUS floating shelves

And that's it... at least that I can think of now. And maybe a rug... I have a nice black shag rug that could work, but I may need to cut it down. I'm thinking of going with a circle theme (for my sculpture) and cutting the rug (LOL) into a circle might be a good addition. We'll have to see, but for now... SO HAPPY!
Make sculpture piece for long empty wall (this is going to be awesome! can't wait to share!)

Project Paper Catch Up

Step #2 was to get all of that paper junk into pretty little file folders!



TADA!

So just to show that we're making progress...

(my desk)

(my dear husband's desk... complete with husband!)

(my craft table... see the Silhouette machine under there! STILL haven't used it! ugh!)

(filing cabinets which will soon be gone)

(recycling can full of paper)

(shred pile... ugh! The shredder better buy me dinner and wine after the intimate time we're going to spend together!)

So the plan was to move on very quickly to step #3 & #4 BUT... I have had a little helper join me and he's about done blogging for the time being! Progress is good but now it's baby time!

Project Paper - Day #1

Welcome to Day #1 of Jen at IheartOrganizing’s Project Paper challenge!

Yesterday's challenge had 3 parts:
1) Research what you need to hold on to
2) Keep what you need
3) Recyle the rest!

After my little man went to bed last night, I got to work. I started wth my Mary kay filing because it needed to be done. I pulled it all out and consolidated it into 2 expandable files. I’m not sure why I needed two whole filing cabinet drawers for this before…

The next thing I did was to tackle the personal/home filing. It didn’t take long to go through, and I ended up with a nice sized pile of trash, and a nice sized pile of things to be shredded. We don’t actually get pay stubs anymore (they’re available online), so there really isn’t much that we have to keep. I have taxes of course, a section for house stuff (warranty, receipts from work we’ve had done/appliances, electricity agreement, etc), a section for cars (service policy information, can insurance, etc),a section for medical stuff, a section for legal stuff and that’s all I can think of right now (I’m not able to go to the office right this second).

Other things I found in the cabinets that will need homes:
Spare sheets for the futon we no longer have
Instruction booklets for anything we’ve ever owned
Lots of office supplies

So here are my drawers now:

(personal/home files...)

(Mary Kay filing)

I anticipate getting rid of more paper clutter from the keep pile as I start putting things back together. My next big step is going to be rounding up all of the rest of the paper from the room. I have a plan though! I’m going to take 3 big cardboard boxes and put them in the middle of the room. One will be trash, one will be shred, and one will be keep. Then I am going to buzz around the office like a little bee until there is not one piece of paper that can be seen outside of those boxes. I *might* take a picture after this because it will be a huge transformation just the get the “crap” out, but I might not. I’m thinking it may be best to wait on the full office pictures so that I can shock everyone with an amazing before and after later! We’ll see!

January Challenge!

Jen over at IHeartOrganizing has issued a challenge for January! Clean out your paper clutter!

Where does your paper monster live? Mine is in the home office. It started out admirably enough. "Oh my goodness! This house is a mess! I have GOT to get the ____ [insert messy room name] cleaned up or I'm moving!" But then lazy happened. "I have this huge pile of stuff I need to file/put away and it all goes in the office... maybe instead of spending 30 seconds doing that right now, it would be a BETTER idea for me to take the stack and set it on some random flat surface in the correct room! That way I can promise myself I'll get to it later and never do it!"

So that's what I did. Once... twice... thrice (???)... A MILLION GAZILLION TIMES! So now the office looks like this:

(This is a slightly cleaned up version... I actually started picking at the office in December so this isn't the lowest of lows).

This is actually great timing for a project like this one! My dear husband and I have been talking about re-doing the office. It was a great place for two gamers to hang out when we first moved in. When we found out we were having the little man we had to do start office renovation part one.

I originally had an L shaped desk floating in the middle of the room with both of our computers on it. It actually looked pretty cool, but there were cords EVERYWHERE and somewhere in my "OMG LEARN ABOUT BABY" books it said that infants shouldn't play with electrical cords. So that's how our computers got where they are now.

We took the L-Shaped desk and took out the middle joint section leaving us with 2 regular desks. We threw them up against the wall, and put our filing cabinets in between to hold the printer. Why do we have two filing cabinets? Well, I had one in my apartment, and my lover had one in his apartment... so when we moved together we had two! Can you tell I'm an accountant? Look at that math! We bought a futon to put along the other wall and put a bookshelf in the corner. It was actually realy cute looking... if not entirely functional.

Fastforward almost a year (my little man will be one in 21 days... but who's counting?) and we've re-arranged again. First of all, Dave Ramsey told us we should sell stuff to have an emergency fund. Goodbye futon and bookshelf! Hello baby step #1!

So then we had an estate sale for my grandmother and I picked up these two lovely chairs!

Doesn't that beautiful orange just scream 1973?! So those will be my first re-upholster project... wish me luck! We also inherited a nice big dining room table which makes me sooo happy!

Our smaller round table has made it’s way to the office. We trashed our big ugly falling apart office chairs and are now using our small ugly “retro” chairs at the desks AND at the table when needed. It’s really not half bad! Except… do you remember that picture up at the beginning?

Here it is again:

Oh yea! There’s no room for anything! So anyway, here is my plan for the room:

For those of you who can’t appreciate my insane paint skills, I plan to push the computer desks up to surround the window on the front wall. The round table will be folded down to take up less room on the wall where the desks are now. The computer accessories (silhouette, printer, router, NPC scanner, etc) will be on floating shelves in the corners above the desks. I plan on making a fun chalkboard area for the little man also. The filing cabinets are GONE! I figure the few paper things we need to keep can be put in a small portable file (thank you Jen for the idea) in the closet, and we can get rid of the cabinets completely! So I’m going to sell those on Craig’s List, and use the proceeds to get the portable solution for the closet!

And now for the great segue you’ve all been waiting for…

If I’m going to get my room to go from this:

To this:

I’ve got to get my paper clutter in order (and for the most part shredded and gone).

Stay tuned for updates as this transformation takes place!