House Projects

Yesterday (Sunday) was a great house project day. I'd been wanting to do that for awhile, but it seemed every weekend something was interfering. (Well, that, and we only finally officially finished moving a couple weekends ago). This weekend it finally fell into place.

I made my 'house notebook' I'd been wanting to make. There were so many projects I wanted or needed to do, they were all bouncing around in my head making me feel overwhelmed all the time. Not overwhelmed in a bad way, like I was freaking out about them ... just overwhelmed in a sort of "I don't know where to start first!" kind of way.

So, being the organization freak that I am, I wanted to put together a notebook with tabbed dividers for each section of the house, a place where I could list all these projects in one place, to get them out of my head and begin focusing on one section at a time. I also figured the notebook would be handy because, besides just lists of projects, I could sketch out plans and ideas, and have a place to keep information I gather, like the paint color cards, or project information I print from the internet.

Yesterday I got the notebook started, so that made me feel less overwhelmed and more motivated. Although the dining room is my first main project, there wasn't anything much I could do in there yesterday, so I went to my kitchen list.

I reorganized the pantry cupboards. A couple of them had just kind of gotten stuff tossed in them when we moved in, and were kind of a mess, and bugging me - so I fixed that. One thing I really like - the bane of my existence at the old house was the collection of plastic bowls and lids I had, which were all just crammed willy-nilly into a too-small cabinet, always a jumbled mess, could never find what I wanted when I needed it. I devoted an entire pantry cubpoard, with slide-out shelves, to the plastic bowl mess, just to have more room for it and make them easier to find.


Then I bought a small, inexpensive dish drainer to use to store the smaller lids.


This keeps the lids organized and easy to find. I left the silveware basket on the drainer, and use it for the smallest lids. This cabinet doesn't look worthy of being devoted to plastic bowls just now, because it looks rather empty - that's because most of them are in the dishwasher at the moment. Otherwise, those two shelves are pretty full. But it's fantastic, because it's so easy now to find what I need.

The second project I accomplished in the kitchen was the window frosting. The former owners built an addition on to the back of the garage, the wall of which unfortunately is just a couple feet from the kitchen window. Made the view out the kitchen window pretty icky, and it really bugged me. So much that I just kept the mini-blinds that were already installed closed all the time, because I just couldn't stand opening them and seeing nothing but siding.



But I hate mini-blinds, and the kitchen always seems kind of dark, as that's the only window. That all was really getting on my nerves. So I did some checking and decided to try window film to camouflage the view while letting in more light. I chose a frosted glass look. I'd had this for several weeks but hadn't had a large, uninterrupted chunk of time to put it up - yesterday I did.

It wasn't quite as easy as I'd hoped, but it wasn't terribly difficult. Here's a picture half-way through - definitely blocking the view!



And it turned out great!


I think it really makes a difference. It does exactly what I wanted it to do -it blocks the view, and lets in all the light possible. I will be putting a valance curtain up, but the one I want is packed somewhere and I couldn't locate it yesterday.

It seemed like only two small things, but that (and mowing the lawn) took up most of the day ... and it was enough. Baby steps.

With so many different projects to do, ranging from easy and cheap to complicated and expensive, it's hard to know where to start. I was hoping to kind of focus on one room at a time, figuring that way (a) my energies won't get so scattered till it feels like I'm constantly working on something but nothing's getting done, and (b) we can have one complete room at a time, rather than a whole bunch of half-done rooms (which also makes it feel like nothing's getting done).

Because it is the worst room in the house, I want to focus on the dining room first. It's not the easiest nor cheapest of our projects, but it needs done, it's a small room (so easier to manage and finish), and it'll make me feel a whole lot better when it's done. The first thing we have to do for that is pick out a paint color. That's next on the agenda.