Bedroom Revamp

I've been working from home for the past month and a half and I was thrilled to have that opportunity. I thought I would finally have the time to get this place clean, organized, and looking like we hadn't just moved in. Sadly, I didn't realize, or more realistically, I didn't take into account the fact that I am a huge procrastinator. I don't remember when this started really, perhaps it's always been in my blood? I do always remember that my bedroom was a mess. I remember once falling out of bed right onto one of my toys, ouch. Perhaps it's inherited? I always remember the morning of a big holiday we'd be cleaning the living room and den, I'm sure this just added more stress to my mothers day, couldn't we have cleaned earlier in the week? Perhaps she didn't trust us to keep it clean, I wouldn't blame her. But that's not what this post is supposed to be about.

This post is supposed to be about me finally making/taking the time to make this house a place we love being, and not just because the other person is there. After almost five months of the bedroom being the same old way I decided it was time for a change. However, when I do things like that I generally do them half-assed, you should see my living room. So as soon as the bed was moved where I wanted it and the other furniture was moved out of the way so we could manuver around I let things be. Clothes were strewn everywhere, books were thrown about carelessley, basically the room was a mess. Basically, the room looked like this ...

And This...

And just in case you didn't get the picture...

There's a lot of stuff that could go. Like those two chairs in the bottom picture. The weird upholstored one was from our last apartment. I'd found it on the side of the road and it's worked out well, the only problem is that it's huge and takes up quite a bit of space. The other one, well that's an Ikea chair that scares the bejeesus out of everyone that sits in it. We've been meaning to get rid of it for a while but well, I think you can see we haven't. It would be great to have a chair in the bedroom. We are both avid readers and any extra reading space is well loved. Why just last night I was dealing with a bout of insomnia so I got up out of bed and read in the chair. It was so nice to not have to leave the bedroom to read.

We have clothes upon clothes upon clothes and I'm sure we don't need every last bit. We have three good sized laundry baskets and easily filled all three for our last trip to the laundrymat. I would love to pair down my clothes but yet when I look at them I just can't bare to get rid of anything. Part of me thinks keeping all these clothes might be beneficial. We don't have our own laundry facilities so we are chained to the quarter. The more clothes we have the less quarters we have to dish out, or am I just making that all up? Hmmm, a quandry for sure. We each have our own closet, I have the large ugly green dresser, he has the tiny grey dresser, and we share the yellow one in my closet. I'm sure we could pare down to not needing one of them, couldn't we?

Another thing I'd love to do is finally give this room a cohesive feel. We painted the walls purple and grey and pretty much left it at that. I figured black accents would look nice so we got some black curtains and a few black frames, printed out some cool b&w pics and put them up on one of the walls. Maybe I would work on that some more? I've got a collection of purple glass that I'm sure would help make the grey walls pop a bit more. I've also been meaning to paint that green dresser, well, pretty much since I painted it green. The yellow lingerie chest in the closet was my gram's and I hate to paint it which is why I've hidden it away in the closet.

In moving the bed to the smallest wall in the room we lost our bedside table space. My fiance is fine with that for now. But not me, for some reason I just like the feel of things next to me in bed. Perhaps it's because I wear glasses and it's nice to know where they are when you wake up. Today I got a tiny black shelf to hang on the wall next to my side of the bed. The placement is a bit tricky because on that side of the wall I have to vye for space with the light switch and the thermostat. I've put the wall up but I'm not sure I like the placement yet, we'll see how it goes tonight in bed.

There is really only one wall that I enjoy looking at right now and that is this one.

Aside from the ugly closet doors on the left it actually looks like I tried. And I like that. These next two days I'm gonna try and make the rest of the room look just like this wall. I'll let you know how it comes out.

Clearing the Clutter

I can't quite believe we've been living in our "new place" almost five months now. I had a friend recently come over that had never seen the new place and she asked if we had moved in recently. That should give you all an idea of how messy and over lived in the place seems. Every time I try to get the house under control it seems I can only handle a room or two and then it all goes to hell in a hand basket.

So, I was thinking I would post my accomplishments and ideas here to the web to hopefully kick my butt into gear. After all if you all out there in cyber land are expecting a nice clean house to see pic's of then how can I disappoint? For now I'll just imagine that there are hundreds of you readers out there, though I'm sure that number is much closer to one or two.

I've asked my fiance to have a cleaning day this weekend. I'm thinking perhaps if he and I work at it together I can't procrastinate as bad as usual, though I'm worrying that he'll only help me procrastinate even more :P. I think part of my problem is that I don't really understand what clean is to me.

There are so many different levels of clean. There's the white glove clean, then there's the toys under the bed clean. Which one am I okay with? I think that's what everyone needs to figure out before they really tackle a big cleaning like a whole house, even if that house is only five rooms big. Part of what I've figured out is that I need some empty space. To much clutter makes my head cluttered and I just can't stand it.

I recently went through our game shelves and purged. I took out ones that I didn't want(though those were rare), and more likely those that we just didn't use. We really don't have friends over that often so keeping a ton of games where I can see them on a daily basis just seemed like it was creating a wall. First, it was creating extra clutter for me to look at and second it was taunting me reminding me how I didn't play the games I had. I've now gotten it down to one shelf of games and an empty shelf and let me just tell you when I sat down after cleaning and saw that empty shelf it was like my brain woke up and pushed it's way through a brick wall. I breathed and inner sigh of relief.

Now, looking around the rest of my living room I'm noticing all the movies I don't watch, all the books I haven't looked at in ages and I wonder, how great would it feel to purge those too?