home improvement

A few weeks ago, Rob and I borrowed a nail gun and an air compressor in order to add shelving to our closets. I took pics of the during and after, mostly to show you people that I can live in a disaster area without killing anyone.

I can last two days, three max. Otherwise, watch your back!

The end result is so orderly and SPACE-making that I am in raptures every time I open a closet. Really. I keep dragging people over to see the pretty order and space. Since we've managed to cram fifteen pounds of crap into a five-pound house, space is a really big deal!

Blake's closet, where we keep the paint and other noxious chemicals that can't be in the garage or they'd freeze. You can see we're not total fuddy-duddies: he has a monkey blanket in there too.

The hall closet, still mostly empty, only because I have the drill and toolbox located on the floor of the living room at the moment. They're... holding something down. Something really important.

OK, I just haven't put them away yet.

The laundry closet, all organized and pretty.

The two pantry areas - we added the half shelves in the back, and I can't tell you what a difference they made in here. Before, I had everything stacked up like a precarious game of Jenga, and heaven help us if I needed something off the bottom of the pile.

The organized part of the master closet. We've got a bunch of unorganized stuff on the other side that Rob's trying to sell for a friend... and I didn't even bother taking pictures of that!

With the shelving up, I got all insperred (deliberate misspelling that one dear friend will totally get) to greatness and finally got around to getting these prints I've had for a few years matted and framed.

A friend has a matte cutter and is tolerant of my cooking, so he came over to help out and we fed him. Then I hung them while Rob was out of town. I chose to start with a regional print, Rob chose to start with a Tennessee print, and we've got about ten more we'd like to matte up and frame, eventually.

These are replicas of Depression-era posters promoting the National Parks, and I love their simplicity, clean lines, and limited but bold colors. And everyone I've shown them to is surprised that I love them. I guess they don't look like my taste? The only thing I'd change would be to matte them in cream, but then we'd have had to use gloves or something to protect the mattes from smudges, and I'm just not that careful.

Then I sewed up some pillow cases for new throw pillows on our bed (with mucho help from Reese in the getting started part). I'm not quite sure about the brightness of the turquoise, but maybe I'll fall in love when we get the new soft grey/green paint on the walls in here. Either way, I'm pretty proud of all the stuff we've got going on. The best part is to put all this energy and time into a place we are still enjoying, rather than a place we're trying to sell as quickly as possible.

*I deliberately chose to edit out curse words TWICE in this post. How proud of me are you?!