I’ve been eating a lot of baked oatmeal lately. It’s so satisfying and easy to make that I decided I’d share the recipe with you. Of course, this meant that I needed to get a blog-worthy picture of oatmeal, a tall order. I did the …
Last Sunday, I had the best day ever, not because anything exciting happened but because of how peaceful I felt in my heart. I played with the cats, polished the furniture, carefully cleaned and rearranged my collection of Fiestaware, and hung a little garland of …
For the last six years, I’ve been using the dining room as a makeshift crafting room, sitting at the big table to paint and sew. Well, the other day Rob and I started talking about how I needed better spot to work in, and we decided to turn half of the Little House, the small outbuilding that serves as our home office, into a cheery crafting space. Heck, while we were at it, we said, we’d redecorate the whole place. (The Little House is not at all pretty, and its furnishings have sustained a lot of cat damage over the years.)
I was full of ideas on the subject: “Let’s paint the Little House so it’s not so drab,” I said. “Let’s paint it a pretty pastel green or maybe a light salmon pink. And let’s get a big closet-like cabinet to store all my crafting supplies, and let’s trade our big, heavy desks for enamel-top tables. Oh, and I could get an old card catalog to hold all my little jars of beads and sequins.”
While I couldn’t convince Rob to start painting right away, he did agree to go furniture shopping on Saturday. We spent six hours driving from store to store in Tallahassee, coming up empty at every place. I was in low spirits when I got back home, but after a while I rallied. I decided to shift gears and work on another project Rob and I have been discussing—removing the Vine House, our once-cute-but-now-rotting little shelter by the driveway.
I started prepping the Vine House for demolition by stripping it of its decorations, moving my collection of Christine Sibley wall sculptures to the breezeway. Up on a step-ladder, I spent hours festooning the breezeway with Sibley creatures, including mermaids, a giant butterfly, and a leaf-man. Every time I went out to fetch another Sibley from the Vine House, June, our smart little tuxedo cat, would run outside too. She wanted to frolic, eat grass, and roll on the sun-warmed driveway. I’d jog along behind her as she romped, and pet her as she rolled and squawked and made a big fuss on the driveway (she was so excited!). Then I’d bring her back inside, where she’d await her next opportunity to escape. As she waited, she kept herself busy by climbing to the top of my step-ladder, batting my screws around, and burrowing into the cordless drill’s carrying case.
“June,” I said, “you’re being so cute I can hardly stand it!”
When I got all the Sibleys hung, the breezeway looked lush and fancy, I thought. The Vine House, on the other hand, looked forlorn and empty, so I dreamed about the plants I would replace it with—native wax myrtles that would soon be full of berries and birds and maybe even a bird nest!
It was just about dark when I switched gears again and went back to the Little House project. Rob had been cleaning the Little House, and we decided to go ahead and move some of the weird old furniture out even though we had no new furniture to replace it. We carried an old bookshelf to the garage and planned how we’d try to sell it on Facebook Marketplace. Then I spied a little folding table in a corner behind the lawnmower and decided to set it up in the Little House as a temporary crafting table. The folding table gave me a place to put my easel and my Sta-Wet Palette. Then I had another flash of inspiration: I realized I could use the cedar chest in the Little House to temporarily store the rest of my painting supplies until I could find the big cabinet I was envisioning.
I spent the rest of the night and pretty much all the next day happily emptying out the closet in the dining room and organizing my canvases, paintbrushes, paints, rags, and other supplies in the Little House. The dining room looks awesome without my crafting mess. Now maybe we can start actually dining in it again!
As a side note, here are a couple of examples of the kinds of crafts I like to make. These are my two latest acrylic paintings:
I wanted to share a few little improvements I’ve made around the house and yard recently. I’ve lived in my house for 19 years now, but I’ve still got so many dreams for it. About a month ago I found the neatest little rocking chair …
One of my favorite Saturday activities is whipping up a smoothie for myself in the early morning hours. It’s so fun and easy. I use almond butter, almond milk, ripe bananas, and organic frozen strawberries. In the lamplight before dawn, I like to sit with …
I spent the last two weeks of February reorganizing the back bedroom. Every night after work I’d hurry home, eager to get started. I’d change into my comfy fleece pajamas and socks and sit on the rug in front of the bed to sort through clothes, knickknacks, and other treasures and ponder how best to store or display them.
When I began the reorganization process, clothes, Christmas decorations, and photography props were scattered all over the house, hidden (and often forgotten about) in various trunks and cabinets. My goal was to group all like items together and designate a single spot for each group. In the back bedroom I planned to keep only my clothes, some figurines and other pretty things for decoration, my camera equipment, and the props I’ve collected for my toy photography hobby. Everything else would be moved out.
Reorganizing was cozy, lamp-lit work. Cats purred and rolled on the rug as I sorted and arranged faux pearl necklaces, doll hats, human hats, and other odds and ends. I listened to audiobooks and sipped hot tea. I guess what made the sorting so much fun was that it gave me a chance to appreciate all my little “valuables” and savor the memories attached to them. For example, I got to spend some time admiring a sweet little puppy finger puppet that I rescued from a parking lot in Atlanta nearly 30 years ago. I remember I saw him lying there lost (it was obvious he’d been there for days and had been rained on and run over) and I felt so sorry for him that I had to take him home with me and give him a bath and stitch up his wounds. He’s now got a very nice, snug little home in the back bedroom. He’s relaxing in the old doctor’s cabinet, in a teacup.
I was able to whittle down my wardrobe enough that everything fit neatly in the back bedroom’s tiny closet. No longer do my T-shirts and jeans spill over into the large cabinet nearby. Instead, I’m able to devote that entire cabinet to my toy photography hobby—to my stuffed animals and props. I’ve filled it with Beanie Babies, San Rio characters, antique teddy bears, doll-size parasols, fake cupcakes and candy, hand fans, silk flowers, rhinestone tiaras, and other bits of whimsy, and when I open its doors I feel like I’m entering a small wonderland. Every last item in the cabinet “sparks joy” now, as Marie Kondo would say—so I think my reorganization effort has been a success!
I’m proud of how tidy the bedroom looks in these pictures. I just hope I can keep it this way!
I took last Friday off and had another long weekend. Hooray! “I have so much to do!” I said to Rob on Thursday night. “Well, you won’t be able to get to it all,” Rob warned kindly. “But I’m going to try!” I said. Here …
Last Monday at my lunch hour I ran over to Rabbit Creek, a great new antique mall in Tallahassee, and bought a rocking chair and footstool I’d had my eye on for a while. The owner of the booth where I found the chair was …
For the past year, I’ve been working on outlining all my garden beds with bricks. I dig a trench around each bed, sink the bricks about halfway into the soil, and arrange them in a sawtooth pattern. The bricks add a nice, tidy edge to my rather wild beds, which are filled with huge needle palms and free-spirited wildflowers that seed themselves wherever they feel like it.
I usually work on my brick project from four, when my job ends (I’m still working from home), till about six-thirty or seven on weekdays, though, of course. I’m not really working solidly that whole time. I always do a lot of lollygagging when I’m outside. I love meeting box turtles in the yard . . . and looking up at the sky . . . and smelling the big lemony Ashe magnolia flowers that are blooming now in April. There are still plenty of kumquats and orangequats on our trees, and I frequently stop for snacks.
Sometimes June, our smart little tuxedo cat, will come out and supervise my work. She’ll take dust baths and squawk at me. She’s so bossy and busy that Rob and I like to play that she’s a local Quincy business tycoon. She owns all the crappy businesses in town (we pretend), loves to cut corners in terms of quality and service, and is a billionaire.
Anyway, here are a couple pictures of my brick-edged beds. I’m still not done with this enormous project, but I’m getting there!
