New furniture

Just a quick update to my last post. Here's our new bedroom set:

Bed and nightstand:


Dresser and mirror:



The new bed is *huge*! I'm still getting acclimated to the new mattress. I slept fairly well last night, though have been fighting some unrelated insomnia lately. It is still off-gassing a bit, but that should hopefully go away soon.

We got a good waterproof (but not crinkly) mattress pad at Kohl's (my first time ever in a Kohl's - it was right next door to the furniture store) at 50% off. Saved even more on a set of Vera Wang sheets (they were in the clearance section).

Furniture shopping

-D and went furniture shopping the weekend before this past one (so, the 5th). We didn't have a whole lot of time, and the stores are all about 45 minutes or so away. So we decided we'd go to Raymour & Flanigan first. We ended up with some extra time, so went to Bob's afterwards, too, for some comparing.

Impressions: sales people can be a bit pushy. There's just no getting around it. The sales guy at R&F was respectful, while also trying to do his job. He realized that we aren't loaded and didn't try to push us out of our price range. He was honest if one that we liked the look of didn't stack up in terms of quality, and pointed us to what were actually less expensive alternatives with better quality. We were there for bedroom furniture and a new mattress, but took a few minutes to browse couches and dining room/kitchen sets. Every time we stopped and he was nearby, he'd be sure to point out the price and features of that particular one. But on the whole, not a bad guy. He also told us about a sale that would be happening the following Wednesday only, and that he'd give us that sale early, if we ended up buying anything.

Then we went to Bob's, for comparison, and to see what they had to offer. There is no comparison in quality as far as the bedroom sets go. Where just about everything at R&F was dovetailed, everything was stapled at Bobs. Wood quality, craftsmanship - all of it better at R&F, thus justifying the higher price. Bob's is great if you want something that looks decent but doesn't need to handle a lot of use. With the sale at R&F, the price difference just wasn't enough for us to go with Bobs. The mattresses (or at least a couple of the better ones we tried) were comparable (price included), but again, with the sale at R&F, it made more sense to just get everything there.

So Wednesday night, we went back and ordered our new bedroom set from R&F. We've got a new, king-sized bed coming (woot!), along with dresser, mirror, and nightstand. They should arrive some time tomorrow morning.

This weekend we worked on shifting our furniture at home around - the full-size guest bed has been moved to the attic, and our queen-sized bed is now the guest bed. What I've been using as a dresser will be headed tonight to the 3-season porch for organizing my dyeing and spinning supplies.

This year's planning

Before I start, I just want to mention that we did manage to enlarge our driveway last year. -D works for a paving company, so for the price of a case of (cheap) beer (they don't like the good stuff), we have widened the driveway by about a foot, maybe a bit more, and extended it lengthwise by about a foot. So we can now fit four cars in our driveway.

So, -D and I were talking this weekend about what our projects will be this year. We have some exciting, but not yet revealable, news, but suffice it to say it'll require a bit of replanning. We're getting a great tax return, so hopefully our plans will survive.

Top priority is the porch roof. It seriously needs doing. We just need to get some friends over to do it. -D wants to check one of the local places to see what it would cost for metal roofing that we install (rather than having it installed - the quote we got for that was too high). But it will be done once the weather is more predictably warm.

Next is our kitchen. To get it done, we're going to need to take down some of the horsehair, and all of the original wainscoting, then sheetrock, mud, paint, etc. So there will be a weekend of no kitchen while we tape it off for some demo. Painting may end up a bit tricky on account of the unrevealed news, but we'll figure it out.

Also on the list is a new bedroom set. It would be fantastic to have a matching bedroom set. If we're going to do that, we may as well upgrade to a king sized bed, too, right? Not entirely sure on style yet, and I like the colors in there as they are (I painted before we moved in). But a new bedroom set, and probably a layout change.

Then there's our back yard. I really want to get the retaining wall terraced (to hold back erosion). In November, I cleaned out "the hill", just raking and pulling out the dead stuff. So it's mostly down to bare dirt for the winter (with perennial roots buried) and looks nice and neat, rather than the chaos of dead leaves and seed stalks. I did pull a few of the more shallow roots when I did it - I figure if it didn't need a shovel to remove, it probably wasn't holding back too much of the soil. It needs the terracing before I can nuke it like we did the side yard, lest we end up with a mud puddle at the base of the wall.

Once the upper wall is terraced, we'll hope that we have the funds to get a wall in about a third of the way down our backyard (which is sloped), to level that space and create a patio and play space for Bug.

So those are the plans. We'll see what we can do with them.

On organization

About a week ago, a friend of mine posted a link to 52 Weeks to an Organized Home. I love the idea behind this: organization needs to happen in small bites to be successful; otherwise you may overwhelm yourself. I have decided that we will work on tackling our organization at home, though not necessarily in the same exact chunks suggested in the challenges.

Anyone that knows -D and I knows that we have a lot of stuff. I generally try to keep things clean, but we definitely have a lot of clutter. Moving from apartment to apartment on an annual-ish basis, we got really good about purging things we hadn't used in a while. Apartment buildings are also handy for disposal: chances are there is someone willing to take what you don't want anymore. Living in a house for 3 years now, we haven't had a good purge in a while. It's time. And while we're at it, we may as well reorder what we are keeping.

So this weekend, we tackled our kitchen organization. Here's our kitchen for reference:


Our counters have always generally been a little overrun. While we designated some space for working, the counters have housed: coffee pot, cutting board (beautiful wood one made by my dad), microwave, toaster oven, stand mixer, and all the oils/salt/pepper/wine for cooking. To the left of the sink, we have a pad for drying dishes; this space also generally houses recyclables, even though the recycle bin isn't that far away.

When we moved in, -D emptied the kitchen boxes into cabinets. They sort of made sense, but not really. We've been using them as such for 2 years now. While I knew that pasta went in a lower cabinet, along with rice, freeze pops, fruit roll-ups, and mashed potatoes, others may not have understood that canned goods (soup, beans, tomatoes, etc.) went in the upper cabinet, along with unopened salad dressing, stuffing mix, crackers, pudding, and Pam spray. Cutting boards mingled with the loaf pan, and soda hung out with the bread machine. Makes perfect sense, right? And don't get me started on the closet, with its lonely shelf too high for me to reach.

So thinking about the organization challenges for the kitchen, and thinking about our use of the kitchen. Instead of doing each section (counters, dish storage, and food storage) separately, I decided we needed to do it all to get it done and done right.

We went out and got a Closetmaid wire shelf system for the closet. It came out a little pricier than we had thought it might, but I have to say it's well worth it. The shelf brackets (the triangular piece that holds and supports the shelves) were one of the biggest contributors to the cost. You can expect to pay a little bit for the shelves and the mounting bracket (the piece that attaches to the wall), but the brackets were $10 a piece, times two per shelf, times four shelves... you get the idea. Despite this, we have a modular, adjustable setup that we can change, add to, what have you, if we decide down the road we need to redo it.

Just make sure you mount everything into a stud (no, we didn't learn the hard way - we were smrt before we started and got the stud finder).

I unfortunately didn't get a before pic, but imagine a self-standing wine rack jammed in a closet with crap filled in around it, and some lobster plates on a shelf well over my 5'1" head. Here's the after picture:



Stand mixer and toaster oven no longer take over the counters. I even picked up a couple of totes for the stand mixer attachments and another for my canning supplies. I have so much cabinet space now I almost don't know what to do with it.

Speaking of cabinets: I reorganized those as well. I switched the tupperware and lower food cabinets, so the food is all vertically aligned now, rather than being at separate ends of the kitchen. I threw out all of the tupperware with no lids, and lids with no tupperware. Baking vessels live happily in their own cabinet without the cutting boards. And the food makes sense now. There is a lunch/dinner cabinet (complete with condiments and other supplies), and a breakfast/snack cabinet.

We do plan to make some pullout shelves for our pots and pans, but those'll take some time. I also admit I have yet to attack the baking cabinet. But this was lots of progress for us for one weekend.

Hopefully it'll be a kick in the pants to deal with the walls in there next.

I'll close with a pic of our gorgeous walls, after we took down the (first layer of) wainscoting:


Until next time (hopefully not in six months!)

--Lisa.