The Towel Bar Dilemma

As I think I have mentioned before, I have a tendency to get a bug up my ass about something totally random, and just dive in without thinking it through all the way, like the aforementioned closet reorganization.  So occasionally, poor Sean will come home to me either exultantly wanting to show off what I did, or with the “Ummm, baby?”, which he has come to know precedes me telling him something that is probably going to be something I fucked up or that he needs to fix. Well. This leads me to the towel bars, which luckily was not an "Don't kill me, but.." moment. 

Partly because the linen closet is full of other stuff, and partly because it’s halfway across the house, we don’t keep any of our towels there. Meaning they are all in our bathroom. The same brain impulse that compels us to have our clothes in plain sight (I like to claim it’s being right brained, not sheer laziness), also means we rarely, if ever, have neatly folded towels artfully hanging on bars. We are hook people. So in our fairly small (very small by master bath standards) bathroom, the two towel bars just seemed superfluous. Every time I sat down to pee, I would stare at the consistently empty towel bar and think to myself, ‘Hey Eleanor. Just take that fucker down. You’re not using it, and it makes it look like you’re some sort of weird non-bathing slob’.  Which I assure you, we are not. So a couple of weeks ago, I busted out the screwdriver and took one of them down. No, I didn’t totally think this plan through. But it worked out okay. Plus, ignoring the fact that there are now holes in the wall from the dry wall anchors (don’t worry Mom, they’re going to be patched), I think it looks much better. The original plan was to buy trusty sticky hooks, but I was wandering through the dollar store and found an over the door hook thingie. These have worked well for us in the past, and it was some staggeringly large total, like $2 or something. So far, this new arrangement is working. We’re no longer hanging towels on doors, and I’m not taunted by a towel bar any longer.  The one near the sink is soon going to fall prey to my trusty pink screwdriver as well, but I think I am going to replace that one with one of those ring things. Replacing the medicine cabinet with something less crooked is on the docket as well, but that one requires some repainting. Baby steps seems to be the theme of our house projects.

Back in the Closet

When we moved into this house, one of the things we really liked about it was the spacious master closet. All the closets in the house were pretty good, but this one, thanks to it being a 1990’s addition, qualifies as a small walk in, and came with a pretty good ClosetMaid system already installed.  I was super drawn to the shoe rack along the bottom edge.  It was big enough that we didn’t need to use a dresser, which is good, because neither of us are really dresser people anyway. It’s nice to have all your clothes out where you can see them. Hell, we barely even close the closet door, partly due to a certain cats propensity for sleeping on the top shelves.  Well, after a few months of living with it, I figured out that it wasn’t quite suiting our purposes. What was mainly bugging me was this odd little narrow shelf right in the middle. And that lovely shoe rack? Well, it was a little low to the ground, and wasn’t big enough.  So. Little shelf came down off of my side, and shoe rack was flipped upside down and re-hung as a normal shelf.  This works MUCH better for us.  I later bought two shelf thingies from Target to hold shoes, which I like, and work.  The only issue with them is that there isn’t a good place in them to put my boots, but that’s why the organization gods gave us plastic bins.  I’d been coveting another piece in the same line with a door, and a shelf that I could use for socks, bras, underwear and other small little things that liked to run away into corners and fornicate with the dust bunnies. Well, last weekend while browsing through a certain big box store with a red theme, I found a unit that has drawers. They’re a bit on the small side, but true to my relatively new found policy of ‘if you don’t have enough room, it means you have too much shit’, I used it as an opportunity to get rid of all those bras that don’t fit, underwear that’s too small, and socks with holes. Now, our closet looks like this (yes, that is part of my RennFair costume hanging on the left. I'm a nerd. I don't deny this):

Unfortunately, the process turned our bed into this: . And of course, this was done right around bedtime. Because that is the optimal time to reorganize your closet doncha know.

And just a little explanation, in case anyone is looking at the second photo and panicking, most of that either went in the Goodwill/garage sale pile, or was put back away in the closet. That black and white bin contains all my purses, which are going to get a weeding soon I think. All in all, I'm making some progress. And we've managed to keep it that tidy (almost) for a week now.And those nightstands were tidied a bit after this picture too. I just wanted to prove to the internet what I slob I am I guess?

Spring Fever

Well, it's looking like winter is finally departing from the mountains, thank god. Now we're just rewarded with warm days, cold nights, and some EPIC storms (including the one three nights ago that knocked out our power!).  And of course, the ubiquitous spring cleaning bug.

This whole ''spring cleaning bug" has bitten me on the ass pretty hard. It's also being fueled by reading far too many DIY/design minded blogs, YoungHouseLove being my current favorite. I've never been totally thrilled with how our living room is put together, and the addition of one of a new Ikea shelf is making things more complicated. One of the inevitable perils of having roommates is that you end up with furniture that doesn't always fit the space, and will eventually move out with their owners, leaving me reticent to get rid of anything, lest I want it at a later date, yet equally reticent to buy anything to fit the current configuration since it will change in the future. In our case, we are lucky enough to have a pretty massive (306 sq ft to be exact!) space, so we don't feel TOO crowded, and even then I think it's just me. But I'm discovering that big isn't always better. We have room for more seating than in the old place, but I'm left feeling like the old tiny living room felt cozier. It doesn't help that I feel like we've just got pieces in here that aren't necessary, so it just feels cluttered to me, yet we still have odd areas of dead space.

There's also this huge expanse of wall with nothing on it. I keep saying that I am going to print photos from some of my trips and frame them, but then I start doing the math of buying enough frames, and my bank account starts crying, and the idea is abandoned.


I finally have a completely free weekend, so there's going to be a lot of cleaning/re-organizing going on. I'm on a quest for new bedroom lamps, frames, and eventually a rug for the living room. We've (okay mainly me) got some ideas kicking around on things we want to do in the kitchen and master bath as well, hopefully some of those can come to fruition soon.  I really want to do something like this in the awkward corners in our bedroom:


And on the knitting front, I cranked this blankie out for our new nephew, Captain Flynn. Sucker came out enormous (blanket, not baby), but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.