Weekly Recap

Hi!

This is another slow week for projects.  I only did a few little things around the house.  Such as, putting our tools in a toolbox!

  I didn't take a Before Pic, but the tools used to be in a plastic drawer behind the sewing machine. My first idea was that the drawer would stay in its holder, but it never did. Then it finally dawned on me, that that drawer was kinda like a toolbox without a lid. HH seems to like to collect tool boxes, so we had about 3 empty ones in the storage room.  I was able to put our most used tools into the small box above.  The rest of the stuff from the drawer went out to the tool bench in the breezweay.  So, that's another thing to clean up, but I'll do that on another, warmer day!

Here's a pic of the laundry closet.  It's currently in DS's closet and will eventually be in the hall closet.

As I was in a cleaning mode this week, I moved the white plastic drawers (similar to where the tools used to live, but that was smaller and in the kitchen). They used to be in the above pic on the right.  Below is a pic of the future laundry closet, looking into the master bedroom closet.  You can see the drawers on the right.  The laundry will eventually go kinda where the shoes are... 

And in the most exciting news this week, we got our rug from Cottage Industry!  I got a gift certificate Christmas 2012 and this is what I finally bought a couple weeks before Christmas 2012! It came in last week.  HH went to Charlottetown on Tuesday and he picked it up then. 

So, here it is! Since it took so long to get here, I was afraid it would be different than I remembered but it's pretty much like I thought it would be, so that's good. 

This is an indoor/outdoor Dash & Albert rug that will go in the front room. However, because it's been so cold, HH suggested it go in our bedroom to help keep the floor warm. Here's a pic from the bedroom looking out into the hall. Doesn't it go well with the painted hall rug?  It's not exactly the same, but it looks nice.  

Can you believe I haven't even tried it out in the front room yet? I may do it today! :-)  The front room floor colors are the same as the hallway floor so I'm sure it'll look good.  Except the front room is such a mess now.... Oh, well.

We are supposed to get more snow Saturday night.  This time it'll be right around freezing, so it'll be slushy snow.  Have a great weekend! :-)

No Accessories Party

My first linky party!  I'd been catching up on some blogs Friday and came across The Nester's post about ridding your house of accessories for the month of June.  I'm a week late, but decided to do it anyway.  I thought I'd gotten rid of most of my accessories as we are still in a state of renovation and I didn't want to have a bunch of stuff around.  However, upon closer inspection, I discovered I still have a lot of things.  Here are the main areas I decluttered.

Here are the shelves in the kitchen on the right-hand side of our window.  Not so bad...

But here's the after: (Yes, that's a tv antenna for the 2 channels we get! Oh and I must do something about all those black wires!)

Here is the breakfast nook on the lefthand side.  Lots of stuff, junk and tools!

 Here it is all cleaned up!

Here's HH's dresser:

 And after:

Here's my dresser:

 And here it is now:

Boy that looks much better!

Here is a pile of all the stuff I gathered. Plus I found a couple more things after I'd taken this stuff out to our storage room.

  In the process, though, I broke a see-thru glass plate and the green, bumpy stemmed glass you see above in the yellow cup. My mom had a set of 3 glasses that I'd always admired and finally she gave them to me when I moved up to Halifax when I first met HH.  Sometime along the way, the brown one broke (it was my least favorite anyway) and I had 2- one for me and one for HH.  We do use them sometimes, but not often, so I thought I should put them away.  The bottom broke off so I may try to glue it back together! :-)

I like this exercise in decluttering.  We got a lot of work done this weekend and are finally moved into the front bedroom!! Yay! (DD is temporarily set up in the back room.) Our dressers are still in the back room so I can easily finish the drywall in the bedroom, but the bed is in and we slept there last night! I'd like to keep the bedroom as clutter-free as possible! 

I have a lot of progress to share on the master bedroom and DD's bedroom but I've got to start cutting some drywall so I'll write more on all that later!

:-)

Drawers

(This post was written in December, but I'm just publishing it now...)

I read a good post yesterday on Decluttering before the holidays.

The Amazingly Awesome Pre-Holidays Declutter Guide

I've been trying to declutter the whole house since the summer.  But today, let's talk about kitchen drawers.I've done pretty good in the kitchen which is pretty small I guess, compared to other kitchens, but it seems to have all the space we need.

We have one "organized" junk drawer, which looks a lot better since I moved all our tools to another location.  (Since we are renovating/building we have a lot of tools, screws, nails etc. The indoor tools live in a plastic rolling cart drawer under our Breakfast Nook.)

The silverware drawer is fine.  It looks empty because I haven't unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher yet!  Somehow this summer we lost about 6 of our spoons. I have a double set of silverware which I really like for everyday use and I have some different extras to send in the kids' lunches so if they lose them I don't have to worry. But for some reason, my good spoons are missing. So, I brought out my 2 "good" silverware spoons to use.  (We got that silverware for our wedding from an old family friend of my husband. She had picked out the pattern "Belle Rose" which happened to be the name of the little plantation cottage we stayed in for our honeymoon! We're not really into "good" dishes or silverware, but we kept them anyway because of the nice coincidence.  Anyway, she gave us 2 settings.)  I also borrowed 2 spoons from my dad and step-mom who this summer bought a travel trailer to keep by our cottage.  To go in the trailer, they also bought spoons!

Next is the spice drawer. It seems we have a lot of spices, but I really use most of them!  I have gotten rid of a few jars so the remaining ones were sliding all around. I fixed this problem by putting in the little basket for garlic, the garlic press, salt and pepper. I was going to put in a couple baskets to group like-spices together, but I didn't have room so I only used the one.

The utensil drawer was also cleaned out this summer. I use all the things!  This is a drawer my husband built from the drawer that would've gone where our cooktop is. He had to narrow and lengthen it.  I'm noticing the bottom is a bit funny looking. Perhaps I should look for some drawer liners. Maybe I could use some wallpaper from the Restore...

So there you have it! A look into all my kitchen drawers!   :-)