The Bookshelf Saga: Part 2

Once the bookshelves were finished, I started loading them with books, beginning with the shelves we bought.  Those shelves are at the end of my new shelving system, and I alphabetize our books by author, so I started with Z and worked my way backward until I filled the shelves...

...and ran out of room.

So I got creative!

I found this set of retro mustard yellow suitcases at Goodwill earlier that week, and I still hadn't figured out exactly what I was going to do with them.  So I used the smaller one as a bookshelf at the east end of the lighted bookshelves!

(I filled the big one on the bottom with denim I'm saving to make quilts for my kids some day.  

Storage in plain sight; I love that!)

This is my Desert/Cowboy Corner:  a rubbing of a Native American petroglyph (my step-grandma made it along the Columbia River in the 60s for an art class, before the dam flooded the area), a paint-by-number my grandpa did, jars of jawbones my kids collected in Nevada, a too-small cowboy hat and too-big cowboy boots, and a desert-scape picture my brother-in-law took in South America (the frame belonged to my great-grandma and is made out of cactus).

On the wall facing that, at the west end of the lighted bookshelves, I stacked up a few old wooden crates from my mother-in-law and filled them with books (because I knew by the time I got to the M's that I was going to run out of room), and I used a horseshoe-shaped book holder turned on end to take part of my Louis L'Amour collection vertical.  To continue my cowboy theme, I filled some too-small cowboy boots with coins to use as bookends and added a red bandanna and my father-in-law's moose jawbones.

I'm happy with my little extra shelving solutions, and the bookshelves we bought and assembled are very nice, but my hands-down favorite are the lighted bookshelves!

I love how easy it is to read the titles, even on the oldest and most worn spines,

and really I love the soft glow that showcases my beloved friends books;

especially at night!

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 1

When we moved from Tennessee to Washington, we had 33 boxes of books, and by the time we moved into this log house, I had collected just a few more.

(Boxes?  Or books?  I'm not telling!  My husband's reading this!)

That collection has grown even more during the years we've lived here, but they're (mostly) for school, and I like to plan ahead, so...

We want to put in some really cool built-in shelves along these walls on the upstairs landing, but in the meantime, my shelves were cardboard boxes, stacked up on top of each other and reinforced with boards between layers.

The shelves along this adjacent wall were even worse:

and there was no improving them.  In the last configuration the box-shelves were five rows tall instead of the three in this picture, with no wooden bookcase and with less uniformly sized boxes.

And the top two rows were starting to lean forward away from the wall.

Scary.

To save our children's skulls and their mother's sanity, we bought some "temporary" bookshelves for the larger wall,

and my husband built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me along the short wall.

But my husband doesn't do things half way.

He built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me...

...with built-in lighting on each shelf!

The rest of the story (or at least more pictures) is coming soon!

Another Laundry Room Makeover

After my last laundry room makeover, the laundry room was organized and functional, but of course it never stayed this neat.

And these ugly (albeit functional) brown shelves,

 well, I just couldn't handle looking at them any more.

Ew.

So one evening, while the kids had cereal for dinner, I painted them white.

(Editor's Note:  The shelves, Aunt Shirley, NOT the kids!  It's safe to eat cereal at my house again!)

A few weeks later, I inherited the crib that my grandpa built in the 40s.

It was the excuse I'd been waiting for...I tore out the cheap cabinets in the laundry room to create a space for the crib, and I only lost two inches of walkway.

(If it's quiet, and I can't find my girls, I look here.  They've been known to curl up in the crib together to read - all three of them!)

The laundry room is still not my favorite room in the house, but at least the new look makes me smile when I walk in there instead of cringing!

Welcoming Fall In My Entryway

I bought this (cheap but sturdy) cabinet at Goodwill this summer so we could have a place next to the front door for sitting to pull on boots.  The doors hide grown-up work boots and off-season throw blankets.

For the summer months, I piled my Peruvian bright striped pillows in front.

 We call this the "boot basket", although it holds the kids' tennis shoes too.

I thought the basket looked summery enough on its own, so we left it bare.

The trees are finally starting to change colors around us, and the Fall weather has started,

so we started bringing Fall inside too.

My only rule for decorating as the seasons change:

"Use only what we already have around the house" ...

aka "Spend no money."

I wrapped the boot basket with a textured piece of fabric

and secured it with two pieces of twill tape tied together. 

I moved the bright striped pillows to the back and covered them with another piece of fabric, then piled the brown pillows in front with a green wool one that I borrowed from my bedroom.  My son helped me choose some branches off a tree in our front yard, and we stuck them in a bottle that we rescued from the recycle bin.

And my pumpkin pillow?

Why, yes, it is just an old orange cashmere sweater stuffed with a pillow!  

I tied the sleeves together at the top and stuffed the ends inside, then wrapped a brown washcloth around the knot for a stem.  Then I borrowed a scrap of felted green cashmere from my daughters' craft supplies, tucked it in next to the knot, and called it a leaf.

Fall has officially arrived in my entryway!

It Has Begun

It has begun.

This school year marks the beginning of my last 13 years of teaching.

Let's pause and let that sink in for a minute.

Yeah.

I only have 13 years left before I retire.

Amazing.

Anyway.  Moving on.

We started our new school year on Monday, and for the first time, all four kids are "officially" in school.

I have two 5th graders, a 4th grader, and a Kindergartner.

All of the books that are scheduled to be read in the first 12 weeks barely fit on the school shelves in the living room,

(although some of these books will carry through the whole year)

(The top two shelves are alphabetized by author, and the bottom row of over-sized books is too.)

and our school cupboard in the kitchen is full of the workbooks and notebooks we use (almost) every day.

(Workbooks are grouped by subject, and notebooks are color-coded according to each child's signature color...which also happen to be their favorite colors.)

Am I organized?  Why, yes, yes I am.

Maybe a little bit too organized?

Maybe.

But I'm OK with that, and so is my family.

It helps keep the chaos under control, and everyone knows where to find what they need.

And if they can't find what they're looking for, I know exactly where to tell them to look!

***
(Can anyone guess what song is now stuck in my head?)

Formerly Known As...

If each week got its own unique descriptive phrase, last week's would have to have been

"Internal Upheaval".

The room formerly known as the "Guest Room" became the "Music Room"

(so I can close the door on the new-to-"us" drum set),

 

which meant that what was formerly known as Mr. Adorable's room is now also the guest room

(but only when we have guests, of course),

and the many boxes of books, formerly stored along two walls in Mr. Adorable's room, are now once again stored along one wall on the upstairs landing.

Most of them, anyway.

OK, maybe 2/3 of them.

Fine. 

At least more than half.

The Fight Against Fuzz

I do not regret reading any of the books that I read in my childhood. At least not that I can remember at the moment!

I'm sure that some of the literary choices I made were less than stellar, but none were really awful, bad books. Part of that, I'm sure, is due to the fact that I was finding my reading material in our little library in Peru (yeah, that would be the little library on the missionary base), and therefore must also partly be due to the fact that any book I checked out had to make it past "Aunt" Theresa*, the former-nun-turned-missionary-librarian.

Aunt Theresa scared all of us kids, I think. She was a tiny woman even from a child's point of view, with short cropped gray hair and a no-nonsense attitude. She ran that library. She might have even been officially in charge of it. NO ONE crossed Aunt Theresa. If she didn't approve of a book I was trying to check out, she would call my mom to make sure it was OK if I walked out with it. It drove me crazy, and eventually Mom told her that I could check out anything I wanted and they (my parents) would look at it before I read it. And yet, although I was in awe of her, there was a certain sparkle in her eyes that made me feel like I was her favorite among all the kids that passed by her desk. My speed-reading, book-devouring little self certainly kept her busy, at least!

My girls read just like I did as a kid; fast and often. And, just like their mother, they read far above their grade level, which is where my battle begins...and where I begin to appreciate Aunt Theresa's efforts at a whole new level.

Our school curriculum is heavy on reading. (Imagine that!) We have multiple books for each subject, as well as "free reading" books and scheduled literature. We have books for Kindergarten through 5th grades on our shelves, and I've started collecting books for 6th through 12th grades as well. It would be an understatement to say that we have a lot of books.

And it is precisely because we have a lot of books that I keep a list in my purse of all the books on our school shelves. It's printed in a font about this big, and it's currently 9 pages long. I started it a few years ago because I kept coming home with books I was looking for...only to find a copy already sitting on our shelves! I am constantly updating the list: when I pull a book off the shelf to get rid of, that book gets deleted from the list, and when I find a new treasure, it gets added to the print-out before it gets shelved. It's a system that has worked well for me, and I've successfully kept it to "only" 9 pages. (So far!)

The other day I entered some new books into my list, and in the process decided that one of the books, although harmless enough in subject matter, wasn't worthy of "living" on the school shelves. (I call these kinds of books "fluff" books. They are books that are mindless, quick reads, with nothing to grow on. They have little, if any, educational value and contain nothing worth thinking about later. They are books with no "meat" to them, only "fluff".)

I told the girls that I had decided that it was a "fluff" book, and that if they wanted to keep it they had to squeeze it onto their shelves. They kept it, and later, one of them asked me why I had called it a "fuzz" book, yet put a similar book on the school shelves.

I asked her if she had learned anything from the fluff book (hereafter known as a "fuzz" book!), and she said, "Well, no, but it was fun!" Then I asked her if she had learned anything from the other book. "I already knew about most of it...but in the end Mr. X learned that he shouldn't be rude to strangers, and ... OH! I get it! One of the people in the book learned a good lesson that we can learn too! That's why it's not a fuzz book and the other one is!"

I think Aunt Theresa would approve!

*All of the kids on the missionary center called the adults "Aunt" and "Uncle". It was like having one really big family. :)

Laundry Room Make-Over

I finally couldn't take it any longer.

The clutter in the laundry room was getting to me.

So I decided to give the laundry room a make-over.

The only rule was that I had to use only what I had on hand around the house.

It almost...

...ALMOST...

...makes me want to do some laundry.

Closet Space

After Mr. Adorable dumped the contents of my shoe rack onto the floor, I decided that maybe it was time to clean out my closet.  I've spent the last year sorting, consolidating and re-organizing every closet and every room in the house, and I never even thought about tackling MY closet.

But last month, tackle it I did!  I made myself some mental guidelines and dove into the project.  I got rid of:

*anything that was stained, stretched out, or worn out

*styles that were too young 

*shirts that were low-necked, sheer, or not long enough

*things that just "weren't ME" (even if they WERE cashmere!)

*shoes that were uncomfortably tight (even if they WERE Clarks!)

I sorted through my bookshelves recently too, and got rid of a small pile of beloved books, the premise being that if I wouldn't allow my children to read them when they get older, then they have no business being on my shelves.  As a parent, I should lead by example!  That same idea contributed to my clothes-sorting guidelines.  

To begin with, we humans (especially we Americans) could get by with a lot less stuff.  (Time to clean OUT the closet, not just straighten it!)  We (our family) live on a comfortable income, and can afford to buy new clothes IF and when we really need them.  (Good-bye, stained, stretched out, worn out old t-shirts -- I can always wear one of my husband's t-shirts when I mow the lawn!)  I am 32 years old, and a mother of four.  (Isn't it time to dress my age?  Well, at least not wear clothes meant for teenagers...)  I am trying to teach my girls what is and what isn't modest, and good examples are hard to find.  (I shouldn't be able to point to my OWN closet for the bad examples!)  And yes, I am addicted to cashmere (anything cashmere!) and Clarks brand shoes, and I will freely admit it.  (But that doesn't mean I should wear unflattering colors or styles and walk around in too-tight shoes!)

It is a lot easier to keep my closet neatly organized now that there are less clothes in it!  Now, if I could just convince Mr. Adorable that my shoes and shoe rack are not toys...

Christmas Challenge - Part 10

10 - Do your Christmas shopping ahead of time.  WAY ahead of time!  Start watching the after Christmas clearance and sales for all of your Christmas supplies and gifts for next year.  If you buy gifts ahead of time though, don't forget who you bought each gift for, and don't forget where you put them!  (Sticky notes work well!)  :)

Christmas Challenge - Part 8

8 - Use an old photo album as an address book.  I keep an alphabetized list of all the people we correspond with at Christmas in an old photo album.  I write their current address in pencil in the space next to the picture, and I put the most recent picture we have of them (usually their most recent Christmas photo-card) in the photo keeper slot.  It keeps me organized in the midst of the Christmas chaos, and it comes in handy too when my husband can't remember a name!  :)