Carpe Minutum!

Am feeling a little more in control of my life again at the moment which I realize is probably a passing fancy here, on the brink of The Holidays...but hey! Today I took the kids to their first theatrical production and left the baby for the first time...(He did great, my friend Nutmeg rocks!) and feeling thus emboldened...I decided to paint a little. There are such ugly risers on our stairs...potentially pretty but so scuffed and chipped and splotched with various colors that they are pretty uninspiring. Have been itching to paint them a nice gloss white for ages and ages. Why not now?!? Since dinner is in the crockpot, the kids are asleep and I don't have to dash out again for the afternoon doctor's appointment for another half an hour...I'm all over it. Ha! Feels so good!

Am trying to become an expert at carpe diem and even more realistically in my life carpe minutum...seize the minute. My life is a woven thatch of moments right now and so there are not often whole days but there are always moments. Must read more books and less reflexive facebook checking, must clean one little spot, sort one little box, lay out an outfit for one child and spend less time standing there wondering what I was doing, wishing I had more energy or lying in bed hitting snooze. There is a place in life for letting go and relaxing your mind and your frenetic To Do List but there's also a lot to be said for doing little things here and there to make your life more peaceful and happy and productive. Am ever inspired to do better with what I have....better than most people say I have any right to expect I can be. Thus we achieve...by trying.

Foxy Rocks Decorating

Foxy, and her son, my darling nephew.

My sister Foxy is a fabulously inspiring person.She's one of those people who takes on challenges with gritted teeth and a war cry. She is also a person of unbelievable resilience and flair. She's a veteran, an ex-fire fighter, a great cook, a step mom, a mother and a gardener to boot not to mention fashion-plate, brilliant home renovator and maker of the very best chocolate milk around. She is one of those people I have often called when I feel at my bottom and she always tells me to keep on. For years I kept a little Post-It note on the corner of my computer screen where I scribbled something she told me once on a bad day, "The tide will come back in and will bring with new wonderful things!"

English: A small pad of Post-It notes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We all need people of this caliber in our lives. Impressive, forgiving, funny, thoughtful, forever in our corner types. I hope you have one or two, if not...get looking...they're really valuable stuff. If you're in Kalamazoo, Michigan I recommend my sister...Foxy is top notch.

The whole shebang.

One of the most wonderful things that we did on this last trip to Michigan last week was stop and see Foxy and her family. They live a very frugal life, and travel money isn't always on the books so it had been a long time since we were together. Not only did I get to see her but my entire family (6 kids y'all!) converged on her house for lunch and noshing. A tasty and nostalgic time was had by all and we even managed to get a great big family picture with every single person looking at the camera!

Cousins, just playin' in the yard. Best ever.

Foxy's suave husband.

And people...in the midst of their well pump being out, her sweet husband being between jobs and her working insane swing shifts....I was inspired all over again. How does she do it??? In the middle of all of the stress and short ends in their life right now she and her husband are working hard on their house, constantly rearranging things and trying to figure out how to make better with what they have. I love their place. They live in a suburban neighborhood in a fixer-upper house they are slowly remodeling with an acre of beautiful fenced yard: a gigantic spreading cherry tree and the perfect childhood swing, a vegetable garden, and lots of creative spots for kid play. My children are in heaven the entire time we're visiting.

Foxy, my spritely niece, and my other sister Lockbox.

Sprite holding her baby cousin, Pom.

I love her can-do spirit her artistic vision and her romantic sensibilities. I've always said she had amazing innate ideas about taste and aesthetic. I am ever more sure that its true after this visit. As usual she's been busy shifting around the details of her house and thinking of clever things I wish I'd discovered. I had to share my favorite bits and bobs with you.

She made this little play-tent from an old sheet, a golden scrap of fabric, a hula-hoop and a little ribbon! Amazing or what?!?$

She's a decorating wizard and all around impressive person. I think I won the sister lotto! And this is only one of my amazing siblings if you can believe it. Hot diggity dog...my parents had it goin' on!

Sometimes You Need A Little Taupe

I swear I decorate in rash episodes. I mean to have strategic plans and check things off cleverly one by one working my way methodically through the house creating a nest of beauty as I go. But what really happens? I wake up one random Wednesday morning and decide I have had enough....today I must paint the upstairs hall. Life and death hangs on it. And it has to be done before I take the boys to their co-op meeting, and before the babysitter gets here, and before my extremely stress laden meet-and-greet appointment with the birth center that is my last out of hospital hope. I am not sure if this is insanity, stress relief, brilliant inspiration or nesting.

Pre-renovation stairwell and view into hallway

Ripping out that old carpet

Who really cares? The hall looks good! Not finished, there is still a floor to finish, a ceiling to paint, and trim to re-paint with gloss white. But its starting to really look sophisticated and pretty and to hint at how I want the house to feel. Its a lot better than the plasticky faux wood panelling look + really dingy carpet look that was there before.

I always leave a set of squares for each of the boys to paint at the very end with their own brushes

Nib's first experience getting in on painting himself.

I've never painted a wall taupe before. I feel like a grown-up. It's very elegant on the wall, not boring and it feels adult. I had the runner on the floor and my friend and very sophisticated pal, who also happens to be Ru's godmother suggested taupe after taking an advisory stroll through the place during a co-decorating brainstorm. She's edgy and eclectic and hip and not at all the boring, bland over-elegant style of decorator that I makes me shrink into a very small version of myself. I aspire to be as expressive and creative as this girl. She's that hip.

The finished product. Hall doors and trip all white,walls taupe to match the cool runner.

And when I finished I re-hung the mirror I took down out of the kid-bath which is darn cool but going to be replaced by a medicine cabinet.

Good thing I kept it, eh? It's classy.

Anyhow...all that to say, she told me instantly that I needed taupe. "Taupe walls are the thing in here." And I would never, never have decided that on my own (I go for colors like teal and peacock and bright grape) but when she said it I could see it immedietly and it felt right and I also remembered that I somehow had a bucket full of taupe paint in the basement that I'd pick up somewhere on clearance. So, that was this summer and here we are, a few months later...tucking into bed, in a room off our newly classy hallway. Ah! Accomplishment. One "room" down...five million to go.

Related articles

• Room Paint (hersweetjournal.wordpress.com)
• Living with neutrals...just not beige. (dreamingahome.wordpress.com)
• Elegant ways to paint a room using two accent colors? (ask.metafilter.com)

Bathroom Stripping

 No, not me...this frightening bathroom wallpaper! One of our upstairs bathrooms had this lovely heavily plasticky, blueish, faux-woodgrain wallpaper. As soon as we strolled through the house for the first time I put removing it on the list of renovations to tackle early on.

 Now, of course, all of you real life home-owners know that "early on" means sometime in the first five years of owning your new place, right? I'm so ahead of schedule, getting to the job in the first year. (This is what I tell myself anyhow.) I did a little online reading about wallpaper stripping and then began....then there was a long lull and finally A helped me tear the rest off. Handily, the heavy plastic texture turned out to be a bonus....it peeled off in pretty large sheets and left nothing but a little glue on the wall.

Here are some shots of the plain white tile that lines the shower and the tiny teal-ish tiles that are on the floor. Inspired by them, I am hoping to paint the walls a bright orange as soon as I finish washing all the glue off the newly naked walls. Good thing it's a small room. I am hoping to go for a nice poppy bright color. I always do these edgy, borderline bizarre rich colors and I'm not entirely sure it is wise. I am no interior decorating wizard, that's for sure.

 This one spot above the sink is all I really have clear so far. Lots left to do. This could take a while. Good thing we started to early, eh? We could be occupied for a bit.

Here's Nib on the new bath mat, next to the shower curtain. I hope the whole theme works out. I am primarily being inspired by bright orange coral and seafoamy ocean water. Sounds sane, right? Tell me I'm sane.

Here's my whole design inspiration board, just in case you wanna visualize the colors I'm thinking.

Books and Birds and Buds

There is a pair of hawks swooping around our block lately. They shriek together while they soar high over the convent next door and in the morning I often watch them preening in the tops of the very tall maples across the street. I stand in tadasana and then swan dive down towards my yoga mat while they shift and ruffle feathers and the wind silently blows their tails in chill flutters. I hope they will decide to nest nearby. I'd love to see a nesting pair of hawks raise their young. I've never seen birds so big so familiarly. And maybe the local feral rabbit count will go down too which could be good for my vegetable garden, eh?

I am slowly getting bits and bobs of the house together. Today I moved some of the rugs and art work around and yesterday I figured out how to hang a mask I wanted to display. It's all stop and go and a painfully slow process but I feel like at least the motion is forward. And I know that soon...I'll be all outdoors minded and it will be all that I can do just to make myself wash the dishes, hang the rest of the house.

View into the sunroom/studio

Ru and I are reading aloud the rest of The Little House books again...we have worked our way through the first two and are beginning the third and A is reading Farmer Boy at night. I am not sure why I use the phrase "work through" the right label is "burned through" or "tore explosively through" or some other wildly manic phraseology. It is all I can do to keep the reading sessions down to an hour at a time. He's so thrilled to listen that he will beg and beg for it continue no matter where I leave off. If only I didn't want to sit there reading all day long myself. Heh. I don't know where he gets it.

The last of our snow, in that little sloping pile behind Dee.

The latest garden plan at the moment is a standard, tree-form wisteria. I was ready to give up the wisteria dream. All garden types say it is absurdly invasive and no matter the heartbreaking beauty of the plant it is evil and it will send four million runners all over your lawn and worm a thousand robust fingers up your gutters and then beginning to tear lustily at your siding.

Promising looking buds on our forsythia!

Yes, but I do love it and I have dreamed of having wisteria for years and years and A says I shouldn't live so safely. Claim a dream. I'm thinking that the grafted tree form varieties I've read about seem safer...less prone to runners and wildly unkempt habits than their vining relatives. How does this one look? The next question is: "Do I have to keep it in a planter in order to survive co-habitation with said plant? I wouldn't put mint in the ground to save my life...am I insane to consider plunking a wisteria down?

Related articles

• 13 Reasons to Grow a Vegetable Garden. (frugalupstate.com)
• Hawk's Nest (wvcabins.wordpress.com)
• My Hawk Friend (40dreams.wordpress.com)
• How is a hawk's nest different than a blue jays (wiki.answers.com)
• Yep, the FDNY rescues hawks, too (nydailynews.com)
• Proud to Read Aloud (thereaderonline.co.uk)

Spotlight on the Playroom

Whole lot of paint on my fingers and toes lately as we start to really get into Remodeling Land.

Little mini-tour of an evolving room in our house today. I have shown you bits of the playroom before, but today you'll get a little glimpse into its hopeful future too. Right now, we are mostly calling it "the playroom" by default because it is the place where all the toys and many of the kids books live, but it will also be the room where we will homeschool.

The walls are all faux-wood paneling in a dark brown which makes the room feel very close and cave-ish. But, that is changing! We are now halfway through painting the walls with a gallon of flat white paint that, believe it or not, I found in the basement. (How fabulous is that?) The beauty of knowing that everything will be eventually getting painted and that the floors will eventually be refinished is that kids can paint too! No worries about "messing it up" really. The boys think that's the best thing ever.

Finished walls...just trim left.

Art hanging finally! Love that purply watercolor on the right...Dee's work.

Kid measuring chart, a cool housewarming gift from the next-door neighbor

Where I've stopped at the moment...and you can see our new stand globe, the recently hung curtains and our two free chairs that will belly-up to the table I'm still looking for.

I got a gallon of soft periwinkle blue ('Blueberry Buckle') for $5 in the reject paint section and slapping that on some or all of the walls will be the next step. I think once we've opened the space and made it more breathable with the white its going to be fun to add a little character and homey love with a touch of color.

Found this old metal tray and the two wooden crates below it at a free neighborhood swap. Am planning to have Dee help me organize the rest of the Matchbox cars in it.

Other ideas on the way include:

• A thrifted heavy, very large baroque style frame, painted gold mounted on the wall, around a chalkboard, right at kid level. Something like what this woman did.
• This giant zebra rug, made with just glue, scissors and felt
• A big, sturdy table of some kind that I am hoping to find for free on Craig's List or else curbside
• Some of these nature posters
• A cheap cd player/tape player for listening to books on tape or music together
• A frame like this, and a rotatable set of "The Great" artist's works to put inside
• A simple, big  wall clock with hands and numbers
• And...one or both of these very cool cupboards which the sellers left down in the basement