Space Sharing With Your Spouse

Feeling a little cramped in my own house today. A has been holed up in the office all week on important (must keep the kids quiet!!!) phone calls and dodging in and out of the house for meetings and gym runs. This morning he left while I was out with the boys and he locked up out of the house by accident. Its so hard to switch up your regular routine and toss a new person and new demands into it, right? It seems so cozy to spend extra time together but the reality is a little stickier.

I always thought I was extrovert until I realized that being an introvert is more about needing alone time than it is about hating people. Read this fabulous book all about introvertism and came away with a whole new perspective and an understanding about my need for space and recharging. Makes sense that having my little world invaded, even by my own spouse, would make me feel a little encroached upon now that I feel legit about my own wiring. Autumn feels like a season that pushes all the introvert buttons extra hard too, its all of the moment: stand at the sink peeling apples for hours and stock the larder with homemade apple sauce, read books alone in the dark by the light of a lantern, get up in the quiet and start a coffee cake before the children get up, walk home from work alone and take a shortcut through the woods to kick leaves....you get that right?

 

Sharing is good but admitting your own needs and boundaries is also good. Sometimes a little open-eyed clarity is the key to stopping the obsession and high-stepping past your own little stumbling blocks. I think one of the problems is that I also skipped my mama-night out alone this week. So, now I'm off to the library to look for a good book that I can take off and read alone after dinner just to get myself out of the house and breathing in a little solo space.

This Whole Motherhood Thing

There are times when being a Mommy is super, crazy fun. They are, I won't lie...pretty select times. Mostly its just a thing...like being a homeowner or being a wife or being a student. Not bad, not amazing...but decent. And sometimes it makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon but that's for another time. Sometimes...there are real, genuine moments of idyllic happiness.

From time to time I wish I felt like motherhood was almost always moving and wonderful but it isn't, at least for me. Sometimes, I wade through Mommy-guilt about that fact. I think maybe "good moms" are the ones who always rave about adoring their children. Maybe even good moms are the ones who pretend they're perma-thrilled with their role. But then, I have a real penchant for honesty. I'd rather even my children know the truth. Being a mommy is really hard, its scary, its exhausting and its heartbreaking. Its not my most favorite thing in life. Its also very personal, and delicious and peppered with some of my most exhilarating feelings of success. I had no idea teaching someone to read would feel like climbing Mount Everest or that I would actually weep over the strenuousness of potty training. I am genuinely ridiculously proud of myself and the child when I cross the finish line on some Mommy-goal like that!!!!

Although mothering has been really feeding and exciting it also feels like a business I am a little loathe to make "my life" even though I am home full-time and admittedly not really a classic career person. Its a sticky business to make the care, feeding and emergence of a tiny handful of fully sentient and self-aware humans your life-work. I want to support them and encourage them and teach them but on some level I kind of want them to wear that label themselves, not me. I try not to encourage myself to "own" them and their development and instead to do all I can to enable them and to make myself my own life-work. I think there's a lovely, deeply personal, delicate piece to being a mother, there's also a lot of room for mismanagement, obsession, and forgetting who you are as a person and your responsibility to continue growing. And that's my soapbox for the morning. Happy Thursday!

Kitchen Spiff-Up!

I've been working on the kitchen and I had to share the results.
Kitchen Before:



I never remember to take decent Before shots when I am starting a new project. It's so much more exciting to get going!

Kitchen After:

Tada!!!! It's bright green, I know, really, really bright...but I love it! The color is Sherwin Williams, Direct Green. I think it will be an inspiring place to cook in, and that that peppy shade will carry us through winter well. There are still a few little minor details to finish like the ugly faux wood switch-plate on the wall next to the door..and the chic seventies hammered copper door cupboard handles which I am switching out as soon as my Ebay purchase replacements get here! 

And look at all that new counter space!!! I'm psyched! We have doubled when we had when we moved in by adding that pale green section over the dishwasher and then (and this is the latest touch of genius) moving the microwave off the countertop. Hooray for space!

Here's the stove area "Before." I took all those spices down from the cluttery arrangement above the stove and I think the new occupants of the space look a lot nicer. You can't see it in the Before shot but there is a cupboard above the stove and I took the doors off of it to open the space a bit and display some of my prettier dishware that we use all the time. (i.e. things that aren't in the china cabinet but are still nice to look at)

So, this is how it looks now. A good bit better. 

You can just barely see where I ripped off the wallpaper above the cupboard, I still need to remove the bottom bits of it and paint it clean white. Am considering some sort of scalloped colored painted border at the top (maybe cobalt?).

Here are the other bits of the new kitchen arrangement.

The spice corner, near the stove. :) The hanging rack with pretty jars of spices, then more spices in baskets on top of the fridge, and believe it or not, there are even more that are lesser used in a tiny drawer on the other side of the kitchen.  And my stone mortar and pestle on the tiny island counter.

Here's the window now, I need a little suction cup hook or a bit of chain to make that suncatcher hang a little lower but the colors make me happy. There is a kid-reachable spot for hanging  a couple of aprons on the left of the window-frame, a big chalkboard that I painted on the wall for quotes, notes to each other and jotting down grocery items, and then on the right hand side of the window I hung one of my paintings! Hooray!

Now you can see where the microwave migrated too. See it on top of the refrigerator? I know that's a little silly but it works well for us because of the steps which give easy access. I love having all our countertops free and it's kind of cool to use the top of the fridge for something more than just clutter collection. It isn't the prettiest arrangement but you never know, a way to make it look nicer may occur to me. It isn't bad.

Here's some close-ups here and there so that you can get a feeling for the fun details. The only thing I bought was the paint, and the aforementioned cupboard handles (a dollar a piece!) and the rest of the goods were just shopped from my own storage stash and wherever else throughought the house I hunted and found something I thought would work. The yellow gingham on the window was in my fabric stash, the baskets the spices are in were storing something else inffectively, etc.

Yay redecorating! Next on the docket is the dining room and further spiffing in the living room, and then I really roll up my sleeves with the playroom/homeschool room. I'm also working a bit on the pantry after a bout with the dreaded pantry moth. Will put all the dry-goods into glass jars or bust! Argh!

Anyone have any tips for how to store cereal? I would like to keep it in glass, no plastic in some sort of space-efficient system but in jars large enough to hold a whole box-full.  

Related articles

• Creating a Little Extra Workspace in a Small Kitchen (apartmenttherapy.com)
• Easy Ways to Renovating Your Kitchen (allhome-improve.com)
• Rescue Your Kitchen Along With Spice Racks (mydecorarticles.com)
• 2 Must-Have Designs For a Small Kitchen (casasugar.com)
• Jenniffer's Small Yet Luxurious Kitchen Small Cool Kitchens 2011 (thekitchn.com)
• Before and After: A Fresh and Bright Kitchen (casasugar.com)
• 10 Things We Learned from Small Cool Kitchens 2011 (thekitchn.com)
• Kelly's Bright Double Green Kitchen Small Cool Kitchens 2011 (thekitchn.com)
• Kathleen's Super-Bright, Super-Happy Kitchen Small Cool Kitchens 2011 (thekitchn.com)

And So It Goes...

Today I stopped at a farm stand I drive by all the time, near my new house and bought a braided stem ficus tree for our office, a fig tree (with little baby figs on it!) and two huge lush, potted mums for our front steps. I have a feeling I'll be by the stand again. Its part nursery, part farm stand, part bakery...a lovely little operation run by a chatty little Italian man who tossed Ru and apple from a bushel basket full of them as we hopped back in the car. I do love good finds.

Every week we send a few more empty boxes to the curb and we're getting a lot closer to cleared out although there are still no new rooms without packed goods. I am running out of steam a bit, it has to be admitted. I just want to paint and put up curtains and pick which throw pillow go where. I'm sick of all this putting away. I'm also down to the hard stuff and that doesn't help. Where do the back-up toiletries go? How do I put all my hats in my closet in a reasonable way? What do I with diapers now that the desk we were using for a changing table is living in the playroom/homeschool room? Meh. So many tough questions and no astoundingly simple answers. I have boxes of kitchen goods to sort out, little teeny weeny bottles of sesame seeds and the back-up bowl for my Cuisinart and the tortilla press. Drat it all.

Lots of boxes left....

But look! Floor is appearing!!!

In other news, we have company coming again, my mother-in-law is swinging by for a week to help us with all the settling in. I have never had her come visit alone and have honestly spent precious little time with her in a one-on-one setting. Am curious and trying hard to not be too apprehensive.

I am also charging ahead with the landscaping project although not as quickly as I'd like. I've taken pictures of the property for the designer to mull over and sent copies to her. We've purchased a sprinkler and as I speak it is ensuring that our grass won't just curl up and die and I've also made sun-maps of the property so that we know where to plant the hostas and where to put the peonies. Next targets are sending soil samples to our local extension office for testing and measuring the dimensions of our yard space. *pant pant* I will prevail.

my orange highlighted sun-maps

The boys have a dresser!

The good news is that the boys now have a dresser...one dresser...although I need another one (still looking!), we've had a plumber in and he fixed the master shower so that it no longer leaks through the dining room ceiling, a dishwasher will be installed on Saturday  and through it all I am caught up on laundry too! Having a clothesline obsession will do that for you. Small victories, people, small victories.