The house, it is a-changin'!

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. (Some Garrison Keillor for you.) We haven't been too exciting, just busy doing living things. A few appointments, some rain, some sunshine, a few walks. And doing laundry, picking up, dishes, reading stories, and playing with Hoyt. All nice quiet things. Which seems to be exactly what I need. I have been in a funk this fall. Gilbert doesn't have tutors coming four times a week anymore, so there are no longer deadlines on picking up my house. Which I thought would be lovely, but really, just means my house doesn't get picked up as much. Add to that, the normal adjustment period of getting back into school routine and the lethargy (I blame it on the cloudiness) of fall, and not a whole lot has been happening around here. Which isn't good. I get a bit blue (and short tempered) when things are messy and overwhelming. And then, two weeks ago, we moved everything around, which seems to have helped. Things are different and there is something about new things (or at least different) that makes me want to keep them shiny.

Moving things around started late one Tuesday night. Since we moved Orianna and Lily upstairs, Gilbert and Elsie had been rattling around in the bigger of the two downstairs rooms. I couldn't quite get the room configuration to work well with some key furniture gone and it suddenly occurred to me that it would make more sense for us to be in the bigger room and Elsie and Gilbert in the smaller. And while we were doing it, we might as well repaint the kids room, since four years and four kids had left it looking rather war torn. Pin holes all over the walls, a few crayon and marker assaults, tape that had torn off a bit of paint here and there, odd bits of touch up paint... (That last one was totally my fault. I decided it would freshen up the room to repaint it. Except that I forgot that we added white to the final mixing of paint, so the paint I painted on was an exact match of the wall, until it dried much darker.) It was a room in need of a re-do.

Justin had a few days down time, so he was able to help by painting and trimming the room. And move some furniture. And books. Okay, Justin really did it all. I just tidied up the end bits. It was all back to rights by Friday afternoon, when we had company.

I realize this might be boring for all you people that didn't really know what it was like before. Just believe me that it is much nicer now. And cleaner. There is something about completely moving things around that ensures a deep clean.

This is our room, after we started moving things around. (We don't normally keep large bouncy balls on our bed.) Up until this spring, we had a crib over in the corner by the window. So seriously, there was no room in here. There was about a foot and a half on each side and maybe three feet at the end of the bed. Which was fine. It worked for four years. But it wasn't spacious.

We had a bookcase at the foot of our bed, which I love.

I do my own paint mixing, since I think it is cheaper to by mistints and make my own color. This of course is not strictly true, since I end up mixing up about 3-4 gallons of paint before I find the shade I wanted for the original 1 gallon. But it is sort of fun. And lets me paint at the drop of a hat. (Which I never do, but it sounds good.) So these were my trial run colors. I actually ended up lightening the darker shade on the right with a few glops of white paint and went with that. We have this lovely quilt on our bed and I wanted the room to look good with it.

You can't really tell, but this blue wall is horrible. Marks, coloring, and pin holes all over. And the colors together were terrible. We had lightened the pink several degrees, which made it look much nicer with the blue, but then I painted it wrong and it went back to looking terrible with the blue. 

The pink and green together, were a bit frightful. I had grave doubts about the green at this point.

This is where you can really see the difference in the two pink colors. This was behind the huge armoire, so no one saw it, which is why I never bothered fixing it.

Justin cutting in.

Elsie and Daddy working on trim.

And the finished product!

 I like it. I haven't sorted out where to put pictures and whether I should get rid of those curtains yet, but I really, really like it. And don't tell me it should have been a shade or two the other way. It is done. But now that I am looking at this picture, I am sort of wondering if it shouldn't have been a bit darker.... Maybe it is just the flash.

My new bedside table! We got this from my great-aunt when she moved out of her house in Philadelphia. My mom has one like it from my grandmother and I loved it, so this was the one thing I requested from Aunt Emma. It was in our entry for a year and a half, simply because that was where we had a spot to put it when we brought it home from our road trip two summers ago. I would walk by and be pleased that it belonged to me, but rack my brain as much as I could, I could find no where else for it to go. And then, ta-da! There was a little space. I have a desk! (Are these things actually called a secretary? For some reason that popped into my head...) I am really, really happy about this. 

And the top part folds down to this. Isn't it cool? I am in love with this thing. I sat down and wrote three letters the other day, just because I can. And do you see the little wee drawers? Perfect for stamps and pens and little cards. And there is that darling little door and I haven't decided what to use that for, which is just as well, since I feel like there should be something important behind that door. 

Justin's side. I decided to put one of his sewing machines to use as a bedside table. This one was out in our entry area and it is a basic treadle singer, not heavy duty, so he can't use it for leather sewing. This is the one he got for free beside the road this fall. He has it in working order, so if he ever has to sew in the middle of the night, in a power outage, he is ready to go. 

At the foot of our bed. 

Please admire the sheer amount of space there is. And the cute girl reading.

There is that giant armoire, which means we can actually have our clothes in our room instead of in the semi-detached closet. Weird.

And a chair! I sit there and admire my new room while drinking tea and reading my bible or book. It isn't a beautiful chair, but I have offered to let Justin try out his upholstering skills on it. I think that was generous of me. Hopefully soon it will be covered in some other fabric or...leather.

And there is a little table next to it, where I put my mending basket. I am totally going to do mending all the time, now that I have a chair for it. Just like I will write bazillions of letters because I now have a desk. 

I find that once you start moving things around, everything gets moved. This little sideboard was hiding behind our couch for the past few years. 

I put a $5 goodwill drop leaf table behind the couch, which I don't mind dribbling fern water on. 

The kids jumping on their bed. Which is totally not allowed, but I was a bad Mother and took a picture before telling them to stop.

This is Hoyt in the kids new room.

Cozy corner

Closet full of toys. The door even shuts, which is exciting for toy containment.

Their bookcase

The bed from the corner

Elsie and Hoyt's joint effort in deshelving books.

The kids have a huge, firm body pillow for their bed, so they can sit and read books there too. 

And in cute, white rocking chairs

Our entry area.

Justin's old bedside table, the corner bookcase from my grandmother is now where we put library books and the like.

Our entry. We have way, way more room here than we did before. We took out a chair and Justin's treadle machine. It feels so much more open. 

I love my house!