Still working on the walls

I've been too busy with other things to make progress on the school room, except that I took out one piece of potential wall art:  a handed-down pine cone wreath. It is a bit of a family heirloom, but is a bit lacking in visual appeal, and I am ready for a break from it.

Taking it out of the room definitely made an emotional difference; it had been weighing on me more than I realized.

On to the walls

The past couple of days I've made only incremental progress in our school room.

First I had various misadventures trying to do touch-up painting on the walls, starting with using the wrong color of paint--not hard, in a house that has three or four different shades of beige on the walls. Then, after I found the paint can with the right color, it was still the wrong color, because the paint was so old.  Those Magic Erasers for walls have been very helpful.

Then, I pulled out the things that we used to have on the walls, and tried them in various places to see which ones I wanted to use. The results were inconclusive, because most of them are too small, except for one or two that are much too large.  Also, the nails in the walls are much too high, and I am very reluctant to make additional nail holes, now that I know that I can't touch them up very well.

Today I did something that I should have done earlier, and moved my homemade coat hook rack into the school room. It fits in well, somehow makes that wall look much more finished, and connects the colors in the school room with the ones in the dining room. It is also needed there, since my husband has decided that parking the car in the relatively warm garage in the winter only makes the road salt eat holes in it faster, so we use the front door in the winter.

I was curious and measured the width of the coat closet, which is about two and a half feet. That is fine for a family of four in California--ranch style house--but not for a much larger family in Minnesota.

The other thing I accomplished was that some small assistants helped me determine that next to the front door would be a good place for a mirror of moderate size. I have one that would work, but I am very reluctant to move it off my closet wall.

Seating, surfaces, and storage...

...are most of what I have been working on in our school room lately. I brought in a rocker from another room, to make an additional reading chair. I got the book storage straightened out. I put a little rack of coat pegs up where it was before, and put out the boot trays. I reduced my fabric stash slightly so that it would fit into five drawers, leaving a whole cabinet to become a new home for the cookbooks.

Some of the surfaces will be left empty, for breathing room and places to set things down.

I also hung the curtains back up.

Toilet seat paint job update

This summer I gave the toilet seat another repainting; it really needed it.

Looking back at my original post on this, and the one on the repainting after that, it looks like a toilet seat paint job will last for about six months in my busy household.

The initial cost was about $8, and I think I still have enough primer and paint left to do one more round. So it is costing us about $2 per six months, or $4 per year, to keep the current toilet seat going. That doesn't count the labor involved, which is roughly two hours each time, though much of that is 
spent waiting for the paint to dry enough to put on the next coat.

A new seat would last us 3-4 years, and would cost something like $10 per year. That puts my "hourly wage" for this work at maybe $1.50 per hour, which is lower than what I usually aim for.

Some observations

Our school room, without all the books and the rugs and the curtains and the coats and shoes, is LOUD. The sound bounces all around the room, sometimes doing more than one lap, I think, and it's not just the sounds generated within the room, but also those from adjoining rooms and outdoors.

It made me appreciate how much the carpet in the other areas of the house are quieting them, even though I thoroughly loathe that beige carpet.

I had the furniture more or less arranged, but I kept getting Ideas, and with the shelves empty, I could try them out fairly easily. I tried using one bookshelf as a sort of room divider, separating the entry area from the rest of the room. It was an intriguing option, but I decided against it, because it was blocking light and kind of fighting against the architecture of the room. There was also the matter of anchoring the bookshelf securely so that it wouldn't tip.

That particular bookshelf actually ended up somewhere else entirely:  downstairs, where there is a niche in the hallway that I have been thinking of making a bookshelf for. It just fits, and only because the light fixture there has the ability to swivel; I'm still discovering things about this house, after living here for several years.

Today I moved most of the books back. I think we may have too many.

Cozy minimalism in the school room

I was going to put off dealing with our school room until later in the summer, as the next few weeks are quite busy ones for us, but I decided to squeeze it in this week.

I'm glad I did; there was a lot that needed to be done in there.

I started by listing the purposes for the room:  it is our school room, our library, my office and craft room, and our main entry. It also has the biggest patch of bare floor in the house, which is used for sliding and dancing.

The biggest issue with it was Too Much Stuff. I have for some time been fighting the urge to buy even more things to put in it; a big reason why I wanted to deal with the room sooner rather than later.

The room also has a balance problem; massive bookshelves along one wall that seem to pull that whole side of the room downward. At the other end, there is a smoke detector hanging smack in the middle of prime wall space. Storage for coats and boots and shoes and hats and mittens and gloves and socks and sometimes snow pants has always been challenging.

The first step in the Cozy Minimalist method is to gather inspiration. I zipped over that, mostly, because the budget for this room at this time is zero dollars, and if I have anything that is inspiring for that room right now, it is the word "Gothic".

It took me only several hours to get the room cleared of everything but the main pieces of furniture. I say "only" because of the large number of books involved, over thirty boxes worth.  Then I took a few more hours to wipe things down and dust and vacuum under and behind everything. It was a lot of work, but it was good to get it all done at once, instead of trying to chip away at it a little at a time.

I've started a list of the other things that need to be tended to in the room.

The next thing was to work on the furniture arrangement. I highly prefer to measure the room and furniture and make little scale cutouts that I can scoot around on a graph paper room, although the book recommends just moving the real furniture. It helps me to see possibilities that I wouldn't think of otherwise.

But in the end, the furniture mostly came back to where it started.  A cabinet got promoted into a position in one of the room's focal points, and has been given the job of drawing attention away from that smoke detector. That displaced a so-so bookshelf, which is in a subordinate position that hopefully will help the cabinet balance the other bookshelves.

Next step is to work on rugs and lighting.

A much faster way to declutter

From Leila of Like Mother, Like Daughter, an outstanding post on how to quickly declutter and clean a surface:  clear it off completely, wipe it down, and then put back only the things that go there.  After that's done, then you can sort out and deal with the rest.

More edible yard: Milkweed flowerets

Milkweed is edible!  I picked some flowerets off the milkweed growing wild in the yard, and fried them with eggs for breakfast.

There is good information on harvesting milkweed here.  The young stems, flowerets, flowers, and young pods are all edible, but should be cooked first.

Short book review: Restoration House

I recently read Restoration House:  Creating a Space That Gives Life and Connection to All Who Enter, by Kennesha Buycks. I don't have it in front of me now, but I'll give some of my impressions from it.

I found it to be a warm and inspiring book. It is a mix of the author's personal story, ways to graciously show hospitality in your home, and practical tips for decorating your house.

The pictures are in the same decorating style as the cover photo. It is a very restrained style, I would call it a subdued variant of Beach House, but it is also very simple and very accessible. I went to her blog, Restoration House, because I wondered how her style had evolved over time, but it is not set up for easy backward browsing, so it took me some doing to even see that her style has indeed changed a great deal in the last few years.

Her story of meeting God in the midst of refinishing furniture was something I found meaningful, as that is where I am sometimes managing to be these days. Her children apparently slept more or less on time, though.

Her idea of establishing a budget for hospitality, so that you can provide extra for your guests, instead of trying to stretch out what you have far enough to include them, is something that my family should probably begin to practice at this stage in life.

My biggest complaint about the book is that the sidebars and sidepages are visually too similar to the main text; they are set off mainly by a different background color, that is not that different from the plain white pages. So I'd be reading about her spiritual journey, and then I'd suddenly find myself reading about some completely mundane aspect of decorating, because I had missed the subtle change in background color.

Overall, I think it is a good book, and good for multiple stages in life:  starting out, starting over, and re-orienting in between.