Category: DIY

  • a good day

    Atlanta fine art photographer


    No pretty pictures from the day. This is a photo from 2013, 3 houses ago.

    But one night sleeping without coverings on the double doors, and new window treatments are on the way.

    I spent the day ironing. Lots and lots of ironing.

    But, all the windows have their new treatments. I am happy.

    And, all of a sudden, I am re-invested in my house.

    And maybe hyped up a little bit that I actually have an interest in (and have completed) a project.

    I am so very, relieved to love my house again. It’s been quite a long time.

    Today, I feel like I’ve been a good wife and mother.

    I worked my tail off today, no joke. I didn’t sit down much.

    And, while I was ironing window treatments, I also finished laundry day.

    Laundry day doesn’t have to be one day, as Dana from A Slob Comes Clean says. And she’s right.

    In our case, laundry day actually wasn’t that bad. It started half-heartedly on Monday since I didn’t think of it until halfway through the morning and only worked on it a little bit (I always like to have laundry day be Monday) and it will end about 10:30 PM tonight, when the last load finishes in the dryer and I am able to get everything put away.

    And now I don’t have to think about clothes laundry for the rest of the week.

    Sheets will be another thing: I should get all the sheets in the house cleaned sooner than later.

    I think tomorrow will be another good run through the floors and putting the clutter in the primary bedroom away.

    At some point in the next couple of weeks I have to get to Porter’s room finally.

    I was listening to one of the many podcasts I listen to today and somebody said (I cannot remember which podcast) that the state of your home mirrors the state of your mind.

    In my case, that’s probably 100% true. There’s lots of dust, and clutter, and dirty laundry and dirty floors in my head, too.

    It was a good day. Oliver was inducted into the National Junior Beta Club, and we got to see the live broadcast of the CHS Trojan Band on the Gradick Sports Facebook page when we got home. They did such a great job, like they always do.

    It’s harder for me to be charitable about Central, my alma mater. The inside jokes are tired and they are inside jokes from well after my time. It’s hard to feel like an outside as an alum from my own band. But it’s been the case for a decade or more.

    I got to meet Oliver’s new girlfriend and family. They seem nice.

    Yes, my 6th grader has a girlfriend. *sigh* We managed to skip these things with the big boys, and are still so far even. It’s not even Oliver’s first girlfriend.

    I have tried, however, to encourage all of my children to not get into serious relationships until well after high school. I speak from experience on how that can go really, really, really awfully bad. Most of you probably know that story and if you don’t I think I made another post about it here somewhere.

    At any rate, I will go to bed tired tonight. And I desperately hope I wake up in such a state that I can do it all over again tomorrow.

    You can read more about my angsty self here.

  • going team bare windows

    Drastic times call for drastic measures.

    We bought our current house in 2021.

    This is the only house we have purchased that I actually picked out.

    And…..I have struggled mightily with my mental health in this house.

    It doesn’t get a great deal of light. Well, I mean, the ginormous living room actually does get great light, but it was outfitted with equally imposing dark royal blue blackout curtains. Here they are, this morning:

    And yes….the blue curtains in the living room perfectly matched the shade of the blue valances (and wallpaper) in the dining room.

    At least the people who designed our 1994 house, which this is all original to, had stellar taste. Everything still looks fabulous 30 years later.

    But….. I struggle mightily with my mental health, which is likely known to you all at this point by now. And when we moved in 2021, we moved from a house that I moderately despised because of its stairs.

    But what I loved about that Holmes Drive house was its light. That house had fantabulous light, in both the kitchen and the main living room.

    So, this happened today:

    The photos are not the greatest representation of how much better the light is in the house– I took them this morning just after taking the curtains down and it was overcast. And I am sort of rebelling against my camera gear at the moment, so all I did was phone photos. I might take better photos once the job is all done.

    The dining room photo above is after the work in there too– there were paper shades over the windows in there prior to about an hour ago.

    If I had my way, we would be team bare windows in the entire house. I am not much worried about privacy.

    But, we are taking down the paper shades throughout the house, in favor of brand new sheers. They arrive tomorrow, so tomorrow’s project will for sure be taking down the eight other shades in the windows of the house.

    The paper shades were my solution to the extremely off-white, very thin metal blinds that came with the house. I hated them and they came down as soon as possible.

    And they have served their purpose, and we certainly got what little money we put into them out of them.

    But many of them in the boys’ rooms (and the ones in the dining room, actually), had been torn by the cats, and Oliver’s in particular are in very bad shape because Mow, his cat’s scratching post is right beside one window and she has gotten it all furry and bent out of shape.

    So, I will not be sorry to see the shades go in favor of sheers.

    And honestly, I’d worry more about security, but our alarm systems, both furry and actual, are fantastic.

    I just desperately need natural light.

    The good news is, taking down the curtains in the living room has made me not feel like the room needs to be painted quite so much. I do love a basic white wall.,

    And we are not taking down the hardware fast, as I am keenly aware that the blackout curtain do actually do quite a lot of insulation in the winter.

    But…that is when I need the light the most.

    Regardless: I feel better about my house, and I feel better about my life. Which makes me more invested in both.

  • recovery and beading

    Hysterectomy recovery isn’t so easy. It would probably be easier if there was more actual pain to keep me from wanting to be active.

    Yesterday, I took Liam on a tour of Georgia Tech– well, I attended the presentation, Liam went on the tour while I sat at the student center.

    It has long been a goal to get the things that we don’t absolutely want to keep forever cleaned out from storage in various places around our house. So, after we got home yesterday, I had Liam bring up some boxes of toys.

    And, I went through some boxes that Jared had brought up previously.

    And then, all of a sudden I was bleeding more than I really have at all since the surgery.

    So, Jared has put me on bedrest. I was supposed to take Liam to Kennesaw State for his tour there today, but Jared took the day off to take him instead.

    And I know all this will be worth it in the end, I know that there were problems we didn’t even know about that were addressed by the surgery. But right now, it is not feeling very worth it.

    I am not a very good patient, to say the least.

    Treasures were found when we were going through things yesterday, and among them was this cameo pendant. I made a necklace for my best friend to wear when she was maid of honor in our wedding, and it wasn’t her style so I inherited it after the wedding. It has been several iterations of necklaces at this point, and I was pretty sure it was lost forever at this point. I am thrilled to be able to make another necklace with it.

    It’s not the best photo and the necklace may seem like an odd combo of beads and colors to other people but all these beads are sentimental to me: the cameo because of the wedding. There are also some of the crystal beads I wore myself in a different necklace on our wedding day. And some other antique beads that are sentimental, and the glass beads are ones that I made as part of a lamp work bead-making class that Jared gave me in 2010 or so.

    I made another necklace, too, that was kind of fun:

    Other than that, watching a whole bunch of trashy Maury TV has helped me feel slightly better today, as well.

    In addition to my own treasures, we are in the process of going through the lifetime’s worth of toys that the boys have accumulated, mostly stored for several years now. Soooo very proud of Liam, Porter, and Oliver, both for their work yesterday and for Liam and Oliver setting aside about half of their outdoor toys to get rid of today.

    We are getting ready for a garage sale sometime soon, though it may be September or so before we get around to it. It will be cooler by then, too.

  • getting the house straight

    getting the house straight

    Getting the House Straight– So….I am in the process of cleaning up our messy (and dirty) house for the first time in a good while. I started in earnest last night.

    I need motivation and accountability in this process. When I get depressed, all housework goes by the wayside. We slip into survival mode.

    I first found A Slob Comes Clean in 2018. Listening to Dana K. White’s journey to a clean house system and organization inspired me so much that it worked well at the Holmes Drive house.

    I am determined to get our current house in order.

    First up is the kitchen. The microwave on our microwave/oven combination unit is broken. So we have a second microwave in the kitchen currently, sitting on the counter.

    I don’t use the desk in the kitchen for anything other than sorting mail. So I am going to move the coffeemaker and the microwave over to that area. That area will house our printer, the coffeemaker, and the microwave. Our mail and to-do stack of papers will also live there.

    I thought about picking up a mail sorter or something else to mount to the wall for storing to-do papers. But we have a drawer in that desk unit that doesn’t have a lot of contents. So I think I will start having the boys (they get the mail every day) put the mail in that drawer from now on. Then it’s not just sitting out until I can deal with it.

    Getting the House Straight

    Next up will be to de-clutter my bedroom with Jared. It’s all my junk. I have a lifelong habit of just throwing my stuff anywhere until I go on a marathon-cleaning session.

    The boys’ rooms all need pretty major attention. But Porter has said he wants to handle it himself. So, his room will have to wait until he has gone off to college at this point, probably.

    After the house is relatively clean and tidy, next up will come the finishing of unpacking and organizing the boxes of stuff in the standing crawlspace under the house.

    The goal for the standing crawlspace area is for it to house only outdoor and yard tools. The goal is to free up the closet that holds those things in the garage.

    The garage is going to be my photo studio. The closet that currently holds all of the yard and outdoor tools will be a changing area for the studio, eventually.

    Once the standing crawlspace and that closet in the garage are all sorted out, I will work on the studio in more earnest. There’s still paint, finishing the floor, and putting up decorative tiles on the ceiling in the studio.

    But, all that has to wait until the inside of the house is dealt with.

    You can read more about me here.

  • decorating with what we already have

    decorating with what we already have

    Decorating with What We Already Have — Yesterday, I got a wild hair and decided it was time to re-arrange our living room.

    Oliver has been complaining about the fact that we have to turn our smaller couch around any time we want him to be able to sit there to watch TV; our TV is mounted above our fireplace.

    We have a fairly large living room that featured two couches; a leather couch and a smaller green fabric two-seater couch. Most of the time, in case we have company, we have had the green couch facing the coffee table and the other couch. That meant that the couch needed to be turned around when we had movie nights and more people would be watching the TV.

    A little over a year ago, gracious friends gave me a settee for the studio. It will still be used for studio purposes. But in between shoots, the settee is going to live in our living room now. I moved it in, moved the leather couch and our coffee table way back into the previously unused space, and turned the green sofa around. I put the cream settee and the green sofa back to back. We will use the cream settee and the side chairsfor visiting with people. The green couch will be used by the kids or anyone when we are all watching TV together.

    I am thrilled with the outcome. I added the sitting pillow from the peacock chair from the studio, as well as the “You Are My Sunshine” pillow that Jared gave me for Christmas to the cream settee. Our whole living room looks bigger and more inviting.

    I had to be sure there was adequate walking room both between the cream settee and the leather couch for walking. Our primary entry into the house is the double doors right beside the leather couch. We really do not have a back side to our home. We have two driveways and the front door has steps. So, we mostly invite guests to come in the back double doors off our back driveway, by the garage where we park. We use the front door mostly for taking the dogs outside, or for guests that just want to come to the front door.

    Decorating with What We Already Have

    It feels like a new living room, and not a dime was spent on re-decorating. This is my favorite way of re-decorating because our belongings we have are more than adequate for our needs and to be honest- for most of my wants.

    I did discover the limits of our luxury vinyl plank flooring that we installed when we moved in two years ago. There are small, slight scratches below the coffee table and below where the leather couch used to sit. They don’t bother me; actually, the pattern of the flooring makes any scratches look like they belong and blend really well. So, it adds a sort of lived-in character to the flooring. I stand by my earlier statements on social media that this flooring was far and away the best decision we could have made as an upgrade when we purchased this house in late 2021.

    All of the pieces in our living room are either hand-me downs, or sentimental, aside from the leather couch. Our friend Johnny Jackson made the coffee table, our friends the Boyd’s gave us the piano, my parents gave us the green chair and sofa. My parents also gave us the cream chair after my aunt gave it to her, after my Nannie gave it to my aunt. (We pass furniture around in my family a lot, so things rarely actually leave the family.)

    The cream chair’s upholstery has seen better days thanks to our cats, but that chair is well over 100 years old at this point. It originally belonged to my grandmother’s aunt, who was born in 1870. It is still as sturdy as the old days, having been reupholstered at least once. It is one of my favorite chairs in the house. It is so much higher quality than anything you can walk into a store and buy these days.

    Thankfully, keeping scratching posts around the living room really does quite a lot to re-focus the cats’ energy on not tearing up the furniture. We didn’t discover that fact early on, but they’ve been in place over a year now and it’s really saving our furniture.

    That’s all I have for today.

    Love,
    Caroline