Welcome to Our Home

I was talking to someone the other day, can’t remember who it was now, and I mentioned the fact that my home is my “thing”.  You know how people, men and women alike, always have something that defines them; their trademark if you will?  Whether it’s great hair, the perfect purse with every single outfit, that 1/16 inch stubble that never seems to grow, it’s that person’s signature thing.  Now I’m not talking from an inner-person standpoint here.  What I mean is the thing you notice about them physically.

For me it is definitely my home.

Many, many years ago I gave up on the possibility of always having great hair, the perfect purse to go with every outfit.  Somehow though, and you can confirm this with Matt if you like, no matter how often I shave my legs there always seems to be that 1/16 inch of stubble.  Or more.  Perfection is not possible no matter how much I want to strive for it.

So I said screw it to aiming to be the perfect person. But it just hit me this past week that the thing for me is my home.  Boom, like I’d never realized I love to have my house set up in a comfy and pleasing way.  My house isn’t exactly like something that just fell out of a magazine or anything but, if you visit, the thing I’ll hope you take away is that you were relaxed and happy while you were here.

I’m a collector of various things – shot glasses, sports memorabilia, movie related memorabilia.  Not an overabundance or anything though like those people you see on Hoarders.  I don’t even own a live cat, let alone one that died too long ago to remember.  Yeah, I just threw up in my own mouth a little bit too.  You’re welcome.

But anyway, each of those small collections kind of end up defining the spaces in my home and I’m cool with that.  Every Interior Designer on the planet will cringe at theme rooms.  Well I love them to be honest.  So I guess ID’s are cringing at my house?  Oh well, probably why I had no desire to see ID school through to the end.

So because I promised multiple times that I’d post pictures (as I was reminded recently) I guess there’s no better time than now to invite you over.

This is the kitchen before, when we first moved in.  Before the painting madness ensued and I covered just about every square inch of this place in low VOC latex.

Kitchen now.  The cabinets are just painted but we’re playing around with the idea of darker cabinets so at least this was a cheaper solution to see if we like it and can live with it until we save up to renovate the space.

We’ve got an en suite master set up which is pretty cool.  We had this in our last apartment too but they put the teeny stand up shower in that bath and the tub in the other bath plus the guest bedroom was larger there so we ended up giving up the second bath to our guests and office.  No biggie though…

Because now we’ve got separate rooms for the guests and office (as you know from my last post) and our bedroom is just perfect.  The bath attached is a nice perk.  We tore out the glass doors (yuk!) and Matt put a refresher epoxy on the surround.  I’ve been wanting to paint our bathroom this color of blue since I installed blue in a client’s bathroom before we left Massachusetts last summer.  I think it works well with the brown and we already had the shower curtain & accessories.

This is my desk set up and some of the built-in shelving for the office.  A side note for all my EcoEtsy peeps – the green boxes you see on the shelves are repurposed.  My most recent order of Ripple the Twine came inside those two boxes & then inside a shipping box.  I cut off the side flaps, painted them using the paint color we have in our guest bath, attached some self-adhesive Velcro to the front flap and now I’m using them to store stuff as well as cleaning up the look of clutter on those shelves.  The flap-top box in between them houses all my small acrylic craft paints.  As you can also see a bit of sporty goodness has started to find a home too!

And this is my little sales corner.  I don’t know if anyone will ever be at my house to buy a single copy of any of my work but I like having it on display if for no other reason than to feed my own desire to keep doing it.  When I look up and see all of my projects in one display I am happy that this is what I do for a living now.  Okay, happy is probably an understatement; elated, ecstatic, “broke but I’m happy”.  Can’t argue with that! 

It has started climbing into the triple digits on a regular basis now.  So unlike the winters here where you can be outdoors pretty much every day and all day, and also unlike winter v. summer back on the northeast coast, I’m spending the summer inside.  I figure I owe at least that much to the house, to appreciate its awesomeness now, after all the hard work to get her here.

(Sorry for the blurriness of some of the pictures, I took them with my phone and didn't have time to edit the images)

A Collection of Positivity Twenty Years in the Making

Fortune cookies completely fascinate me. To think ‘if I had grabbed for that one instead my little jolt of positive reflection would have completely changed’ is something I relish in. Call it fated destiny or whatever blah, blah you like but I love to open up those little sweet treats to find the inspiration inside. I have been collecting some of my favorites for apparently much longer than I remembered as I discovered a whole slew of them yesterday.

Wait a minute, let me back up and share the full story.

The day we got back from Cali I ordered a treadmill. For the past few months I have been weighing (pun very much intended) the options between the gym or a treadmill for my home. The treadmill won because I considered that when I used to go to the gym that was typically the only thing I used anyway. For just slightly more than an annual membership fee for just one of us, now Matt and I have that gym right here in our home (wow, how infomercial does that sound?).

Well, not yet exactly.

It should be arriving this week so for the past few days I’ve been doing what I do best -- de-cluttering my environment to make room for this extra large item that is coming in.

There are a few boxes we have yet to unpack as I knew that they were things we couldn’t do much with. Framed photos we don’t really have wall space for here, fabric for OPP (other people’s projects) and a final box that I have been carrying around with me for what feels like forever -- “Memorabilia”.

Within that box is another smaller box I labeled “Box of Memories”, this is the one in the photo above. I created it out of corrugated cardboard that I fashioned into a base and sides which are scotch taped together, then a top that is “hinged” on one of the longest sides. The cover and opposing long side have holes punched near the edge and the whole thing is held together by a fluorescent orange shoe lace. It was quite an ingenious bit of MacGyver-ness if I do say so myself!

Every so many years I go through this box and I’m always re-surprised by some of the items that I find: a mug received for graduation that has every class member’s name printed on the back, my bible and diploma from graduating CCD, a 6” railroad nail I salvaged when they took the line out in the early 80’s, the lyrics to both The Rose and Amazing Grace (for Holly ♥), a postcard from a pen pal who visited Astoria, Oregon where The Goonies was filmed, the program and ticket stub from when Dane Cook starred as Danny in our high school production of Grease (and a stub from his very early years act at the now defunct Catch A Rising Star in Harvard Square), Svetlana Boginskaya’s autograph, and all 4 years worth of my varsity letters for gymnastics.

Sorting through the box instead of just bringing it to the basement was just too tempting as I considered how long it had been since I had last done so. Ticket stubs and programs from productions and sporting events, postcards from other places, my HS diploma and then at the bottom of the box, plus taped all along the inside of the cover, were tons of fortunes from cookies that I had been collecting for I’d guess more than the past twenty years.

As a self proclaimed clutter free kind of gal it mystified me that I would keep such a thing as tiny little scraps of paper but then I started to read them:

“If you continually give you will continually have.”
“Serious trouble will bypass you.”
“He who knows he has enough is rich.”
“You should be able to undertake and complete anything.”
“Your life will be happy and peaceful.”
“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.”
“Trust your intuition. The Universe is guiding your life.”
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“You are going to have a very comfortable old age.”
“You are a person of another time.”

All of a sudden it hit me. All of these awesome self improvement gurus are just doing what I’ve been doing all of these years, collecting their fortunes and following the advice inside as a way of daily life!

My older ones were definitely uplifting and they all remained inside the box but as of now I am living my life by one of the more recent ones I have taped to my computer monitor:

“Love is a present that can be given every single day you live.”

The Little Things Count the Most, Always

The end of another calendar year draws near and it always causes me great nostalgia for just about everything from friends, new and old, family, living and passed on, and places, those I have been to and those I intend to see in the upcoming year. Aside from my birthday New Year’s Eve is my all time favorite holiday and the night is always memorable; the fact that most years I shed a little tear for the passing of the calendar is purely tied to my heavily reminiscent personality.

My mom used to have a big party every New Year’s Eve, the house was filled with her friends and it was the one night we were allowed to stay up late if we could make it; my earliest memories of Saturday Night Live are attached to one of those parties. One year, back in high school, four of us from the gymnastics team decided to get dressed up and go out for Italian food and when I went to shake cheese on my ravioli, the top came off, which prompted all of us to laugh the entire night. Another year, my best friend had some of her college friends come up to party and we all got hammered on champagne right in the middle of the street at the Boston Harbor as we watched the fireworks with about 200,000 other people. As the clock ticked over to the highly hyped Y2K I gained some geographical space in North Carolina with a friend, her husband, sisters and other family and as soon as the lights did not actually go out forever we all passed a joint around.

As I get ready to celebrate moving nine years into the new millennium, things in my life have changed dramatically but one thing remains the same -- I never spend New Year’s Eve with people I do not love. If the year to come is a reflection of the way we rang it in then I certainly want to be with the people I love, doing exactly what I want to be doing at that moment. In recent years, with the exception of a very blurry memory of a visit to my sister’s a couple years ago, Matt and I have generally spent the evening with S & B; we have dinner, chill at their place, pop champagne at midnight, hug all and kiss our respective other half and end up falling asleep at approximately ten after twelve. With them having four month old babies this year, who knows if any of us will even make it to see the clock tick over.

This past year was up and down, back and forth but so many shades of grey in many areas of my life so I have been thinking back to New Year’s Eve last year and trying to remember how I spent the time as we rang in 2008. The four of us toasted to change and growing families as well as friendship and bonds that will never be broken. This got me thinking about new people in my life, how giving and kind they all are and how so many things can change from one year to the next.

Over the past year I have met some amazing people through blogging and even though we are all very different people when it comes to age, gender, rearing, religion or writing style the common thread is that we all enjoy supporting one another’s achievements. I have met two wonderful gals outside of our little virtual world, Trayce and Bridgete, and I suspect that everyone else is just as fantastic as these two gals because, frankly, I do not surround myself with people who suck. (Yes, I stole that line from my sister but it is rare she finds time to read my blog anyway so it is likely she will never know it. And if you do, thanks Wendy.)

One new friend, Rose, was so generous recently and sent me this beautiful Christmas ornament that she hand painted just because, what a thoughtful gift! I do not have a tree so it is dangling from my candle holder instead.

Ginger was kind enough to mail me a box of henna hair color after I mentioned thinking about giving it a try (I am still a chicken right now but someday…).

I do not know what the future holds but I do know that this coming year is sure to be full of great times and adventures, family, best friends, writing, selling, new friends, creativity and exploration but most of all a heaping pile of gratitude for how far I have already come. Ringing in 2009 in two short days I plan to toast to new adventures and amazing success for everyone I know and love. Have a safe and happy New Year everyone.