Oopsie!

So I have been working this week on organizing my kitchen and pantry. The idea was that I would be able to take out some cabinets that have been bothering me since we moved in. My kitchen is small enough without having those cabinets hanging there making it feel smaller. And 90% of the time, all they were doing was picking up clutter because it was a flat space to put things on when I was trying to clear the counter. So tons of the stuff I got out of there should never have been there in the first place. But I was able to reorganize my pantry and cabinets so that those cabinets were incredibly pointless! YAY! 

This is where I started. Sadly, not the same angle, but I wasn't about to take a picture of the mess in my house today! Those cabinet doors came off about a year ago. There's no glass in them. If there had been glass, I might have left them, but the previous owners had never bothered to get the glass for them. I really don't know why the builders said that they'd supply the doors but not the glass. It's bizarre to me.  But I wanted to be able to get to things more easily, so I took them off. I don't think I've got a picture of that. But today, this is what it looks like.

Looks better right? Look closer. See that, just above the window? Here, have a close-up.

Yup, there's a hole. In my ceiling. We were thinking they were just cheap, until we looked closer and realized that it was cut out AFTER the ceiling was textured and painted. Turns out that the builders didn't measure very well when they were building the frame for the cabinets. So they had to cut out a big bunch of drywall in order to add 2x4's to support the cabinets. It's kind of funny to look at it closely to see just how many screws they put in before they realized that they weren't hitting anything.  On the bright side, a giant hole in the ceiling is kind of just what we needed. You see, look back at that first picture. The light switch for the kitchen is between the couch on the right and the banister just past it. If I'm in the middle of cooking something and a cloud covers the sun and the light's not on, I've got to hope that my kids are in a good mood and will hit the light switch for me. So we're hoping that we'll be able to wire a switch in that's IN the kitchen now that there's a hole to work with. We're also hoping to take out the soffit. I've always hated it and would love for that part of the ceiling to be flush with everything else. So I'm hoping that my dad will be willing to help me with that since we have to patch, re-texture, and paint anyway. And I have a couple of holes in my wall that need to be patched while we're at it. I'm blaming the previous owners for mounting odd things in HORRIBLE ways, leaving giant holes in the wall.  So we're in for a bigger project than I was hoping for, but it fixes some of the issues that we've been having, so I guess when one door closes, another opens, right? In the meantime, my husband stapled some plastic over the hole so we wouldn't have to have insulation falling out until it's fixed. And I should mention that he did a great job of catching the cabinets for me. Although, I wouldn't have laid down on the counter and held up my hands and feet if I were him. But it was amusing. It's too bad my hands were too full for a picture!

Master bed and bath

So, I've been working in my master bedroom and bathroom today. Kind of a follow up to my spring cleaning...or an extension of my spring cleaning which never got finished. Oops! I had two kids have surgery almost two weeks ago, so that meant taking some time off. And, as most of you know, if you have kids and take "time off," that really means you're starting over! So my master bathroom got cleaned today. I still need to clean the tub and mop the floor, and wash the bathmat, but the sink and counter are completely clear. My under-sink area has been organized into some bins that didn't fit someplace else. I'm really excited about that. It's nice to have bins to be able to pull out when I need something instead of having to dig through everything in there. I left only the things on the counter that I absolutely need, plus a little basket. I figured that I would embrace the fact that I don't remember to put away my ponytail holders and clips and leave the basket on the counter so that I could just toss them in there and put them away whenever I feel like it. I also cleaned out the window track in there. Have you ever done that? Admittedly, I've never lived anywhere long enough for it to need it until now, but still! It took a bit, but it's nice to have it done.  Recently I also made myself an earring holder as well, so it's nice to have that up in there. I'm 27 and my ears have only been pierced for 9 months. I don't really have a lot of earrings, so the medicine cabinet was working well enough, but it was starting to drive me nuts!  I took a few pictures of it, so I can share those.

My other project for today was finally putting up my "new" lamps in my bedroom. They were in my formal front room, but we finally put in an overhead light in there. (Side note: WHY can builders not figure out that overhead lights should be STANDARD not an option?!? It's ridiculous to have to pay extra for a light!) We needed the extra light, plus we put in a fan so that we could get some air movement in there. It was just so hot upstairs in the summer, so it's been nice to have it. But now we didn't need the lamps. We're trying to decide how to redecorate (or decorate...can it be REdecorating if it's never really been done?) our master bedroom, so we decided to use the wall lamps in there. They actually install on the wall (they're from Ikea), so I don't have to use up space on my nightstand for the lamp. I'm excited about it. Hopefully it works out. I'm hoping to finish cleaning/organizing the bedroom tomorrow and maybe post some pictures of my two bedspread options to get some opinions. In the meantime, here are a few pictures of what I got accomplished today.

Gallery Wall

I finally got around to putting my pictures up in my bedroom as a gallery wall. It's been on my list of things to do. I've had TONS of frames that have been gathering in a tub in my bedroom for almost the entire 9 years that I've been married. I have a bunch on the wall in the hall, which didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped. But this gallery wall turned out so much better than I'd hoped! My husband even came home and sat there and stared at it with me. He told me that I should be very proud of myself. Now, you won't get any kind of a tutorial from me on this because I'm a "fly by the seat of your pants" type of decorator. In fact, I got "done" and then looked over above my headboard and realized that one of the pictures I'd intended to put in the gallery was still hanging over the bed! So I ended up adding about 8 more frames. It expanded a lot, but I'm really happy with the end result. Want to see? ;) 

I still have a few frames that need to be filled. A couple of 5x7's and a few 5x5's, which should be interesting picking out. But I was pretty happy with how it all turned out, and as the Nester says, done is better than perfect, right?  I had been putting all of this off until I paint my room. Well, we've lived in this room for almost 3 years now and the frames had been sitting in the tub the whole time.  It wasn't worth leaving them there anymore. I figure I can always put things back up whenever I get around to painting. But that's been taking so long and we're SO overwhelmed with finishing the basement, that I think it'll be a while longer still. In the meantime, I'm going to try to make the bedroom as nice as I can for us. It's the LAST bedroom to get touched. I should've done it a long time ago. I'm planning on getting three small bookcases to go underneath these pictures. We have a TON of books that are sitting on the floor waiting for a home. My husband just moved some shelves downstairs so we need some new ones for upstairs. I'm also trying to decide what to do about my bedding. I bought some new bedding while my husband was deployed. It was a color scheme that I liked, but it didn't go with my headboard. See it's brown and turquoise and my headboard's black. Black fabric. They don't really mesh. But I just got back a quilt top that a friend made for me that's a gorgeous black, red and white that goes with it. So now I'm wondering if I should just finish that quilt and leave the headboard. I'll post pics tomorrow and take a vote! I just can't decide!