A Retrospective 5.The Dining Room, 2007 to (early) 2015

To celebrate my blog's eighth anniversary, we're taking a tour through time and looking at the changes I've made to our house over the years. This is the fifth in the series. The last areas to be featured were the Bedrooms, 2007-2014. If you'd like to start at the beginning, go here: The Front and Back Yards, 2007-2014. You can also catch all the retrospective posts under the Prairie Home Tour tab.

This room has been known by many names. The Office. The Scraproom (or, as it is labeled here on the blog, my "creative space.") Recently, I took to calling it "the study." But that just felt pretentious--especially as I decluttered 80 per cent of the books out of here earlier this year!

So. Let's call it the dining room--which it is about three times a year.

The rest of the year it is my sanctuary, my haven.

It wasn't always that way! In fact, it started out quite the opposite.

These posts are quite long, so click through to read through, thanks!

A Tale of Two Lamps

Well, technically, it's a tale of three lamps, but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it? And we're not really concerned with technicalities when we're decorating, are we? No. We're interested in nuance, in hidden meanings; relationships.

I found these little lamps at Target.

I loved them. I thought they went really well with all the riotous colour going on at the bed opposite.

The little green gourd called out to the duvet cover and said, "Hey, how are ya. How are things around here?" And then they fell to chatting about where they were from and their travels abroad.

But, the little green gourd would not shut up. It was beginning to get rather obnoxious. Then the duvet cover started whispering to me at night. She felt she just might be upstaged, poor thing, even though I assured her it was impossible and I was just seeking balance. I'd look at the little green gourd and could not figure out how to carry on. How should I cover the loveseat?

Trying out something dark really sent the duvet cover into a tizzy. Too much competition! The navy had nothing whatever to do with the bed. The two wanted some sort of relationship.

And how would I finish off the curtains?

Little green gourd, I thought, you really are rather short. And bossy.

Out shopping with Mom for her bedroom makeover, I came across this watery wonder.

It did not shout across the room to the duvet cover. In fact, it waited patiently for a proper shade (and accessories).

It calmly suggested a direction for the sofa. It quietly nudged the curtains the way they should go. And even what to do about the mirror frame became clear, too.

The watery wonder will be like a good friend to the others: respecting them but improving them ever so slightly. It is here to stay. (Even though in a perfect world, the shade would be more white than ivory.)

One of the little green gourd lamps went back to the store. The other found a new home on my new sleek desk where no one will feel put out.

The End.

My Creative Space

One of my goals this year is to awaken my long dormant creativity. I am taking two classes this month to help me along. (I would not have chosen to take these classes at the same time, but that's when they were available!)

The first is Photo Freedom taught by Stacy Julian from Big Picture Classes. Yikes! Is that going to be a ton of work! The second is Organize Your Creative Space by Aby Garvey from Simplify101.

My creative space is my dining room/home office. This room:

Photo from 2011

 

Most of my scrapbooking supplies are actually in the Expedit.

Photo taken today.

A few more are downstairs in the basement. They're primarily in (and on!) this dresser and these two old stacked pine IKEA units.

There are also different scrapbook projects in the cases on the shelves to the right of the table. (Under that green cloth is my miniature house project I haven't seen in 16 years!)

 

(I took this photo last year after working on it for a month last year. Shortly after I set up this space to work, my husband and my son turned it into a place to play video games. This is how it looks today! I need to spend some time down here and create a better set up.)

 

 

When I last took a scrapbooking class--and thus knew I'd be scrapping for ten weeks or so--I set up my dining room like this:

 

Everything right within reach. It worked really well.

Of course, this is all cleaned up! This is how things really looked at Christmas while I was putting together the scrapbook calendar:

My problem is, I can't leave the room set up to scrapbook all the time. Never mind the chaos, I need this room for many other things as well.

For example, in my photo Freedom class, I'll be sorting photographs on the table:

For a while, it seems!

So, the challenge for me will be how to figure out how to do scrapbook pages in a casual way, a way that doesn't involve radically changing the dining room but still lets me get a page done now and then.

That would make me happy.

Spring Cleaning Report: The Dining Room/Office

I am thrilled with the work I got done in this room, even though I didn't get through everything I'd planned.

I think I have given up on the idea of cobbling together two different, old and outdated computer towers. I didn't even find out if it would be feasible. Instead, I started to dream about the computer of the future. (or maybe it is here already? I wouldn't know.)

I'd want the portability of a laptop but also the comfort of a separate keyboard and a large, large screen. I started thinking of a three componet laptop where each piece can detach from the other two and be used together or separately--without cords:

1) a motherboard like a little black box on the desk to which I could attach all sorts of devices if I wanted to (remember tuner/receivers in old stereo systems? Like that, although ideally without cords, but I'll suffer them if I have to!)

2) A screen

3) A keyboard

I could put these three pieces together and have something resembling the conventional laptop--and I could take the pieces apart and type without the stupid mousepad area under my wrists--and the screen could be a comfortable viewing distance (with the option of plugging into/connecting with a larger one).

Maybe by the time e've paid off our debt, there will be such a thing.

Meanwhile, I simply took everything related to the tower down to the basement.

(It's like those pictures in kids' magaizines: Can you spot the differences?)

That meant I had to deal with this mess:



I don't know how well you can make out the infrastructure under all that mess: but I have a power cord "wrapper"-type thingy from IKEA there at the top, and a metal basket at the bottom which holds my power bar. Both are attached to the desk. That meant you never, ever saw the cords. It also meant that I had to pull the desk out from the wall to access everything--but when I had the tower in the desk too, it made no difference.

I labeled the plug ins.



I plugged everything back in.



I'd removed the lamp, the tower, keyboard, mouse and screen. Five plugs gone and fewer cords but still, a mess.



The future will be cordless.

(Wow. 500 words on power cords. Who knew I'd ever write that?)

I packed up my projects.



I'll unpack a few of them tomorrow, I think.

And I edited and rearranged the tops of my various bookcases and such:





I got it all done in time for Easter dinner Sunday night.

I gave my daughter a free hand to set the table.



I loved it.

And now, we've rounded the corner, we're more than half way done. Next, we plunge into bathroom week.

Spring Cleaning Week 4: The Home Office. The Plan

The Home Office (and Dining room, for me) is this week.

I spend a phenomenal amount of time in this room browsing and working on the computer. It has occured to me since our tower died, we don't need this bulky set up.

With a laptop and wifi, I could work over at the dining room table and open up the curtains. (Right now the glare of the indows off this lap top screen makes that impossible.)

I could put our small white dresser here and a comfy chair and create a little reading spot. I'd like that.

However, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately.

So, here's the plan:

Take the two computer towers I have and figure out if I can use parts from one for the other.



List for sale the working parts I can't use.

Cull books.

Organize drawers in the desk.

Get the room ready for Easter Dinner.

As for the specific Cleaning tasks, here they are:

Dust and wash walls
Dust and wash shelves
Clean baseboards
Wash floor with Wood Cleaner and Refurbisher
Wash/Touch up desk drawers
Vacuum screens
wash windows
Wipe down telephone

Declutter:
Paper work (toss last years bills, etc)
bookshelves



Redundant files of the computer (not too many of those!)
E-mail
China cabinet


Busy week ahead, especially as I've some projects from the living room yet to finish.

The William Morris Desk Drawer

It wasn't that big of a project--and it nearly didn't get done.

It's been on my mind for weeks. Several times a day I would open this drawer, yes, this one, actually a basket which sits at the top of the bank of drawers, and get annoyed.

I couldn't ever find a pen. Or a sharp pencil. Or the pencil sharpener. I would have to get up, go around the corner and go to the kitchen or get up and go around the corner the other way and go to my son's room.

So, thinking it would be a great project for the William Morris link-up on Pancakes and French Fires today, I took a picture yesterday morning and then promptly walked away.



I made lunch: potato and onion soup from scratch with whole wheat Irish soda bread.



I watched a movie with my husband home this week on holiday. I went to the library and took my son shopping for pants.

It wasn't until just before bed that I remembered the drawer. I decided to check my e-mail while I sorted. And then this happened. It's our one remaining computer (with any decent speed).


intitializing disk for crash dump.... I have no idea what it means. But as the laptop sat there, whirring away and getting hot, I began getting more and more concerned.

I started cleaning out the drawer, wondering if I should.

I am usually ruthless when it comes to throwing things out. Everything, someday, could be useful. It's true. But to live from that place is to live in fear. I was afraid last night. A little bit afraid. Our new mantra around here is no more debt. That means no new computer until we have saved up for it (and no saving up for anything until the current debt is paid off).

Earlier this week, I had grabbed the old, dead, lifeless computer out of the garage to see if I could transfer the recently installed RAM into the dinosaur my Mom gave us. It turns out it's going to be more complicated than I'd ever imagined. I also thought I could sell off the still working parts.

My dining room is currently over-run with all sorts of things I've listed for sale. I'm impatient for it to sell. I'm impatient for this debt to leave us.



After I'd emptied everything and sorted into "keep," "re-locate," and "trash or donate" I had to go to bed. I couldn't deal with it.

This morning, before the fear and the coffee kicked in, I hooked up the laptop. It came on and acted just as it ought. So, breathing again, I began going through the mess.

You cannot save everything because someday it may be useful. I do know that. That's why I keep only three extra bread bags around--not zero and certainly not all of them. It's why I save the dried out pieces of bread, sometimes, and the heels of store bought loaves. Sometimes. You cannot live in fear. To do that is to invite pure chaos and all that comes with it. Frustration, anger at yourself for letting things get out of control, despair because it is all just too much.

So, I kept all three lighters instead of tossing two (but I put them in the drawer with the candles). I took the fancy pen and pencil set and instead of putting it in the donate pile, extracted the pen and pencil from their box and placed them in the drawer to mingle with the ordinary common pencils and pens. (Yes, I found two!)

But, yeah, I let go of chewed up erasers, pen lids and 2H pencils. There was a surprising amount of just plain unambigous garbage in that drawer.



So, here we have it. Too many staples. Too many dog chewed pencils and way too many return address labels. But it's neat. It's organized. I can find a pencil, a pen and an eraser without fear.



Life the way I like it.

Death of a Computer

I really think the tower is dead. It hasn't been officially diagnosed, but it made strange whirring, chirping and clicking noises until it just seized mid-chirp, stopped doing everything and made a sound like it had flatlined.

So, I am using the laptop we bought for the boy last September. It's keyboard is quite strange and the "w" is wonky. Apologies.

Other than all my personal pictures from 2011 (and 2012, so far) and Microsoft Word (which I purchased less than a year ago licenced for use with one machine) I'm really not worried about losing what was on there. Actually, I just realised, honestly? I'm trying not to think about it too much--that ay I can't remember all that I've lost. Fortunately, I transferred just about everything on that hard drive to an external hardrive at the end of 2010 so everything prior to that is OK.

But still.

After the beast flat-lined, I turned it off to work on the desk.

I removed old files for doing our taxes and made up new ones. Sorted, filed and tossed the rest, you know the drill. After a couple of hours (or so) here we are:

At least now there's a clear path for the power cord.

Moving Forward.

Ever get stuck in a rut of nothingness? the blahs? the "I can'ts and I won'ts" --a toxic mixture of ennui and procrastination tinged with non-motivating panic?

My cold which hung on for two weeks had a lot to do with it, the fact that these are the darkest days of the year had even more, and the fact that Christmas is bearing down relentlessly probably made a substantial contribution as well.

I am behind. Every day this month I have bemoaned this fact to myself.

the table on December 1st

But I felt completely powerless.

the desk on December 2nd

Days steamrolled right on by and there was nothing I could do but pop in videos of Mad Men and watch from Season One to Four all over again. Once in a while I resolved to do something about it all. I know because I took "before" pictures.

the desk on December 13th:


the table, the same day:

I'm not showing you these nasty pics to embarrass myself, but to try and show you the sheer oppressiveness of it all. This, some would say, is the state not of my dining room only, but the state of my mind--tuned inside out and exposed for all to see. And if it isn't, it might as well have been.

Today, something changed. (Thank goodness)

Maybe it was simply getting out of the house for a while to go to my periodontist appointment, but something in me shifted. (Treatment did not go as well as hoped. They now have to peel back my gums and really clean things up under there closer to the bone. It isn't gum surgery, though. Not quite. Fortunately, I don't have to fret about it until February.)

When I got home, I took a couple of "before" pictures and got busy in the dining room.

desk:


table:

After working in the room for half an hour, there seemed to be some progress.

desk:


table:


Another 15 minutes and things began to shape up.

desk:

I know it looks worse--but look closely at that top tray--it's empty!

table:

Things looked like this after an hour. An hour!

desk:


table:

I kept puttering about while chatting with my daughter about her day at school, my husband calling to tell me he was on his way home (my cue to thaw the meat for supper in the microwave) and so on. Still, I was shocked to see these "done for now" photos time stamped a whole hour after the previous photos.



This isn't done. The two piles on the left need folders--the pile on the right is a mish mash of stuff that needs to be squirreled away somewhere.


I'd love to put a Christmasy centrepiece here, but for now it is home to boxes of tile. (sigh). That lampshade is going to be returned. It's lined with a shiny blue fabric and I don't like it.

I can't promise I will get cracking on all the Christmas stuff left to do, but at least now I feel like forward movement is possible.

Bit by bit.