The other side of the house

Before picture with cute model

Since moving into this house I have not been able to stand my dining room and living room. BLECH!!!! I wish I took a good before and after pic - but for 10 years I have not been able to deal. Its not that a lot of thought hasn't gone into it...quite the contrary. I just hadn't found pinterest.com yet.  First of all, we inherited a high quality dining room set that was very 70's. You can kind of see the china cabinet here behind my cutie on her birthday.  I remember decorating this when I was pregnant. Apparently I was in a yellow/red/classic mood. Its like someone vomited gold and red all over the place.

As  you can see on the right under the dancing queens; the vomit fest expanded to the next room because, since I grew up in the 80's: I am obsessed with matchy matchy. Dining room furniture falls  somewhere below "things you do when your kids college fund is fully funded" on the priority list. I have not been very inspired here. I let that block me and said, welp there's not much I can do.

First thing I did was to move the monstrous china cabinet that I hated to the opposite wall. Now this is what you see. I bought these pictures as jpg files on line and framed them in cheap Michaels' frames. I put 2 lamps I had on the buffet and viola! I never would have thought to do this but I saw it on line somewhere.

Then, my Coup de grâce; THE ZEBRA RUG. I don't know where i got this idea but I love it! I got permission to mix an oriental run in one room with an animal print in the next room. WHOA!!! I ordered a similar rug from rugsdirect.com but when went to home goods the next day and found it cheaper: AND got this awesome pillow.  What do you think????

Getting the Virgo off my back

My monkey is a Virgo and it wouldn’t get off me for a few weeks. My head is full of nonsense; worrying about every little thing at work and home, feeling overwhelmed, not eating well, etc. I’m up half the night worrying about work and let me just say that I am not the obsess-in-bed-and-solve-problems type. Oh no; I get nothing resolved whatsoever. My worrying consists of thinking about every piece of minutia on my “to do” list backward and forward. I’m surprised I don’t suck my thumb while I do it. I have taken to getting out of bed and working at 4 am once a week because I just can’t stand sitting there thinking and wasting time. Why am I overwhelmed I ask myself? Well let’s see what I’m working on right now besides the usual work 50 plus hours a week, take care of house and kids, take kids to their activities, homework, worry about friends and family, etc but there’s

•   Couponing – otherwise known as printing, searching and going to 9 stores a week for deals; if you need some barbeque sauce I'm your girl. In my defense its a lot of work to make sure that the house has enough toilet paper. Ass wiping is serious business.
• Halloween prep - see previous posts
• Learning to wear makeup; aka watching youtube to learn what I was supposed to have learned like 30 years ago. Why do I care? WRINKLES. DUH.
• Trying to get my kids to eat or ..er ..trying not to feed the kids chicken nuggets every day. Searching for recipes; buying ingredients for recipes, throwing food away that I never make recipes with, etc. Nuff said.
• Pinterest; if you are not spending 3 hours a day on this you don't know what you're missing; I mean I thought I had enough to do but now I can add homemade beauty supplies to the list. Did you know you can make you own pore strips? 
• Obsessive organizing. I actually was up all night last week trying to imagine objects I could use to organize my cabinets on the cheap. One site actually recommended empty tuna cans for the junk drawer. This is not for me.
• Redecorating my dining room and living room and every other room in my house that I haven't finished. Post to come. 
• Waxing. My eyebrows. Its all I can do not to go every day.

I am not just your classic perfectionist; I want to do it all and I want to do it now. And don’t tell me to relax. I don’t do relax. The more I do the more I want to do and the more I expect.  In any case, funny what a downward spiral I can get myself into.  I have a headache, so I don’t go running, I stay up too late, and I have a bag of m&ms at midnight which makes me more tired and less likely to do the things that make me sane like working out and eating/sleeping well.  Stress builds up until I want to explode, or take a nap (it’s a black or white world for me my friends).  My runs have been horrible; every day I seem to get slower, counting every step of my torturous runs.  

Today rather than let myself go deeper into my own mental prison I forced myself to drink a half a gallon of water to cure my headache and went running; feeling like I may have an aneurysm on the way but it was better than the alternative. I had one of the best runs ever. When I came to the hill I normally hit where I have to stop and walk .....I kept going and said to myself YOU CAN DO THIS. I thought of the worst times in my life; my mothers death, stepfather's illness, breakup with person-who-shall-remain-nameless; ....all of it feeling like you just can't put one foot in front of the other.  And I just did it one step at a time. It was like that Bruce song the Rising - I was at the bottom of a mountain and started crawling, then jogging shedding layers of SHIT along the way - I could hear the song Eye of the Tiger playing and when I get to the top of the mountain (home) and I’m feeling like a trillion bucks and I look down at myself and my ...shirt ....is ....on ....inside out. TYPICAL.

Label it...ALL OF IT

I don't know what is wrong with me; I have 90 things going on and yet I keep starting other projects. My search for some rice I knew I had but couldn't find resulted in an OCD episode of magnamimous proportions. 9 trips to Bed and Bath later...all my cabinets are reorganized and labeled with new oxo containers that set me back way more than I care to admit. I even measured my cabinets dimensions before I went. I realized my label machine was broken last week and had to make an emergency trip to get a new one (with my $5 staples coupon and rewards printed of course). I must say I don't like the new one but my daughter has discovered the joy of obsessive organizing labeling; she loves it and hey - its good spelling practice. The good news is that when ditalini comes up on the spelling list my daughter will be way ahead of the game.

Labelling assistant

Can't you just picture her 40 years from now telling her friends how her crazy bitch super organized mother used to demand ask that she help organize the kitchen? One of my memories of my father who died when I was 13 was us sleeping while he vacuumed around us. This probably explains a lot.

I ripped everything out of all the cabinets and organized everything based on how I use it. Pasta (as you can see), condiments, baking stuff, Cereal, etc. I tried to buy the containers that made the best use of the space I had; as you can see the pasta containers are tall and skinny. We have many pastas!

I put the cereal in bags near the bottom of the cabinet so the kids can get at it and I don't have 90 boxes full of half empty cereal. I just wrote with a sharpie what kind of cereal it is. I put all my baking stuff on a high shelf together.

I have a giant pantry but there's so much space to the left and right of the opening that i can't get to. We won't go into the random stuff I found there. I bought these lazy susan thingies for the corners so at least I can get at them.

I am a little horrified at how much food I had to throw out. Seems kind of foolish to have been spending all this time cutting coupons only to throw food away because its buried in my pantry. Must move on from labeling to using what I have; if you are hip and cool you know this is called upcycling.

I'm hoping that with these small change the kids will let me sleep until 11 9 every morning.  No more kids rifling through the closet looking for school snacks; they are all labelled!

We even ran out of labels; there is nothing we can't find now!  

Here's all the sites I looked at to get ideas.

http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.com/2011/08/its-here-kitchen-cabinet-tour.html

http://www.thehouseofsmiths.com/

http://orgjunkie.com/2011/07/taking-action-on-your-everyday-papers.html

Next up....kid paperwork

The passing of Rainbow sunshine

It was a sad day for the Scearbos; Megan's fish Rainbow sunshine died today. He made it over 2 years which is good in fish life but Megan was very sad and cried herself to sleep. My heart aches for her. She learned about intestines today in health so she said she thought maybe it was a problem with his "intestints". Maybe so...probably had more to do with the toxic ph levels in his tank.   

For my sisters