Completed Project: My Grandmother's Cross-Stitch

 It’s done.

Completed.

Several years of work, and a meaningful group project.

 But this is how it started.

 

First things first. You can read the story of how I started this project – and this blog! – in this post here. Click the link; I’ll wait.

Got it? Good.

This was obviously a few years ago, and much longer than I thought it would take for me to finish this particular project. Pandemics and the chaos they cause tend to throw a few spanners in the works, don’t they? We’ve all had more time for certain things – panic, stress, emergency homeschooling, baking, cooking, sitting at home -  and less time for other things, like sitting around chatting with friends, going places, being out of the house. And that’s where this project slowed down for me: it was my on-the-go project, something I could work on to keep my hands busy while still chatting with friends or family.

And there’s been so little going and chatting with anyone the past two years.

Finally, a few months ago, I said enough of this project sitting around not getting worked on, and I picked it up again.

It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I didn’t really feel like working on it, but that’s what commitment is, isn’t it? Forging on ahead even when you’re not all that enthusiastic, because there’s a job you vowed to finish, and it won’t get finished unless you put in the work.

But mostly, it was good work. Calming. The rhythm of the needle, the colors spreading across the fabric, I found it soothing. This wasn’t the project I would have chosen – I prefer counted cross-stitch to stamped – but it was nice finishing the work of the woman from whom I inherited my love of crafting.

Sometimes it made me sad. My grandmother and I were close when I was young, but our relationship fractured when she and my grandfather accused me of, to make a long story short, being the problem in my mother and stepfather’s marriage. I was not; his abuse just started with me. My grandparents called me horrible names, at a time when I had already moved out of the house due to the abuse (I was eighteen). Several months later, I moved out of state; my mother’s husband’s terrible behavior continued for years, this time aimed at my mother. Occasionally it was bad enough for the police to get involved. (Yes, she’s still married to him. I have no idea why.)

My grandparents eventually understood that he was the problem, and they, too, questioned why my mother remained married to him, but no one ever apologized to me for the accusations and insults they hurled at me. And that hurt. Our relationship was never the same after that.

Her death was strange for me, and I was more worried about my mother, the youngest sibling, than anything else. And inheriting my grandmother’s cross-stitch material has been both healing and thought-provoking. With this and things like Swedish death cleaning making the news in past years, it’s got me thinking about at what point we stop accumulating new things and instead focus on what we have. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind all this time, and while I’ve definitely added books to my stash…that’s really been about it. I have enough to work on.

And now I have one fewer project.

I present to you: my grandmother’s cross-stitch, completed.

 

It’s been a long journey, completing this thing, but I’m glad to have it checked off my list. There are a few more unfinished items in the box I inherited from my grandmother, some of which I’m not entirely sure what to do with, as there’s no pattern to go with those items. For now, though, I’m going to focus on completing a few of the other goals on my list for the year. Because what this project taught me, friends, is to complete your projects. Finish what you start, because you don’t want to leave too much unfinished when you cross that finish line.

Completed project: Overhauling my daughter's room.

My daughter has a lot of toys.

Like...

A LOT LOT LOT of toys.

That? Is a HUGE amount of toys. That's not even all of them. Under the bed, in the closet, in the toybox...

Toys are fun. Toys can be hours of imaginative play. It's always fun to get a new toy, right?

Well...too much of a good thing isn't necessarily a better thing, and that's a concept I've been pondering for a while now. I've posted a few articles in my Friday Thoughts posts about how less is more when it comes to toys, and that message came through loud and clear for me this week.

Recently, Elizabeth Willard Thames, she of the amazing and inspirational Frugalwoods blog, made a post about the challenges of holidays with small children. So much of what she posted rang true for me, and when she mentioned a book called Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids, my ears (eyes?) perked up. This sounded like something I needed, and as luck would have it, my local library had a copy.

I'm not done with the book yet, but SO much of what this author is saying makes sense. Basically, given too many options, too many choices for anything, kids become easily overwhelmed, and it shows in their behavior. One of the examples he gave talked about a little girl with so many toys that she wasn't even playing with them, just kind of...arranging them. Gathering them in odd mixes. And with that, I sat back and went, "Oh." Because that's pretty close to how my daughter plays with her toys. I'm constantly finding bags and containers full of toy food, play rocks, Mr. PotatoHead parts, Barbie clothes, a block or two, a shoelace, just odd mixtures of things that don't at all go together (but of course need to be separated and put back into their proper containers). And that's when I realized...maybe my daughter wasn't having all that much fun. Maybe something needed to change.

And so last night, I started making plans. I broached the idea with my daughter (she's 4.5) and, to my surprise, she readily agreed to it. Now, this is a kid who once sobbed during a game of imagination when a doll (that she had JUST MADE UP) had broken. The doll didn't even exist, but she burst into tears over the mere idea of this doll not existing anymore. But she was amenable to the idea of clearing her room out so she could focus on a select few toys, and so I told her that was the plan for the next day.

I'm even happier that I cleaned the basement out this summer, because that's where everything went. The first to go was the toybox, which isn't so much a toybox these days as a giant catch-all for stuff she rarely plays with anyway. And then the little Frozen mirror table, the Little People toys that she doesn't play with anyway, the tent and stuffed animals that filled it and rendered it useless (I SWEAR stuffed animals multiply. I'm going to go through them and pass some of them on, because no one on this planet needs four garbage bags full of stuffed animals), her dollhouse (she plays with the dolls and clothes, but not the house), and a whole bunch of other stuff. Downstairs it all went to a corner of the basement. She helped me carry some of it down, and she knows that she can visit it or trade some stuff out for something else whenever she wants, but for now, that big pile stays down there.

And we'll go through it from time to time, I'm sure, to see what we can get rid of, or what she's developed an interest in, but for now, we're going to give this new, streamlined room a try and see if her behavior improves any. She's always been an intense kid, prone to quick tantrums and meltdowns if something doesn't go exactly the way she thinks it does (or doesn't match up the picture in her mind. Last week, she sobbed because I wouldn't put doll pants on the cat...), and although I'm sure a large part of that is just her personality, overwhelming her with 234823497832749832 options for toys probably wasn't helping, as evidenced by the grouping-odd-stuff-together method of playing. Thus, the whole room overhaul.

And there we go. Calm. Clean. Relaxing.

When we were finished, her exact words were an excited-sounding "I LIKE my room like this!" She was especially excited about the two sets of drawers being separated. "Now I can reach everything!" she told me. Before I was even done hauling stuff downstairs, she was digging through the drawer with her coloring books and coloring on the table- something she's NEVER done before. The table was always covered with Little People toys she never played with, and although she knew exactly where the coloring books were, she never took them out. Today, she did. Later on, the table became a place to make phone calls (her kitchen has a cordless phone), and she used the stool under the table to set up a lemonade stand. I lay on her bed and read out loud to her as she played, and she enjoyed that. She kept sighing happily and chatting about how much she liked the space, and when we cleaned up before going downstairs for lunch, it took two minutes. It really does feel like an entirely new room. 

So thanks, Mrs. Frugalwoods, and thanks to Mr. Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, because although long-term results remain to be seen, today she's happy with the calmness of her new room, and so am I. 

A new twist on Gift In A Jar!

My mom likes to travel. Not internationally, just around. When we lived out of state, she got over her fear of driving long distances by herself and learned to navigate the open road, and we visited a ton of cool nearby stuff with her- places in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, all thanks to my mom and her newfound sense of adventure.

Even though we live in the same state again, about an hour apart, my mom still likes to travel, and so we've kept up the tradition, visiting nearby locations and exploring what's fun. And this year, I'm giving her a Christmas gift that speaks to those trips.

In 2017, we traveled to Traverse City, Michigan, a place I'd always wanted to see. It's a beautiful, charming town and I loved it there. If you haven't had the pleasure of strolling its gorgeous downtown and relaxing on the shores of Lake Michigan, consider making it a goal to get there, because it's absolutely worth the trip. My daughter still had some sand and a bunch of rocks in her sand bucket when we left, and so I took that sand and saved it in a pickle jar. It now sits on top of my bookshelf, a cheerful reminder of the fun we had on that trip, and it makes me smile every time I see it.

This past summer, we visited Door County, Wisconsin, and of course we had a wonderful time. Already thinking of the future, I saved a little bit of sand and some rocks while we were there. They've been waiting for me in a little red bucket, until I had time and materials, and today, as I was cleaning out a few things from my kitchen island, I found the perfect jar.

It's a small jar, but that will work perfectly for my mom. Once I get a detail brush, I'll paint DOOR COUNTY 2018 on the lid. And voilà, a perfect Christmas gift that will evoke memories of a wonderful family vacation for years to come.

My mom will love it, and I'm so excited to give it to her this year. :)

Completed: Heart (a knitting project)

Husbands are so difficult to buy for, aren't they?

Okay, maybe yours isn't, but mine kind of is. He always says he doesn't need anything (which, truth be told, he usually doesn't), and he feels uncomfortable with people giving him things. He likes tools to fix stuff around the house, but I have zero clue how to buy those (and since he doesn't exactly have a system to store things, I'm not entirely sure of what he does and doesn't have). It's rare that I find things at yard sales that I know 100% he can use, and while he likes funny t-shirts, his dresser drawers are stuffed FULL of them.

So that makes buying him stuff for Christmas (and his birthday, which is RIGHT after Christmas) a little challenging. He's a scientist, though, so all things science-related are always acceptable as a gift, which is why I knitted him strep throat. He'll get a kick out of that.

But I wanted to make him something else, too. Something that said 'I love you' but also 'I honor your inner (and outer) nerdy scientist.' Something that he could look at and know that I think he's fantastic and also my favorite geek in the whole world.

What better fits all of that than...

An anatomical heart!

No, really, an anatomical heart!

How cool is THAT??? 

I wish you could all feel it. It's got a bit of heft to it for being just yarn and fiberfill. It's about the size of my entire hand, probably fairly close to what a human heart would be (which makes it a bit weird to hold! Not that I've ever held a human heart before. A human brain, yes, thanks to a science event we went to back in Tennessee, but never a human heart). It's pretty solid, not at all squishy, and I'm ridiculously proud of it. 

Look at the valves!!! So, so cool.

Part of what my husband studies involves heart disease, so this is definitely an appropriate gift.

I used the Heart pattern from Knitty, and I knit it up in some scrap yarn I'd ordered from Knitpicks years ago to make some winter headbands for family members for Christmas. There was just enough to finish this; I probably have five or six yards left, so that was lucky.

The pattern is really well-written and easy to follow. I had to backtrack and rip a bunch of things out, but that's on me, not the pattern. As I mentioned in previous posts, I'm just kind of getting back into knitting after a years-long hiatus after having my daughter. I was never a very fancy knitter; I didn't do a ton of complicated things in the past and tended to shy away from patterns that looked too hard. That said, I had pinned this pattern years and years ago, thinking it looked pretty awesome, and then, like so many other pins, never did anything about it. And since I'm trying to change that aspect of my personality, this went on the needles after I finished with strep throat. I've got another project in the queue that will require me to learn some new knitting skills, so...eep. I'm a little nervous about that.

Knitting the heart was a little fussier than I expected, though. It's knit up on ridiculously tiny needles, and due to the shape of the heart (anyone else hearing Jackson Browne in their heads right now? Just me?), you kind of have to twist and push and move the needles around to get to the next stitch in certain spots. It made that knitting slow going and a bit painful to my fingertips. Binding off was an exercise in not screaming, at the yarn for having so little give, at the stitches for being so tiny, and at the needles for constantly stabbing into my fingers. 

So all in all, despite the challenges of sharp, finger-poking needles and tiny stitches that I felt like I needed to contort myself to get to from time to time, I'm absolutely thrilled with how this turned out. My husband is going to LOVE this. He has a collection of toys on display at his desk at work, and I'm assuming that that's where this will end up as well (since, again, they study heart-related things there). And if it does, I'll be pretty proud to have it on display- but if not, I'm happy with whatever he decides to do with it. My heart is his, after all. ;)

Are you working on anything fun?

Merry Christmas! You're getting strep throat! (A completed project)

No worries. I'm not sick. No one's sick.

But my husband will be getting strep throat.

For Christmas.

"How can you possibly know that?" you ask.

Oh, I'll show you.

Tada!

You remember from your biology textbooks what strep throat looks like under a microscope, right? They're sphere-shaped bacteria, chained together, and they make you miserable. It's like knives in your throat when you swallow. Fortunately, that's not the kind I'm giving him for Christmas; no one wants that!

My husband is a scientist. He loves what he does and he's amazing at it, so what better gift for him than one that is science-themed? The science he does at work is far above my head, and I'm not a scientist at all, but I can at least present him with something science-y under the tree for a bit of a laugh this year, hand knit, of course!

Much more pleasant than the real thing.

The pattern I used came from House Full of Monkeys. She calls for safety eyes, but I just used a bit of black yarn and embroidered a happy face on mine. Because who says strep throat can't be happy while it's making you miserable?

This was a really great pattern. It's super simple to follow and I had no problems with it whatsoever. The only change I might make, if I were to make another one of these, would be to start stuffing it a little earlier than the end. I had forgotten how awful stuffing things is- I'd made a stuffed teddy bear years ago and stuffing that thing, along with sewing the pieces together, was enough to make me want to jump off the roof face-first. But that's it. I hung out on my chair with my two cats and watched reruns of Law & Order while I knit. All in all, it was a pretty relaxing project.

I've even got a super dorky poem written out for when he opens it; wanna hear it?

*groan*

In case you can't see it, it reads,

You didn't need a sweater

And you didn't need a coat.

So instead this Christmas,

I have give you strep throat.

Totally merry, right? 

Our strep throat buddy will reside happily in my gift stash with the other Christmas presents I have stored away. It's not an enormous pile, but it's growing, and that makes my planner heart happy.

So there we have it! A super fun, super adorable project that will make one scientist very happy come Christmas morning. Thanks to House Full of Monkeys for such a great pattern, I really enjoyed making this. 

Onward to the next knitting project, whatever that may be! :)

Completed: Basement clean-up.

So.

Although this blog is only several months old, this is a post 3.5 years in the making.

I explained a little bit of the backstory of this in my post about cleaning up the laundry room. Basically, when we moved in, the movers dumped all the boxes in our basement. I unpacked like a demon over a number of weeks (since I had a baby who never, ever slept and I was seriously delirious with lack of sleep, it took longer than I would have liked), but I left my husband's boxes down there, because, well, they were his boxes. Some of those boxes had been sitting, crammed full of stuff and untouched, since we got married in 2007. At our last house, they were in the attached garage, so I didn't have to look at them, but here? Here they were in the lower level of our house (it's a split level, and the basement is finished, so it's not a true basement, but it's how we think of it) and I passed by the heap every time I did laundry, scooped the litter box, or searched for a book on our shelves or something in my craft area.

As time went on, the heap of boxes grew messier. Stuff got added to the pile, things shifted around as my husband dug through the boxes for items he was searching for, I pushed things around to make room so I could actually see some of my craft area. And still he left those boxes there. "Even if you just go through one item a DAY," I begged him, to no avail. The mess remained.

And all the while, my anxiety grew. Messes and clutter have started making me very anxious, and beyond that, this area of the house was embarrassing. When we had people over and they caught even a glimpse of what that area looked like, I was mortified. Even when the rest of the house was in perfect order, the shame I felt over that basement was gargantuan. I'd been refusing to clean it, because hey, not my stuff...but as time went on, it became more and more obvious that it just wasn't going to get clean unless I did it, and honestly, my anxiety was so bad over that area that something had to be done.

And since part of the reason I started this blog was to leave no task unfinished, I began getting myself into the mindset of cleaning the basement. I started with smaller projects, worked my way up to the laundry room (whose mess was starting to resemble the basement itself!), and then it was time.

Are you ready?

It's bad.

Here it is.

It's okay to scream. Really.

That's not even the worst of it, to be honest. It's looked even worse at times. Can you see why this set off my clutter-induced anxiety so badly? It was getting to the point where I literally dreaded going down there, and I was getting tired of being afraid of- and being unable to use!!!!- an entire floor of my house. Another glimpse:

Is this worse? It might be.

This one was actually after I had started doing a little bit of cleaning, moving some stuff around and whatnot. On the right hand side, you can see a corner of the dry bar, basically just a large countertop with some open storage underneath. My son and I have cleared this thing off multiple times over the years we've lived here, and my husband keeps dumping stuff on it (he's, uh, got a messiness problem. Good thing I love him!). I stopped cleaning it off and my son gave up similarly, and the mess grew and grew. 

But no.

No more.

I desperately needed to Get It Done.

So I did.

It was a Tuesday when I started. I moved things around at first, making enough space for my daughter to play on the SmartCycle someone gave us (but that we've never hooked up to the TV because we don't want to get her started on video games this early! She has no idea it even hooks up to anything and just enjoys riding it like an exercise bike), and then I started going through boxes. I had a huge pile of recycling, a smaller-but-still-huge pile of garbage, and five hard plastic containers for storage in the crawlspace. And methodically, item by item, I began going through the boxes down there.

The things I found!

Bills (paid at the time, but then stashed and for some godawful reason, PACKED AND MOVED. WE PAID TO TRANSPORT THESE, SOME OF THEM MULTIPLE TIMES. YES, I'M SHOUTING; WOULDN'T YOU???), some of them from before 2010. Empty envelopes from cards and mail received years ago. Paperwork from cars and property that we no longer own. Bits and pieces of tools and things to be used with said tools, decorative items, military gear (my husband got out in the mid 2000's), backpacks with broken zippers, and my favorite item of all:

No phone it here; it was just the box.

WE TOTALLY NEEDED TO STORE THIS FOR YEARS AND THEN MOVE THIS THREE TIMES, RIGHT????? (This wasn't mine; mine was orange.) This box went straight into the recycling pile, and I moved on to the next ridiculous item. All in all, I managed to condense the heap of boxes my husband had been moving from place to place into four and a half plastic storage containers. That was it. Those boxes probably filled up an entire moving pod (which is what we used to move back here from Tennessee), but the keepable contents would've only filled a back corner. Not cleaning and organizing your stuff costs you money, people!!! 

So yes, it was an exercise in frustration, and it furthered my resolve of being careful as to what I bring in the house these days. I'm not interested in my time being taken up caring for possessions; I want to spend my time doing and creating and making, not cleaning and dealing with STUFF. I don't ever want to have to do this again. And most of this stuff wasn't mine in the first place, but I'm still glad to be in this mindset so that I don't get trapped by my own personal possessions.

The basement really didn't take as long as I thought it would. Two full days of sorting, organizing, and moving stuff around, and then this happened:

I nearly wept at being able to do this!

This was a huge deal for me to be able to do. 

I gave away a huge stack of empty boxes on Freecycle to a lady in my neighborhood who is moving- she was like, "Thank you!" and I was like, "No, thank YOU!!!!" I loaded up the car twice with enormous piles of stuff and dropped them off at the thrift store (and I still have at least one more, smaller donation pile). I gave my mom a few things. I organized my bookshelf, which had become a victim of my anxiety where I would just dump stuff on it and run out of the terrible basement, and I organized my craft area, which I'd been ignoring for ages, since I didn't feel like I could use it effectively with all the clutter down there. I organized, pitched, cleaned, decluttered. I. Was. Brutal.

Are you ready?

The difference is huge.

Check this out.

TA DA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's GLORIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you even? Because I seriously cannot. 

Even seeing that picture makes me heave an enormous, satisfied sigh of relief. The amount of times I've gone downstairs this past week, solely to admire the clear, empty space, numbers in the I'm-not-sure-I-can-count-that-high. The last time the basement looked this clean was when we were touring this house when we were looking for a place (the lady that owned it previously had passed away, so the house was empty), so this is an ENORMOUS deal. Everyone I've shown this picture to that knows us and has been to our house has had a reaction like, "OH MY GOD!!!!"

Yeah.

It's that good. 

So I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to get at least SOME things done these days. A lot of this summer has been dedicated to getting the house in a more workable condition, and I'm feeeling a lot of relief about the results. I have a few more projects to do- I want to pull the stove out and scrub it down; I want to scrub down my appliances that sit out (my Instant Pot, my rice cooker) and clean off all the dust and yuck that have collected on the sides; I need to clean the two closets in my upstairs hallway (waiting on my husband to put up the missing wall in the shower to do that; it's been down for, uh, six weeks or so now, and the parts of the wall that need to go back up are lying in the hallway. He works long hours and so his time to work on home improvement projects is limited, so we all just live in an ongoing home improvement project, basically). 

One box, one item, one old piece of paper at a time, I got the job done. 

And I'm feeling pretty proud about it. :)

Have you ever done a major clean-up like this? I'd love to hear your story about it.

Completed: Laundry Room Cleanup

Do you have one of those areas in the house that, over time, turned into a dumping ground? One of those areas that the job is SO big, you weren't even sure where to start and so you've been avoiding it?

That's our downstairs.

So.

Story time.

When my daughter was born, she didn't sleep.

Ever.

You go into parenthood expecting some level of sleep deprivation. You expect to yawn, to be bleary-eyed, to maybe hit up whatever caffeinated beverage gets you through the day a little harder than normal. This was what life was like with my son. I was at the level of tiredness where everything was funny when he was young. Not a huge deal.

But my daughter never slept. And when she slept, she woke up constantly, and since my body was her food source, I was awake constantly, too. It wasn't abnormal for her to wake up six times between 11 pm and 6 am, and that was my life for 18 months. 18 months of getting, at most, 3-4 broken-up hours of sleep per day. (And forget naps; she rarely napped decently either, and I was too keyed up to fall asleep, not that it would have mattered, because her naps were 45 minutes tops until she got much older.)

So instead of yawning with bleary eyes, I sobbed uncontrollably, would think something and then have ZERO clue what I had just thought (there were times when I would think, 'Oh, I should get that out of the kitchen,' stand up, and then have NO clue why I was standing up), had joint pain and random aches for no reason, forgot where I was going when I was driving. I wish I were exaggerating; with that last one, my son, who was then 13 years old, had to remind me that I was taking him to school.

Oops.

There's a reason sleep deprivation is used for torture; it does terribly things to your physical and mental health. My daughter is four years old now and sleeps pretty well, but I still feel like my brain is recovering from all that time it spent without restorative sleep.

Anyway.

I struggled pretty badly through that time. I did my best to take care of what needed to be taken care of, but I failed pretty badly at a lot of things, no surprise there. Our basement was where the majority of the boxes were stored from our move (we moved back to our home state when my daughter was 8 months. NOT. EASY), and my husband's boxes, which are full of junk from college and also contain things like Comcast bills (paid, of course) from 2008, are still there. It's a dumping ground, one that I'm planning on tackling next, but the dumping ground had started to bleed over into the laundry room and I hadn't yet found the energy or the fortitude to tackle it. So it got worse and worse and worse, until suddenly, I couldn't take it anymore.

Are you ready?

Seriously. Steady yourselves.

Here's the laundry room.

*infinite screaming*

That's AFTER I started the cleanup process, as evidenced by the pile of stuff on top of the washer. But the stuff scattered on the floor, that was just...there. The bin of what looks like rolled-up wrapping paper was actually a small trash can full of roller shades (none of which fit any windows in the house) that was there when we moved in (as were the old disgusting mop and the other things leaning by the wall. Yuck). That's the thing about not sleeping- you don't even THINK of easy solutions, like, "Hey, I could throw that out." Never even occurred to me during that time, not even once. It's almost embarrassing to admit that.

But part of starting this blog was to hold myself accountable for all the things I both want and need to do, and this was definitely on my list of absolutely need to do, so I began slowly tackling the room. I started on a set of shelves left here by the previous owner (an older lady who had passed away). I weeded out a bunch of things she had left behind, then reorganized my own belongings and called it a day. The next time I organized, I worked on that large set of shelves you see on the right hand side of the picture, then moved to the space between that and the washer. And so on and so forth. Yesterday, I tackled the dryer, which is across from the washer, and the area to the right of it. And last night, I decided that the job needed to be over and done with, and I tackled the final box down there and swept the entire room. 

Are you ready?

It's so much better.

Here we go. 

Isn't it lovely? Isn't it woooooooooooonderful???

The amount of relief that picture gives me is enormous. Clutter triggers my anxiety in a bad, bad way, and I keep going downstairs to examine the gorgeous fruits of my labor. Let's look at some more organizational and cleaning fantasticness, shall we?

The area to the right of the washer had been FULL of boxes, clothes, and junk. FIRE HAZARD.

A view from the other direction.

So clean. So clutter free.

This took a LOT of work and a LOT of effort. My back is pretty toasted today; my hips hurt, my pelvis aches, and I was having trouble walking up the stairs last night after finishing all of this. It's going to be like that when I do the tough jobs; that's unfortunately just how my body works these days, and while it does indeed stink, I'm used to it and know to expect it. But the payoff here is really great; I get the satisfaction of both a clean, clutter-free laundry room, I get space to set up my drying racks for the winter so I don't have to use up so much electricity running the dryer, and I get the immense satisfaction of knowing that I completed a project that desperately needed completing.

I bought a small shelf from Menards today; that will go around where the bottles of water are in that last picture. It'll hold my daughter's paints, which are currently languishing where my husband left them, on the super cluttered bar in the basement. I'm sure I'll find other things to be stored on there as well, because up next...

The basement!

Wish me luck, because that place is seriously Nightmare on Elm Street-levels horrifying.

Do you have any major projects that you're tackling?