Success & Failure (pt. 1)

       It has been an interesting weekend, and in the name of a complete idea - I'm throwing todays events in too. I suppose we must have failure and obstacles in life - how else would we know that things are going well or "easy" if we haven't had difficulties.

       John and I are scrambling to get some of the last HUGE projects finished on the house.  There are still so many more to go, but the majority of those are more cosmetic (though I will admit, it isn't quite what I would call "touch-ups" - they're big projects).  We need to rip the carpet out of one final room... but it's the largest room in the house.  We still need to finish cleaning out the second bathroom and the guest room that have been nothing but storage space. The urgency is because we have family coming to visit the first weekend of  next month!

      The largest project is probably cleaning. We still have belongings stacked on furniture rather than put away, or a few remaining boxes that just cant seem to find a 'real' home somewhere. It's hard to do every day cleaning around stuff like this and of course these things really need to be put away or given away. So, Friday night I gave myself the task to put away the books... a real issue because we have so many! We've known our need for more bookshelves, but just don't want to give up floor space for them (not that we really have floor space to spare anyway). Then it dawned on me, in our office area we could build a bookcase at the top of the wall above the door and windows!! I had a vision and I was hooked!

       A simple enough project it seemed. I measured the wall and stopped off for my bub on my way to Lowes.  Obviously the project wasn't well thought out so the store took a while to gather all the supplies we needed, or thought we needed. We figured it would be a 3(ish) hour project. Uh... So not the case!

      First of all, the moron who built the house didn't put the studs in the proper locations on this wall. On Friday night, we weren't certain there were any studs. We looked for hours; hours of tapping and nailing and high hopes crashing. I also didn't consider the fact that to have enough space to put books on the shelf, there was no space to put an L bracket under the shelf above the french doors (easy fix, hung it upside down in two spots).

      A looongg story short...It took the entire weekend to complete. I now have some major holes in my wall. Many are well on their way to repaired thanks to Joint Compound and patience. Joshua has a new found hatred for flathead screws. And I have a shelf!

      It's perfect!! It fits our needs exactly, although because of weight restrictions associated with the lack of studs in the appropriate places I can't put all our books up. So for now we still have one large, overflowing box of books under the shelf just waiting until I sucker Josh into helping me with the same project again on the two adjoining walls.

It has a great deal more on it now. This was the first "after" picture.

      On the cleaning front, things are looking much better. The kitchen is almost clean, which was the easiest since I keep it pretty clean on a regular basis - it still needs a spit shine and some organization. (Oh! And I got my kitchen curtain rod hung on the door!! It was magnetic and kept falling, but with the help of liquid nails and Krazy Glue Josh got it to stay!!) The dining room and sitting area look much better thanks to John cleaning and his liberal decisions as to what goes into a trash bag...! When the bathroom is finished being cleaned out I will have the cabinet space to finally put away the last of our straggling boxes in that end of the house!