Happy Memorial Day

I hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend. We are finally moving and while you are reading this we are loading everything we own into a truck. I will be taking the week off, because I will not have Internet access (gasp)! I want to thank everyone for reading my blog and if you need something to do visit some of my favorite sites, listed in my side bar! See you next Monday!

How to Arrange Furniture on Paper

Have you every wanted to rearrange you furniture, but were afraid to waste all that time moving your furniture to hate the arrangement or have things not fit right?  Here is my simple and inexpensive solution:  arrange your furniture on graph paper.  All you need is graph paper, pencil/pen, and a tape measure.Measure you room and graph it onto the paper, on my example 2 squares equal one foot.  Don’t forget to mark the windows and doors.  I also like to mark electrical outlet, cable outlets and phone jacks.

Now you’ll need to measure and graph your furniture using the same scale as you room drawing, for this example: 2 squares equals one foot.  Cut that furniture out and start arranging! 

I have got a bit of a problem, my furniture is to big for my space.  New furniture is not in the budget and I have to get this stuff to fit.  I have three different options:

Option 1 – Sofa floating in the middle of living room and not really room for end tables.

  Option 2 – Flipping living room and dining room.  There are no outlets or cable outlets where I have put the entertainment center and I would have to run cords!  Living room is basically just leftover furniture storage.

Option 3 – Entertainment center blocks half of French doors and one built in, plus cords would have to be run as there are, once again, no outlets.

The long term solution is to move the entertainment center and sofa to the basement, where we are planning to have a family room and buy new, smaller furniture for upstairs.  I am not ready to do that yet and I would like to have our TV on the main floor for now, what do you think would be the best way to arrange everything?  I don’t have to use all of the furniture, but we need to have places to sit.

18 and Life

So, my mom and I are talking and she tells me that since we bought a house she’s going to bring some of my things from high school that she has been storing.  She mentions “that picture of that lady with the words” and some other stuff.

Hmmmmmmm…that lady with the words?…

I would like to present Sebastian Bach from Skid Row (if you need a refresher, Skid Row wiki entry) This was a high school art project that somehow has survived for over 15 years, it is a little rumpled at the bottom and the edges have masking tape residue on them, that’s pretty good for some drawing paper and sharpie markers.  I spent some time looking for the original picture, I know I probably got it from Metal Edge, but I gave up after about 30 pages.

Yes, those are the words from all the songs on their self titled album.  There were some other interesting pieces in the collection that she brought me and I will be sharing more “finds” in the near future.  So, what was you favorite band in the late 80’s, early 90’s?

Harmonic Mosaic Washcloth

Yes, I am still knitting washcloths, this time I used the harmonic mosaic pattern from Ribbed For Your Pleasure (I love the name of this blog!!!)

This pattern reminds me of DNA for some reason.  I love the pattern, but I don’t know how I feel about the color of the variegated yarn, its Peaches and Cream Pink Lemonade, it will grow on me, right?  I think I have enough left to make two more washcloths and some facial scrubbies, I must use up the entire ball!  I guess I’ll go to Ravelry (my username is crafterella, add me as a friend) and find another washcloth pattern to try.

The Big DIY

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to start working on the biggest DIY ever and today I would like to share a bit more about that.  A week ago we closed on our first house.  The house has been a rental house for years and the last tenant and her five children did a lot of damage to the home.  The majority of the problems are cosmetic, a bit of hard work and elbow grease and we should have a very nice house!

So, what have I been up to this weekend you ask, scrubbing floors, I think I have scrubbed all the floors at least five times.  The corner of floor pictured above has some sort of gooey crud on it, I spent a couple of hours scrubbing and scraping and ended up with a fairly clean corner of floor.

Almost the entire first floor has hardwood floors that all need to be refinished, but we just spent all of our money buying the house!  I discovered Rejuvenate Floor Reviver and it works fabulously!!!, if your floors are worn and no longer shinny this stuff is for you!  I also tried Orange Glo and while it did improve the surface of the floor, the Rejuvenate made a bigger impact and it can be used on many different types of floors.  I have also been working on the walls, there are a lot of dents, dings, and some larger holes in the plaster (on the left beside the doorway the black marks, yes those are bicycle tracks!).  Patching plaster walls is interesting, but easy enough for a beginner, a nice lady at Home Depot helped me find everything I needed.  I am now getting excited about painting.

This is a panoramic shot of our living room and it shows why this house is so great, there are miles of beautiful wood work and somehow it has never been painted.  Those French doors lead to my future craft room, where I will be making curtains and slipcovers and other fun household stuff plus all the other crafty stuff I like to make.

Now I just need to decide what colors to paint everything!