*sorry for my absence lately. Who else is un-inspired, raise your hand! Plus, I started this post two days ago. Sorry. Anywho, here we go...
Living room organization is complete... mostly...
Oh come on, you know nothing is ever
really finished. I love how Rita Konig felt about her apartment: "When everything is done, it's time to move!"
But for now, and for the sake of argument and this post, I am finished with the living room. And the office for that matter! More on that later...
So what I did:
Other than organizing a
ton of photos, and sorting mementos and putting them in boxes, not much.
This was really the biggest challenge because before the move, I had consolidated all of the aforementioned into a large plastic tub. Photos were sorted by person and put into individual labeled plastic baggies. They stayed this way for a year. Mementos were in random boxes in no particular order. I'm not even going to get started on digital photos. I'm still working on
this project
So to organize the photos, I put them in albums. First by person, then chronologically. For instance, Eric has an album and his photos are organized from his childhood to more recently. Same for me. Now, family photos are really tricky. I have pictures I want to have framed, plus a lot of random photos of random people from God knows when. So what I will
eventually do is make a family photo album for Adelaide of all the best photos, and either scan or toss the rest. (Except for the
beautifully organized photos of my mother's childhood, painstakingly preserved by my grandmother... Thanks GrandNan!) Then, we will take the ones to frame and create a family wall like this one:
Because our built ins house so many different types of things, it was important to me to streamline everything visually as much as possible so it doesn't look so cluttered. So I used lots and lots of Kassett boxes.
I also covered some of the panes with vintage hankies and some eyelet fabric I had lying around.
For mementos, I put them into several boxes sorted by either trip, or for random childhood things, Eric and I each have our own box. And we have started one for Adelaide.
CDs are alphabetized and put into more Kassett boxes to further reduce the visual noise in the built ins.
Along with organizing goes baby proofing since we will very soon have a crawling lil devil getting into everything, so I put our very UN-baby friendly coffee table into "the pile", and made these bad boys:
Using
this pattern for a 5-minute pillow cover from Apartment Therapy. These took a little longer than 5 minutes, but were still super easy and fast, and now I have a place to store our 10 extra bed pillows! (Not that the closet floor isn't a wonderful place to store pillows...)
Our landing strip still could use a little work. Mainly, a few more hooks and some storage piece to house umbrellas, leashes, lint rollers, etc. And I still would like a cushy armchair to sit in Mr. Roger's style.*(actually, the more I look at this chair, the more I like it. And the sheepskin goes to yoga with me every week and it doesn't fit in my yoga bag... bonus!)
But there it is! Our living room:
It was too tall, wobbly, and kind of dingy and gross, but not bad at all for < $100. So we took it and two afternoons later, this is what we're left with: 
