New year, new “desk.”

Every year around this time I go a little nuts and rearrange everything. It’s partly to accommodate all the gifts we just got and partly a kind of New Year fever. Normally it involves moving furniture, which turns up a lot of dust bunnies and pretty much everything I’ve ever lost in my life. Frequently I “archive” some of the toys and games.

This year’s project was my desk. For quite some time I’ve been considering a switch to a standing work station, on account of how I keep hearing they are better for your health… but recently my sciatic nerve has been even more sensitive to too much chair time than normal. (Could it have anything to do with lifting a 40+ pound toddler in all the wrong ways?) So this year’s crazy took hold of the old TV armoire and did this:20131230-105705.jpg
I know, it looks nice and tidy right now. The rest of the room looks like my old desk threw up on it. I can’t wait to see what this looks like in two weeks.

(If you’re looking for a “how to,” I just took the shelf that used to hold up the TV and reversed it to hang from the top. I added a pre-fab keyboard drawer that was a much appreciated Christmas gift from my brother, and made sure everything cleared the doors. I’ll eventually replace the plastic drawers in the bottom with actual shelves, but for now, this works.)

Older home FTW!

I may not have a walk-in closet or granite countertops, but I do have this:

20121008-142813.jpg
Our massive, sandstone fireplace is in the living room, and backs onto our bedroom wall. A good fire in it on a nippy afternoon keeps our room warm nearly until morning.

Of course, we also have a weird little adjunct fireplace on the back porch and a wood burner in the basement, neither of which we’ve ever even tried to use. What I’m telling you is that, in event of apocalypse, bring over your junk mail, and we’ll all make it through the winter just fine.

Oh yeah…

Remember when I mentioned we should Prepare for Upheaval? Well, we did not have a rerun of New Year’s Eve. In fact, we’ve been enjoying this for a while now:

It’s not actually wood. It’s vinyl, and I gotcha there for a minute, didn’t I?

…tidy up time

I pointed out that if we had “Tidy Up Time” this evening, we’d get to “Waffle Time” a lot quicker in the morning. Because Ian’s room usually looks like this:

20120309-214634.jpg
And I’m not notoriously patient before breakfast. Some of us interpreted “Tidy Up Time” this way:

20120309-214731.jpg
But others interpreted it this way:

20120309-214806.jpg
Prepare For Upheaval.

Little change, big difference

20120122-180504.jpg

We had a pretty full plate this weekend, so I thought hard before I responded to the offer for this love seat on freecycle. Picking up a large item like this can be quite a time investment, but we really needed to make a change in the study. And the offerer wasn’t far away, so I went for it.

Well, didn’t it just turn out that we couldn’t QUITE get it on the roof rack! And didn’t the very nice people who were giving it away decide that the husband would drive it to our place, where he also helped bring it in? If you ever hear me say that Freecycle restores my faith in humanity, know that this is what I mean.

Getting the seven foot couch we were replacing to the curb was all on us, though. We had quite the adventure in Ways to Get A Couch Stuck In Our House. Nope, you cannot get a 7 foot couch out our front door. Nope, nope, nope! Out the back door where, for the first time that day, you’ll be glad the ground is covered with ice? Yep!

20120122-181326.jpg

I suggested we just right it, put the cushions back on, and leave it out back as a way of completing the generally unkempt appearance of our yard, but after scratching his head and appearing to take that suggestion seriously, 007 forged ahead and we got it out to the curb. If someone takes it before trash day, more power to them, but I seriously don’t consider it worth the effort of trying to give it away.

The new piece fits in a lot better, and, other than prompting me to want to rearrange the entire room for the second time this month, it’s definitely for the better.