A Work at Home Mom’s Blog

My living room is so cramped it’s not even funny. It’s not huge, but it’s decent sized. But there’s just too much stuff in there. The air hockey table is the main thing that’s driving me nuts. It takes up all of the space from the front door to one wall, making rearranging like I want to impossible. And we have too many chairs to fit comfortably in there.

The good news is that one of the chairs I’ve been dying to get rid of is in the process of disintegrating. A month or so ago the footrest on the recliner part broke. Then last week one of the arms broke off. I think I’ve finally convinced Hubby to let go of it. Now it’s just a matter of getting him to haul it off.

There’s also another rickety chair that I want to get rid of. That would leave us with one couch and one chair. I don’t particularly like that last chair either, but I can live with it. And my brother has another chair for me that I need to pick up, so then we’ll be back up to a reasonable amount of seating.

What I’d like to do is find somewhere to put the air hockey table or get rid of it, and move the TV to where it is. If we could find a smaller TV stand that could handle our behemoth of a TV, we could do that with plenty of room to spare. Then we could move the couch along the other wall, put chairs on either side, and have a pretty roomy living room.

Maybe all of this will happen one day. The biggest obstacle is that blasted air hockey table. It’s fun and all, but it needs to be somewhere else. Too bad the basement’s so damp and leaky. There’s plenty of room for it down there.

We’ve been in our new (to us) home for about nine months now. We had grand plans when we bought this place, but unfortunately we’ve hardly ventured out of the planning phase. We did manage to get the roof done, which was certainly top priority. And we took out the ancient furnace and its surrounding closet and put in a wood stove. I’ve got mixed feelings about that, but it has already saved us an insane amount of money, so I suppose I can’t really complain.

But there is a lot more I want to do to this place. Hubby and I both agree that the ceilings in the living room and my office need to be redone. I want to either cover or replace the paneling on the walls in the same rooms, and the floors could use some work too. But I’d also love to spruce the place up beyond the basic needs. It’s amazing how small details can make such a difference in a home.

Trouble is, I’m pretty clueless when it comes to things like that. I considered going into interior design when I was in my teens, but when we studied it in home ec, I just couldn’t get into it and figured it wasn’t for me. Hubby, on the other hand, has no interest whatsoever in such things. Such subtleties are completely lost on him.

Lucky for me, there’s Inviting Home It’s a website that sells all sorts of interior design products. From details such as cabinet knobs and molding to lighting and benches, they’ve got the things you need to turn your home from drab to fab without a great deal of effort.

Now, some companies would just put all their offerings on a web page and assume that their customers would know what they’re doing. But not Inviting Home. They have lots of resources to show us how to use their products and help us come up with ideas for our own homes. That’s a big comfort to someone like me, who wouldn’t know what to do with corbels if someone gave me a truckload of them. Here are some of the resources you’ll find on their website:

• Plenty of decorating ideas. Whether you’re a bachelor trying to give your home a stylish yet masculine look or you’ve got an awesome fireplace that you want to accentuate, they’ll tell you what you need for the job.
• A home improvement blog with articles categorized by topic. There’s lots of great stuff here about how to choose the right accents for your home.
• An inspiration gallery with photos of their products installed in various decorating schemes. This is a great place to start if you have no idea in what direction you want to go.

I spent a lot of time browsing the site, and I’ve come up with a few ideas. Some new molding to replace the cheap-looking, drab stuff that’s up now, some ornate knobs for the kitchen cabinets, a low-profile chandelier for the kitchen… I could go on and on. I’ve got it bookmarked for when the time comes that we can seriously think about sprucing up this old house.

I’m dying to move the furniture around in my living room. The way it is now, it’s just not very spacious. Of course that’s mainly because there’s a 7-foot air hockey table on one side of it, but I’m hoping that Hubby can get the help he needs to get it moved to either the basement or garage this weekend.

What I’d like to do is put the TV where the air hockey table is now, put the couch on the wall opposite from that one, and put the chairs along the other two walls. But I’m afraid that if I do that, we will have to keep the front door shut when we’re watching TV. The floor has been patched next to the front door and it would be hard to open it all the way (if it’s even possible), and even if that doesn’t prove to be an issue I’m not sure if the entertainment center we have now would block it from opening far enough.

I’d like to have one of those cool pieces of tv furniture that looks like a chest. It would probably be more compact than the unit we have now, and it would still provide plenty of storage for our movies. But for now we will have to work with what we’ve got, so I guess I should be doing some measuring before we go to all that trouble.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the layout of my kitchen. It’s not huge, but you can get around in it without bumping into stuff every way you turn. Still, I plan to do a lot with it when we have the money.

I’ve got a used refrigerator to put in it, if I can ever get Hubby to bring it in from the garage. The one that’s in there works, but it’s torn all to pieces inside. And it just doesn’t look very good either.

The oven burns stuff on the bottom if you don’t turn it over, which means I can’t bake much in it. I’ve even tried turning it down to a lower temperature than recommended, but it just takes longer to cook and still burns stuff. Oh well, I’m used to crappy ovens.

We also need a new dishwasher. I had high hopes for the one that came with the place, but it doesn’t look salvageable. So a new one is way up there on my wish list.

Maybe one day we’ll have the money to really do it up right. All new appliances, cabinets, maybe even a nice wine refrigerator. It probably won’t happen any time soon, but I’ll keep on dreaming until it does.

I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of ways to incorporate more storage into our bathroom without overcrowding it. It’s no easy task, for sure. You’d just have to see it to appreciate how impossible of a task it really is.

I found a shelf at the hardware store that I thought would work nicely. I took note of the dimensions of it, and came home and measured. I thought it would work, but then I thought about the wire shelf that was then in my bedroom. It’s one of those that you can take apart and reassemble in a number of ways, making it wide or tall. I measured the units of it, and they were actually a little smaller than the shelf at the store. So I decided to make it tall and give it a try in an attempt to save money.

I did, and I got it in the bathroom. At first I was proud of myself, because it seemed to fit nicely. I put a few things on it, because I wanted to see what Hubby thought. He was indifferent (which is much better than I expected), so I thought all was well. Ha.

That evening I went to give Pumpkin a bath, and I barely had room to move. Back to the drawing board. It’s still in there for the time being, but it’s gotta go. At least I didn’t waste our money on the shelf from the store, which would have definitely been too big.

I don’t want one of those over-the-toilet shelves, because the window is over the toilet and I don’t want it blocked. There’s just really no room for much of anything else, except if we switch out bathroom vanities. The one that’s in there is tiny, and we could maybe put in a slightly larger one. But that wouldn’t help much, unless we got one that was so tall I couldn’t use the sink without a stepladder.

I guess I’ll have to break down and store the towels (and probably some other stuff we’re accustomed to having in the bathroom) in our bedroom. Now I just have to find a workable way to do that.

When I was younger, I considered going into interior design. I now know that would have probably have been a mistake, but I still have a love for furnishings and home décor. I’ve always had a fondness for retro pieces, but I also like newer trends such as contemporary Asian stuff.

Contemporary Asian furniture has become extremely popular with people trying to create an exotic and impressive ambiance. The selection is much more varied than you might think, and is not limited to traditional Asian styles. The contemporary spin on modern Asian furniture offers a wide array of decorative choices. You can incorporate a few pieces into your existing décor, or you can use Asian furniture exclusively to create your own unique tribute to an incredible culture with a modern edge. Either way, be prepared to have many conversations about your exotic new additions from Tansu.net.

It has come time to replace our ceiling fan. Today I tried to remove one of the bulbs so I could replace it, and the glass part came out while leaving the metal part in the socket. There is one other socket that is the same way, and one that is loose and won’t work. Grr.

Yes, they could probably be fixed, but the fan itself doesn’t work very well either. So I’m hoping we can replace it before summer gets here.

I wouldn’t mind having a nice chandelier in its place. Hinkley Lighting has some beautiful ones that I’ve been drooling over. But we need a ceiling fan, especially since our air conditioning doesn’t work. Unless, that is, we find room in the budget for a new one of those as well.

We finally got the oven Hubby has been promising to pick up for me a couple of days before Christmas. It works very well, and I’m quite happy with it. I’ve been baking like there’s no tomorrow.

When we went to pick it up, the guy tried to give us a bunch of other stuff. There was a kitchen sink, a refrigerator, and a bathroom vanity without a top. But I felt about the same way about them as I would if someone tried to give me a bunch of Chrysler 300 accessories: It’s nice and all, but I have absolutely no use for them.

The only thing I could have possibly used would have been the vanity. If I were so inclined, I could have gotten my hands on a piece of granite or marble and made a nice storage table out of it. But I’m not, and I really have no place for one anyway, so I didn’t bother.

I have a lighting fixture in my kitchen that irks me every time I look at it. I call it a chandelier, but it’s more like an upside-down lamp hanging from the ceiling. It’s hideous, and it hangs down too low. I’m pretty short, and I hit my head on it every now and then.

I would love to replace it with a nice, classic piece by Hinkley Lighting or something similar. It’s not going to happen right now, though. Even if I had the cash to buy a new fixture, I would probably have to hire an electrician to put it in. Hubby might be able to handle it with some guidance if he was feeling well, but right now there’s no way he could do it. And I’m just not going to even think about attempting it.

Now that the weather is nice, I’ve been spending more time outdoors. I love this time of year, even though it gets pretty hot sometimes.

I also like having pretty things to look at when I’m out. I’m not much of a green thumb, so I don’t have a lot of flowers. But I usually get at least a couple of new pieces of lawn decor each year. Online Discount Mart has some beautiful stuff at great prices. I’ve got my eye on a set of colorful sunflowers- the kind you don’t have to water.

Online Discount Mart has all sorts of summer goodies, as well as articles to help you come up with great decorating ideas. And their prices are great.