cleaning house

Since getting married and quitting (well, maybe not quitting, but at least paring down) my wedding... er... preoccupation, I've been entirely obsessed with interior design. Apartment Therapy, Design Sponge, Young House Love, all of it. Gone are the days of hoarding photos pretty white dresses, here to stay are the days of designing dream bathrooms when my insomnia hits. I'm going to level with you here, all the pretty pictures of dreamy bedrooms and perfectly organized spaces can make me feel bad about the crappy, cookie-cutter rental the Hubs and I currently live in. Rental white, popcorn ceiling, and a suite of furniture that was either purchased at Target, without me, or both doesn't help. Combine that with a dual predisposition in our little family towards being (what's a nice word for slobs?) tidiness-avoidant and our apartment can seem more like our mess than our home.

In a fit of cleaning and pent-up dust bunny rage, Hubs and I have spent the last two evenings giving the mess a run for it's money. Tuesday night we started with the pool room. There is neither a pool, nor a pool table in this room. We call it that out of a deep seeded love of an Australian movie called the Castle. It's hilarious. Put in in you Netflix queue. Don't worry, you can thank me later. Anyhow, in it the family has a room in the house (presumably with a pool table, I've forgotten) where all the "special" things go. Mug that says "World's Best Dad?" That's going straight to the pool room! For us, it means that our second bedroom is a giant closet with a desk and my yarn stash in it. There was stuff everywhere. There was nowhere to move, sit or work. The closet itself was overflowing. After several hours of cleaning, organizing, sorting, trashing and donating to Goodwill the closet is once again organized and the floor is cleared out.

Look! Evidence of closet organization!

That's not to say we're done. I'm going to show you what it looks like now in a double effort both for no one to think I'm in any way perfect and to motivate me to keep going until the job is done. To be fair though, my 50mm lens takes lovely pictures but makes it really hard to see the nice empty space taking up most of the room.

Yeah, my yarn gets "organized" periodically. I still have yet to do it in a way that is either a) helpful or b) sticks. We're currently in the market for something that'll help organize the stash. That stack of boxes is the wonderful china we got for our wedding. Believe it or not, that's consolidated by about 65% in terms of box size. Ordering china covers (these are surprisingly hard to find. Macy's doesn't carry them at all. We've found one specialty store online that carries them.) is next on the docket. I've been wanting a hutch to store/display them, but what with our hating our apartment, we've been holding off buying a huge piece of furniture that we'll have to carry up and back down our 32 stairs in the near future. That funky pseudo-Victorian telephone bench that you can kind of see in the corner of one of the photos looks like this. I'm signed up to take an intro upholstery class this coming quarter through the local community college and this is my project. More on that as it comes.

Fresh off our victory in the pool room we decided to tackle the kitchen last night. If you can look past the totally covered fridge (you can't make me get rid of my magnets!), the place is freaking spotless! Perhaps not magazine quality, but everything got a really good scrubbing and all the surfaces got cleared (I have a nasty habit of not putting away small appliances after I use them).

See that burner? All that white? That sucker got at least 45 minutes of combined effort. Did you know the top (white metal part) comes up like a car hood so you can clean underneath? I didn't, but it does!

Still left to cover:
-dining room table
-living room and hallway
-our bathroom
-spare bathroom
-yarn "situation"
-Hubs' desk
-our bedroom
-our closet needs a once over, tidy though it may seem

Tempting as it may be to have a house of my own, it's times like this that I'm glad all we're responsible for is a 2 bedroom apartment.