Hello Blog World Friends! It has been entirely too long. A whole summer, as a matter of fact. Why?
Well, as usual, I’ve taken on too much (impossible to believe, I know)!
At the moment, I’m attempting to:
- Plan a gala from scratch with less than 2 months lead time for a local museum whose board I serve on, with a long list of tasks including graphic design work, sponsorship and raffle outreach, invitation mailing, decor, catering…the list goes on
- Reupholster 6 chairs, a sofa, and an ottoman
- Create nightstands (to be paired with cute farmhouse shutters and new mounted light fixtures ) from a $2 vanity I dragged home from the ReStore that Paul seriously did not believe could be saved
- Sell the mound of things I’ve made over the last few months including a recently refinished kitchen table (that I seriously started on in May and just finished last week)
- Find clever places for all of the random treasures I have acquired (both in my summer thrifting and as gifts from dear friends who know my penchant for old things) from the garage, and pronto because said garage needs to be ready for cars before impending Snow Belt shenanigans
- Write a book ( 2 chapters so far – this is gonna take a second!)
- Keep my consulting business up and running while also working my part-time fundraising job
- Be a mom, wife, friend and moderately sane member of society
I am presently writing to you at an ungodly early hour from my craft room which has become a depot for the half-finished upholstery projects and the 15 yards of green velvet fabric that will someday grace their bare frames. This is all in addition to my regular hoard stash of crafty things, presently bursting out of formerly-neat little boxes, and spilling onto the floor like that scary plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
In short, my craft room looks like my mind. And no – I am not showing y’all pictures of it. Only pretty things here!
This summer, I finally put a name to one of my most profound superhero (or Shakespearean tragic hero?) traits.
I am: The Under-Estimator!
I have the unique ability to under-estimate how much:
- time
- money
- materials
any given project will need. Several prime examples from this summer’s project list come to mind.
- Paul and I renovated a bathroom (more on that in the next post)! I literally woke up one morning and decided I could no longer live with all the beige and modern ugliness. It’s a tiny bathroom, I reasoned. A quick trip to ReStore and Home Depot, maybe $100 worth of materials, and one good long Saturday of work and BAM! Bathroom beauty. Spoiler alert, but three weeks, double the budget, and about 5 more trips to Home Depot may or may not have been involved.
- To keep the momentum going, I also decided we need to tackle our ugly back staircase on a whim. It featured gunmetal grey stairs and the yuckiest black wood/rubber stair treads you ever did see, all “brightened” by some truly unpleasant yellow paint on the closed-in walls. I took a paint scraper to one step and with minimal effort pulled up a big section of the glued-on treads. Easy Peasey! We can tackle this in a weekend! Insert laugh track here. A month, a whole lotta scraping, and several trips to the hardware store later (because I was eyeballing how much wallpaper I would need and I can’t eyeball accurately to save my life) it is finally up to snuff – but Paul won’t forgive me for it any time soon.
- Also – we now have a pond in the front yard! A pond Paul did not want. Until he did. The digging and supplies were a tad more expensive/extensive than I initially promised. But now we are fish people (in addition to cat people)! And our 20 gold-friends have moved into the TV room for the cold months in a giant tank complete with a pineapple under the sea. You know. These things just happen.
Here’s the upside: my talent for under-estimation has led to some pretty awesome transformations that I certainly would never have attempted if it wasn’t for my frightening lack of common sense.
I’ll be back soon (I swear!!!) with details on all the summer projects!
Old, Pretty, and Slightly Broken 