While I should be studying for my midterm on Monday, I'm actually sitting here at my desk dreaming up ways to get our living room to "flow" better by repositioning the 2 couches, giant redwood coffee table, and bookcases. We were going to sell the huge blue chair+ottoman from my "old becomes new" post but I didn't get any takers when I posted it on Craigslist. So we are toying with the idea of bringing it back into the livingroom (it has been under a sheet in the garage since--eek!--December).
I'm also procrastinating by creating a word to describe my infatuation with all things orderly. So far I have: instaurphiliac (from the latin root for storage: instaurare, meaning 'to store' and -philiac, meaning to have an--abnormal--affinity towards something, like being addicted to something). It is interesting to note that instaurare is also the root word for "restore," which I also love doing to old furniture. I could also describe myself as being addicted to organization, but that would yield a much less interesting word: organophiliac, since the root word for organization is "organ" like our bodily organs since they are "arranged" in a certain way.
Incidentally, we're almost done with the flooring project! Dave is at home finishing up the last few floor boards for the livingroom and hallway. While we were at it, we also purchased and installed another pantry unit at the end of the kitchen. Now I have SO much storage in there! I have an entire metal cabinet in the garage that is full of all the kitchen stuff I couldn't fit in the current cabinets--KitchenAid attachments, dutch ovens, conical sieve for making smooth soups, my 50 pounds of flour and sugar (I love Costco!), etc. Now I can put it all away in the kitchen, where it really belongs. Seriously, I wasn't lying in the first paragraph...
We bought our house a little over a year ago; when we moved in, one of the first things we did was to install more kitchen cabinets at the "end" of the kitchen. The kitchen was completely redone right before we moved in so adding more matching cabinets was as simple as buying them from Lowe's. We have a "dead end" kitchen (you can't walk through it) with a walk-way area at the end opposite the kitchen window. This space allows you to walk from the living room, through the kitchen, and into the dining room. Our Realtor told us that it is officially called an "eating area," a place where you put your kitchen table. Yeah, right! That space isn't very wide so your table would have to be up against the wall on one side, limiting the number of people who could eat there. So we just put a ton of new cabinets along that wall, which doubled our kitchen storage. (Yippee!) Originally, there were only a lone light fixture and a single electrical outlet smack-dab in the middle of the wall. (Honestly, who designs crap like that?!) We rewired the whole wall so we have both on-the-top-of-the-cabinet lights and under-the-cabinet lights, plus changed from two electrical outlets instead of one. Although we haven't gotten around to it, we'll eventually order a matching countertop for these cabinets. Right now we're using shellacked plywood. Here are some pictures of that spring 2007 project and what it looks like now with my snazzy new double-wide pantry.
2007: This is me installing an expansion to the light box (I don't know if you can tell, but I'm installing it backwards in this picture...I had to redo it later...oops). The kitchen is behind me. See what I mean about that area being too narrow for a useful dining table? There's the first pantry we installed, to my left. (And yes, I know my coveralls are very sexy.)
2007: All the cabinets installed (looking from the pantry-side):
Today: My new, extra pantry! Just because I could, I got inside. (Now that's PROOF to how much it can hold!)
All right, I'm off to Target to buy a dustbuster to suck up all the little wads of dog hair that are littering my house.
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