The mouse was successfully dispatched the following night.

Rosie got up in the morning and went in the kitchen.  I heard her scream, “A dead mouse!  Inside our kitchen!”

She grabbed my phone and took a picture of it and brought it in bed to show me.  Indeed, it was a dead mouse on the kitchen floor.

Ada got up to look at it, screamed and ran back in the bedroom to tell me it had tiny eyes/legs/toes and A REAL TAIL.

A REAL MOUSE TAIL, MOM IT HAS A REAL REAL TAIL.

Yep, it does have a tail.

I finally meandered out of the bed to pee and everything, and by the time I walked in the kitchen to throw the mouse away it was…gone.

I know that it was dead.  There’s no mistaking a murdered mouse.

Then Rosie told me that Gus Cat had walked off with it in his mouth.

As in the cat took the dead mouse somewhere else in the house.

Ok so I’m not the least bit bothered by one mouse in the house, or a dead mouse in the house.  No big deal.

But a missing dead mouse in my house, possibly partially dismantled?  That’s a little too gross.

I’ve searched the entire house and haven’t found any sign of the dead mouse.  So that leaves me to hope the cat ate the entire thing.

Otherwise…I’ll smell it?

Pregnancy nose plus dead mouse smell.  Oh, help.

Please say Gus ate it all.  Gus is not a hunter and doesn’t go outside because he’s scared, so he’s never eaten a small animal before.  He was walking around the rest of that day with black eyes and purring loudly.  I hope that’s a sign he was pleased to have eaten a fresh kill, even if Willow killed it and not him.  I’m sure Willow left it as a gift for me.  My lady cats always leave dead things as gifts, though usually outside and not in my kitchen.

One day last year Willow ran straight out the door, grabbed a black bird instantly, and ran straight back to me at the door and dropped it at my feet.  The girls were stunned. The bird’s neck was snapped.  At least it died instantly, poor thing.  I really think Willow expected us to eat it. She just kept staring at me and I didn’t know what to do!  Awkward kitty moment.

There have been no more mouse turd sightings.  Lone mouse is definitely gone.  Tyler can stop freaking out now.  (A little disappointing, it would be kind of funny if another mouse popped up, except for the nastiness of their little poops…)

(iPad typing again, excuse any errors.  It doesn’t spell check or let me correct because I can’t scroll down in the editor.)

I am suddenly so busy.

I don’t like being this busy.  It’s stressful.  I’ve had a lot of photography business, which I thought I wanted.  Now I’m not so sure.  I just don’t have time to take care of the kids, homeschool, ENJOY the kids, take care of pets, do all the chores, cook all the meals, run all the errands, and also do photography.

It’s ok, for right now.  I’m still going to do pictures for people who come to me, but I’m not going to do any advertising or anything like that.  

I’ve got two weddings and a birth on the horizon.  Really looking forward to the birth especially.  I just love births!  I would happily photograph nothing but births if that was somehow possible.  Ah!  Soon I’ll share some of her maternity pictures with you.  They are so beautiful.  Well, she is beautiful I should say. :)  

I think I have orphan nesting.  It’s sort of like pregnancy nesting, only I’m preparing for K to come.  We have to have a homestudy done by a social worker.  I’m finding that thought kind of panic inducing.  My little house being inspected.  Yikes!  It’s not a full homestudy that you would need for adoption.  It’s like the lite version.  The social worker from the adoption agency is very nice, so I supposed it will be ok.

In the mean time I’ve been Organizing All the Things.  I’m done with the major projects.  I need to dedicate a day to cabinets and closets…minor overhaul, nothing major.  I also need to deep clean. 

Clutter and dirt in my house cause me to feel panicky.  I feel so much better with everything reorganized.  I feel like I can focus on the kids and keep a regular cleaning schedule again.  It makes me feel relieved.  In a small house things can get out of control very fast. 

My due date club from Ada’s pregnancy is still very active.  We have our own private Facebook group.  These past few days we’ve been sharing videos giving a tour of our houses.  I thought some of you nosy Nellies might like to see mine, taken this evening.

My house is nothing special.  1,000 sq feet, not a single interesting nook or cranny. Just teeny tiny rooms shaped like squares.  I really struggle to live in this space, to be honest.  It’s hard to figure out how to manage our stuff and really hard to just cram our minimal furniture in here.  

I was talking fast in the video, in a hurry because supper was on the stove and the kids were like two minutes from a major meltdown.  Fun stuff.  Also, yeah Duck Face’s poo on the back porch is super disgusting!  Soon she’ll be big enough to be kicked off the porch and out in the yard.  Right now my male duck Benny tries to rape her constantly, and she’s too little.  He could squish her and kill her by accident.  She’s utterly terrified of him.  Anytime he gets on the porch near her she screams her frantic duck peeps and we run out to see if she’s ok.  She sometimes slips past us and runs inside to hide under the kitchen table!  She’s an amazing pet.  If only she didn’t shit so much.  I hose off the porch almost every day, but she is a poo machine!  

Ok, anyway, house tour video:

I cannot wait to move to some place a bit bigger.  I just need a little more bedroom space, an entry way to keep shoes and dirty boots, and a second bathroom preferably with drawers on the vanity thing.  I miss drawers, and space for a night stand, and space for a dresser in our bedroom. I would kill for a closet deeper than the width of a clothes hanger.

The house we want to look at will be ready in three weeks.  They’re putting in the new drywall out there this week.  I am praying and hoping it works out and we love it.  I’m a little scared to move out there, but it would be the perfect way out of this house.  We could put our house on the market while renting.  There aren’t many rental houses where we would be able to have all of our pets and also the chickens and garden, at least not places we could afford while also paying the mortgage on our house until it sells.  It’s all kind of scary to think about.  

It’s 1:30 in the morning.  I need to go to bed.  I’ll try to share some of the billion pictures I have soon.  I can’t believe I’m so behind in blogging!  

Rosie has her speech evaluation tomorrow at our local elementary school.

I’m kind of nervous!  I wonder what it will entail.  Rosie is nervous too, more so than I am.

She has trouble saying her R’s.  They are like W’s.  She also can’t say the letter J, she says a D sound instead.  Like “dam” for “jam” or “poil” for “pearl”.  “Girl” sounds like “gal”.  She’s improving slightly as she gets older, but she still has such a baby voice compared to her peers.  I don’t want it to be something that she gets made fun of over later on.  It’s most noticeable when she’s reading out loud.  That’s what finally motivated me to seek the opinion of the speech therapist just in case.

The speech therapist told me that they only offer therapy to the very worst cases in public school.  The preliminary evaluation will tell her if Rosie needs to be evaluated further for free speech therapy at school, or if she should get private speech therapy (out of pocket, yikes) for a mild issue, or if we should wait another year or two for her to grow out of her speech issues.

On the phone the speech therapist told me that the major speech issues they treat are ones that interfere with learning in the classroom.  I’m not sure Rosie’s speech is that terrible, it’s just a bit wonky.  I would be surprised if her speech was found to be poorly enough to be approved for public school speech therapy, but I’ll gladly take the speech therapist’s free opinion of what we should do.

Just to clear up any confusion we’re still homeschooling, but Rosie can get public school services like speech therapy the same as any student in the district.  I had to call the speech therapist and schedule the evaluation a few months in advance.  If she were in a classroom at school her teacher would set it up.  If Rosie does qualify for their speech therapy then I would take her to it and pick her up just like I would for any appointment.

I kept thinking that she would start talking more clearly at any time, but it just isn’t happening.  I have no idea why.  I started getting concerned when she couldn’t sound out words. She sounds out words and writes them really wrong–like she would mispronounce them.  For example if she were to sound out the word “reading” she would write “weeding”.  Speaking of reading, she is doing really well with it. She can read and comprehend books like Frog and Toad, and she’s starting to read harder books like Junie B. Jones.  (I dislike Junie B. Jones quite a bit for her bad example of behavior and I banned it from our house, but it’s crept back in.)  She reads books to herself every night in bed while falling asleep and then tells me about them the next morning.  It’s crazy how she’s suddenly so much older.  She’s wanting to spend more and more time off by herself reading and writing, and playing games on the iPad.

Rosie broke her glasses today.  We ran into each other in the hallway.  I was carrying a huge indoor slide we have, that one shaped like a school bus.  Rosie was running down the hall.  She fell under me and snapped the ear piece off of her glasses so hard it scratched her face and made it bleed.

She was utterly devastated that she’d broken her glasses.  She sobbed and sobbed.

We went to the eye place to see about a replacement.  They were under warranty for a full year!  But they had to order the frames and it will take at least seven business days before they come in, so in the mean time the lady frankensteined another mismatched ear piece onto Rosie’s pair so that she could still wear them.

Ada tried on every pair of baby glasses they had while we were waiting.  Most of them looked ridiculous, except for this one pair.  If they weren’t so expensive I would have bought them just because Ada and I both loved them so much.  (Red stuff on her nose is from a fall down the one step out the back door…)

Bad eyesight runs in Tyler’s family.  Tyler got glasses as a preschooler.  I didn’t take Rosie to the eye doctor as a baby and I regret that in hindsight.  I made Ada an appointment for April 11th.  If by some chance she needs glasses we are so getting this pair!  I’m a little nervous about how the appointment will go.  What if she won’t let the eye doctor near her?

We’ve been spending all day, every day outside.  This weather!

Rosie is tending to her garden of strawberries.  She has two 4×4 beds of them.  They send out runners and make new plants every year.  One bed is less full than the other and I’m thinking about condensing them all to one bed.  I think they can be quite close together.  Or maybe I’ll just plant the green beans around the strawberries in the less full bed?  Google told me I could do that.

Here’s the fuller bed.  I just weeded it and pulled out all of the fall leaves that had piled up in there.  The strawberries were happy to see daylight again!  I’m going to mulch them as soon as I dig up the cash to buy mulch.

This green house I found at Tractor Supply is awesome.  It works!  It’s warm and wet inside, perfect for my sprouting seeds.

(Warm and wet inside. I can hear Tyler making an inappropriate joke in my head.)

We did something great today.  We found out that we could consolidate our $7,500 of credit card debt by rolling in into our small second mortgage and refinancing the whole shebang into a principle and interest 15 year low fixed rate loan.  We did it through the credit union so there were no closing costs or any fees.  Now we have no credit card debt!!!  NEVER AGAIN!  The main reason it accumulated in the first place was when Tyler lost his job while I was pregnant with Ada.  We paid bills with our savings and bought food and gas with the credit card.  Desperate times.  Hope that never happens again.

I feel such relief to have it gone.  We still have to pay off the second mortgage, but it’s so organized now.  Just one payment every month that’s even lower than all of the minimum payments we were making before on several cards, and lower than the interest only payment we were making before on the scary adjustable rate second mortgage we had.  This is a total win-win situation beyond what I could have imagined.

Now we only have our main mortgage, our small second mortgage, our low car payment for the van, and our basic household bills.  This is very good.

Plus paying off those credit cards will really raise our credit scores, which in turn will enable us to get a better mortgage rate and amount for a farm/house when we are finally able to move.  It’s looking like that won’t be until after Tyler is hired on and we’ve saved some money.  I’m trying not to think about it. Maybe it will go by fast.  Hopefully I will be complaining about cramming a third kid into this tiny house…

I think it’s supposed to be rainy and in the 60′s this weekend.  Maybe our random brief summer has ended and we’ll get back to regular spring.

I’m a bit sad about that.

Rosie looks a lot different without her glasses on.  I love this picture of us together though.  We have almost the same color eyes.  At least I was able to sneak in one little part of my DNA.  Tyler’s DNA took over the rest of Rosie’s appearance.

Disappointing.

Again!

The farm was almost perfect.  We really liked the house.

However…the 10 acres has no road frontage.  How, you might ask, would you get to your house if it doesn’t sit up on the road? 

Oh, well you have to drive up the neighbor’s driveway, then open the gate to their field of donkeys.  Drive through the donkeys, then open another gate where the driveway ends.  Then there’s sort of a car path through the field up to the house.

So the lack of driveway directly to the house is a bad thing.  It would be expensive to put in.  We would get stuck in the mud without one.  It’s very hilly there, there’s no flat spots on the property. 

The biggest negative is that we would essentially be living in someone’s backyard.  Way out in the sticks, not another neighbor for miles, except for the ones in our front yard.

Awkward.

What’s probably happened is that the driveway neighbors have sold a back piece of their property to a relative, then the relative built a house but circumstances have caused them to move away and put their house up for sale.

Still though–why would I want to move and get away from neighbors only to not even have my own driveway?  What if those people move and someone else buys their property and then doesn’t want us to drive through their field all the time?  We wouldn’t be able to get off of our property.

Just…so much potential for things to go wrong here.  Not to mention we have to drive past loud donkeys right out of the front door.  Not that I didn’t think they were hilarious.

It seems like we’ll never be able to find the perfect place.  Each place has something wrong with it.  This one is the worst because we loved the house and the location! 

Back to the drawing board.

I’ve found a couple more places we could look at, but they are in need of some fixing up.  Maybe it’s just cosmetic, maybe not.  I hate wasting time and gas driving out to these places only to find that they are not what we expected.

If I’ve learned one thing it’s that if it seems too good to be true then guess what?  It is, and you’ll soon find out why.

This little guy has been hanging out on my front porch in the garden bed for a week now.  I love how expressive bugs are when you get up close.

Hard to tell from this macro picture, but this is a baby praying mantis just a little larger than my thumbnail.  Rosie and I had so much fun stalking him.

I love the way they cock their heads to stare up at you!  I happened to notice that his eyeballs can rotate completely backwards, without turning his head he can move his eyeballs to look straight behind him.  How cool is that?

See what I mean?  One set of eyes can see out of the back and the front of his head.

(Why aren’t human mothers equipped with this skill?)

Rosie and I also found these little bugs.  I have no idea what they are–they are super tiny, smaller than a pencil eraser.  They have a puff of cotton coming out of their behinds.

What in the world?  Never seen bugs like this before.  They are all over some weeds by my back porch.

I’ve nicknamed them Blast Ended Skrewts.

I am such a nerd.  I love looking at bugs up close.

They are so fascinating!  They look like we would imagine aliens to be, or monsters, except on a very tiny micro scale.

Anyway, moving on from insect photos…ahem…

Tyler is working nine days in a row, starting today.  (Saturday)  Good money, but…blah.

We’re going to go see that farm tomorrow night.

Excited/nervous/excited/trying not to get my hopes up.

Been thinking about what exactly we need to get done in our house if we’re going to put it on the market.  Kind of a long list of small things, a couple of bigger things.

-New closet doors, since the others fall off…wouldn’t be good if those big slabs of wood fell on someone when they were looking at our house!

-New bathroom sink/cabinets because the old one is horrific.

-Touch up/finish bathroom paint job.  I never painted behind the toilet because you can’t really see it, I just never got around to it!  And the paint above the shower needs a second coat.

-Touch up ceiling paint, door frame paint, and door paint.  Easy and will make a huge difference!

-Pressure wash the siding and the concrete around the outside of the house.  (Did the front tonight, tomorrow we’ll do the back.)

-Weed eat and rip out the horrible overgrowth.  When we moved in the yard was unkempt.  It’s scary, the weeds will never go away.  We’ll just cut them back as much as possible and hide them with a nice layer of mulch.  This will take a lot of work. Most dreaded task ever.  It’s like a weed jungle all around our house.  I gave up on it awhile ago.

-Clean out the garage.  It floods every time it rains, there are drainage holes drilled in the walls of the garage.  Great, right?  (It’s an unattached garage.)  We store everything up on bricks.  Redneck garage.  It looks gross in there because when I was pregnant with Ada and feeling miserable a few chickens started living in there.  Really, a redneck garage.  Pressure washer will fix this problem right quick.  It’s fun to spray out muck with a pressure washer, as long as you keep your mouth closed tight and wear your boots!

Once all of that is done, if we are making an offer on the farm we see tomorrow and planning on showing our house then I’ll pare down everything we own to the bare minimum and drop the rest in storage.  I already have a ridiculous organization system set up with rubbermaid tubs as a result of living in an inefficiently laid out 1000 st ft, so this will be an easy task for me…and secretly enjoyable.  But I’m not packing stuff up unless we think we are actually moving right now…so this has to wait until very last!

Then I will have to implement my strict cleaning schedule and maintain it while we show our house.  Ack.  I should start going to bed earlier so I am more energized.  How does 1 in the morning come so fast?  I have horrible insomnia.  I suffer from racing thoughts about all kinds of random things.  I purposely distract myself from going to bed because I hate laying there trying to get my brain to shut up!  But at the same time late night racing thoughts are where I come up with my best ideas…so…trade off, I guess.

Please tell me you also see it–doesn’t it look like this Cabbage Butterfly has on huge glasses like Professor Trelawney?

Or maybe I just have too much Harry Potter on the brain.

I’ve found one more house that we *really* like.  It’s 15 miles from Tyler’s work, but that’s still only about $80 a month in gas compared to the $300 per month we spend now.

This house is on 10 acres of beautiful rolling pasture.  Right now it’s a cattle farm, judging by the pictures online.  (The property taxes would be about $1,000 a year. Not too horrible.)

Tyler and I both really like this one.  It’s only three years old, so hopefully it’s not as scary as the last house.  But by now I definitely know how pictures of real estate can lie.  Oh boy do I know.

We are waiting for our real estate agent to get back to us with a time to see this place. 

It’s right at the top of our price range, it would be a stretch.  They would have to sell it to us for at least $9,000 less than the asking price in order for us to get the mortgage.  You never know though.  I think in today’s market there is a chance they will accept a lower offer.  Especially because this house is waaaaay out in the sticks.  (I am so excited to live out in the country.)

I hope they get cell phone service out there!  The last house didn’t, at least not with AT&T.

The house looks in good condition, in beautiful condition actually.  It just has nothing on the outside–it’s only painted with primer.  We would need to paint it or put siding on it.  No big deal, at least I don’t think it would be…?

It’s 1490 square feet with 1.5 bathrooms.  It also has a full unfinished walk out basement that’s 895 sq ft and has a spot to install a wood stove down there.  The house has two heat pumps and geothermal heating, so it has central heat and air.  For some reason a lot of farm houses here don’t.

Look at it!  I hot linked these from the real estate website.  Shh. 

(The blue color is the primer, ignore that.  We would make it white probably.)

(Master bedroom with balcony over looking the farm!)

Isn’t it nice?

The only huge downside is that it doesn’t seem to have a barn, unless it’s not listed on the info sheet and not pictured.  I see one off in the distance there but maybe it’s on an adjoining property line because they don’t note it as belonging with the house.

Dare I hope that this one will work out?  Maaaaybe?  I hope we get to go see it soon. 

In the mean time I’m working on fixing small things around our house to put it on the market…I’ve got a lot to do!

Oh my.

This was NOT the right house.

I think a hoarder lives there.  It was *nothing* like the pictures. 

The ceilings of the upstairs bedrooms were so low, combined with the sloped walls…it was claustrophobic.  Not only that, there were no closets!

The clutter was everywhere.  We could barely see the walls.  There were huge deer heads and stuffed turkeys all over the place downstairs.

The cellar/basement had a damp floor with clutter mildewing in it.

The big barn outside had the wall panels collapsing inside of it, and the barn itself was filled with clutter. 

There were a couple of abandoned buildings packed with clutter and random items on the property that had unsafe floors, we’d have to tear them down because the girls would wander in and get hurt.  They had rotting floors with holes that were open to a pit underneath.  (Snakes!)

The house was really old, but nothing had been well maintained.  It was just kind of crappy and on the way to being run down.

The wood stove was extremely smokey, and the carpet around it was burned.

And on top of all that, there was no cell phone service at all.  No bars.  No 3G.

Want to know my favorite part?  This is how you can tell the seller had no motivation to fix up anything before showing the house.

This was on the grill right by the back door.

That’s right–they couldn’t even be bothered to throw away those big ol’ turkey legs and the turkey beard.

WHO LEAVES OLD ANIMAL PARTS SITTING RIGHT OUTSIDE THE DOOR TO A HOUSE YOU’RE SHOWING??

The first thing you see when you get out of the car and go up to the door?  Some feet with flies on them, steaming in the 80 degree humid weather.

Obviously the property has an abundance of wild turkeys.  Yum.  But please–throw away their feet man!

So, yeah.  Not the right place.

We’ve got a couple other places we want to look at.  We’ll see.

I am disappointed, but I kind of love how nothing is for certain.  It’s like waiting for a surprise.  We’ll find the right place eventually, I hope.

On the upside, our little house seems so much cleaner and nicer after being in this smokey dilapidated old place.  (And my chickens are so much nicer with their legs attached to their bodies!)

Tomorrow morning we’re going to look at a perfect little farm house. 

It’s an 1800 sq. ft house, sitting on 7 beautiful rolling acres with a big 30×50 foot barn that has electric. 

The property is only 8 miles from Tyler’s work.  Right now we spend at least $300 a month in gas and his commute is an hour.  Can you imagine living 8 miles away!?

This farm, this house…they are exactly what I’ve been dreaming of since I was little.

Tyler loves the location and the looks of the property from the pictures.  He’s so picky–it’s amazing that we’ve found something we both like.  The perfect mix of Tyler’s need for something newer with my desire for something quirky on a nice patch of land.

We’ve already worked out the financing with our mortgage broker. 

The only downside is we have to sell our current house before we can buy another home.  We couldn’t afford two mortgages at once anyway, but that doesn’t give us much leeway. 

Basically we have to pray our house sells quickly.  I’m so afraid it won’t and it will all fall through.

Anyone want to buy a house?  It’s 1,000 sq ft with new everything…new plumbing, new tile floors, new paint, new windows, new roof.  Raised garden beds, and negotiable chicken coops…we’ve put a lot of work into this house and now it’s ready to move into.  It even has new light fixtures!

Oh please please let someone buy our house.

We have to run around the next few days putting all of the finishing touches on our house and then it will be going on the market, assuming we like The Little Farm tomorrow as much as it seems we will based on the info and pictures.

The prospect of selling our house makes me nervous.  My stomach is bubbly.  Maybe part of that is excitement, and possibly some nostalgia.  This was our first house together.  Ada was born in here!

The Little Farm seems too good to be true.  I hope that’s not the case.

Oh but can you imagine me living on 7 acres?  The majority of it is dense woods, the other part is cleared field.  All of that space just for me! I could stand on my front porch naked.  Not that I would foresee any reason to do so, but…I mean…hello privacy!

I’m going to need a tractor.

And a cow!

And a pony named Peppermint!

Wait, I might be getting ahead of myself.

I know this might not work out.  Especially if we can’t sell our current house in time, or if they won’t accept an offer contingent upon the sale of our house.  The real estate agent says that’s a weak offer. 

Poo.

Basically I have no control over this.  Why is this such a huge reoccurring theme in my life?  I just have to be patient, once again.

I will wait to find out.  All of the pieces will have to fall perfectly into place.

And you know, despite the frustrations that come with waiting helplessly, there’s an upside.  You know that whatever happens is completely meant to be.  It’s not me taking control and screwing it up.  It’s only going to work out if it works out, and that’s it.

There have been other times in my life where we’ve been in a similar situation–remember when we were going to move, right when I got pregnant with Ada?  Then the real estate agent selling the house was completely rude to me and we decided to walk away from it.  We were so disappointed.  Shortly after that Tyler unexpectedly lost his job, and we were completely lost. 

But then Tyler got the great job he has now, and we are way better off.  We would have been screwed if we’d moved because we would be stuck on a property twice as far from Tyler’s job as we are now.  We couldn’t see it at the time through the disappointment, but it all worked out perfectly.

I’m sure the same thing will happen now, right?  It will all work out perfectly in the end.

It’s just the waiting that’s the hard part.

Since we saved up enough money to buy the Expedit shelves from Ikea, we decided to just keep on going and clean out the entire house.

Well.

That is a lot of work!  Still on-going…I’m hoping we can have it all finished by Saturday, when we’re having Ada’s birthday party.

OMG did I just say that?  Ada’s first birthday party!

Her actual birthday is this Thursday, the 21st of April.  We’re having family over for doggy cake on Saturday.  Can’t believe my squishy baby is going to be one year old.  But, that’s another entry for another day.

Back to the house organizing.

I’ve titled it Operation Anti-Hoarder.

We got the Expedit shelves all set up yesterday.  They were easy to put together, but since our entire house was destroyed when we moved the rooms around and had to make space for 12 feet of shelving it was a little challenging.

We still have to finish painting the room over the window and around to the other wall.

You’ll notice the effing couch is back in the middle of the room, no longer in the doorway.

If you’re nosy like I am (come on, you know you are!) then you’ll want to peek closer at the shelves.  The books are organized by topic.

The baskets have toys in them, one has coloring books, and the basket up on the higher shelf has kid craft things in it.

(I LOVE Wendell Berry.)

These books are the ones for Charlotte Mason homeschooling, mainly from the Ambleside Online curriculum.  They are all excellent books and you can find them very cheap used.

I absolutely love these shelves!  Having my house organized is better than a new car, honestly.  The rest of the house is currently in shambles, but already these shelves have made a huge difference. The girls can reach in the baskets and on the shelves and grab a few toys.  (I plan to rotate what’s featured on the shelves.)  They can easily read books then we can put things away without having to redistribute stuff back all over the house.  I even have a cube of the shelf dedicated to library books they won’t be constantly lost!

The shelves have three smaller bookshelves worth of books, a shelf full of toys, my aquarium supplies, the wireless internet router things, homeschooling supplies, homeschooling books, my sewing machine and a bin of fabric for recent projects, and still some empty cubes left!  The shelves are so deep that we could double layer the books if we need to at some point.  Right now they just have one layer of books because I’m hesitant to clutter it up with too many.

Tyler anchored the shelves to the wall, so they are super sturdy.  The wood the shelves are made of is very heavy, the shelves weigh more than 200 pounds each without anything on them.

The desk is great too!  It was only $50.  It’s extremely sturdy and huge enough that I can store a box of homeschooling/craft supplies under it with plenty of room to spare. The chair is also from Ikea.

Tomorrow I plan for Tyler to build two shelves in our back room closet so I can put my bins of craft supplies on them.  (Yarn and fabric.)  We also have a couple of other things to store on there.  Anything that doesn’t fit neatly on shelves is leaving our house and not coming back.

Wednesday I am going to clean out Rosie’s room and make more space in there.  We have to fit a bed in there for her.  Right now she sleeps in a toddler bed crammed in our tiny bedroom, but she’s getting longer than the toddler bed.

At some point in the next few weeks we are going to get a real dresser.  I AM SO EXCITED.  Our 1980′s cheap kid dressers are too small.  All of our clothes for the entire family are in one shallow closet and in these little kid dressers with multi-colored plastic knobs.  I freaking hate these dressers.  I know, I shouldn’t complain about free things but…ugh!  They are quite terrible and impractical.  I am sick of folding laundry only to wad it up and shove it in a tiny drawer, then have the bottom of the drawer fall right out.

Once we get a new dresser then hopefully I can fix our room, which is like a pit of disorganization.  There is just enough room to squeeze a dresser on either side of our King sized bed, then you have to sit on the bed to open the drawers.  There isn’t much you can do with a space like that, but at least I can organize our things into a more practical dresser so there aren’t piles of clean clothes everywhere.  A girl can dream, can’t she?

When we moved in here we didn’t have any furniture.  The only things we have now, aside from our wonderful new shelves, are old cast offs that other people gave us when they got new stuff.  It’s not practical to organize your house with mismatched old furniture.  On top of that our house doesn’t have a pantry, or large closets, or a basement.  Basically we were screwed as far as organization goes.  But I cannot stand it any longer.  If we’re going to keep living here we are going to spend money (or charge it on credit cards) so that we can have actual furniture that is functional in this small house.  I’m not opposed to used things, but Kentucky is not a mecca of reliable used goods believe me.  In the trailer state you cannot find nice used furniture unless you just happen to get lucky one day.

One thing I’ve learned in the past four years of living in my own home is that you can’t expect it to automatically be clean and organized.  It takes deliberate planning and action, and appropriate furniture for your specific home size and layout.  I’m sick and tired of trying to make other people’s old furniture work in my unique space!

While I’m at it, I’m also making Tyler add one shelf to our laundry closet in the tiny open gap of space so we can use it as a pantry shelf.  Can’t wait for that either!  Maybe he can do that tomorrow when we get the wood for the closet shelves.

I guess this is sort of like spring cleaning…