house

Admitting you’re in over your head is hard. It hurts. I don’t know anyone who enjoys it, and I don’t know any fellow perfectionists who can do it without feeling a great deal of shame, hesitation, or remorse.

This afternoon, I admitted that I was in over my head, and I pulled out a recommendation I’ve been sitting on for months — I called a professional housecleaning service, and have an appointment with the owner after I get back from my conference. We’re going to go over what parts of the house I could realistically ask a third-party service to clean, and if the cost is reasonable … bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and do it.

Yesterday, in sewing terms, was nothing short of an epic journey. I had to check my last.fm account to see a tally of exactly what the final answer was (the question, of course, being, “What do I have to do to finish this quilt top this weekend?”) —

• 4 episodes of the Splendid Table (200 min total)
• 1 episode of WireTap (26 min)
• 1 episode of On Being (50 min)
• 4 episodes of Trust Inc (112 min total)
• 1 episode of Marketplace (27 min each)
• 1 episode of The World’s ‘tech’ podcast (16 min)

431 minutes, or just over 7 hours. I had joked about treating Saturday like a workday, except a workday devoted to fabric instead of software troubleshooting, and I think it’s safe to say I actually followed through on my jest.

Scott, bless him, offered to come up for a few days around New Year's, and we've been busy creatures during that time. The New Job™ means I work out of the house, but the bad part? I didn't really have a good workspace for me, my phone, and my laptop.

We needed to fix that, but doing so meant that we needed to tear down not one but TWO corner desks, combine two computers into a single work station, put in shelving, and blah and meow and etc.

Good news: we're mostly done.

I had huge help this weekend from Crystal and Jacob. Because of Jeff's accident, I wasn't able to take my earned holidays for Christmas and New Year's, and since it was nearing the end of March, it was verging on use-or-lose status for them. I'd been babbling incessantly about doing a Great Shelving Project to anyone who would listen (and several people who politely wished I'd just shut up) and we finally got cracking on it. Of course, about halfway through, Jacob had an insight which totally changed the course of the project — more on that insight after the photos.

Previously, the only shelving in the master bedroom had been the tiny corner shelves, which you see empty in this photo. The white ones are all new. Five new sturdy shelves for books I don't want to keep in the main areas, plus the random items that need keeping in a bedroom:

It’s unfortunate that ants won’t die if you just swear at them. After yesterday’s scrubfest, I have airtight scientific proof of this fact. While ants will die if you spray them with orange-scented cleanser (is it the fact that it’s a cleanser or that it’s orangey that does the killing, I wonder?) and swear at them, swearing alone does not seem to do the trick.Ants are difficult to squish.

We set out on a Saturday afternoon to conquer the wilds of the furniture stores, a few days after Misty and I had performed our scouting mission for sectionals. I consider furniture shopping an occasional, horrific necessity, similar in scope and pain threshold to car shopping.

Do not mistake me: like the purchase of my car two years ago, I will celebrate the purchase of this sectional once it is completed. We are both looking forward to the furniture shuffling that will take place once the purchase is made, but the process….Well, the process of getting there, I could really and truly do without. Okay, perhaps not the entire process, but I think I’d be happier if I were at least allowed to superficially wound the furniture salesmen that annoy me.