Day twenty four

Less than a week left in my challenge but life is really picking up and keeping up is getting difficult.

I actually had a picture of our one closet, but apparently erased it, and I plugged in my battery to charge and it is taking eight hundred years. I'm sick of cellphone pictures so you'll just have to take my word for it that my closet and my bathroom - my best hopes for mass storage - are in need of major organization. You'll remember my office the room in which everything accumulates so I can get some sleep at night (by closing the door and forgetting it exists).

Instead of focusing on my place I thought I would do what I do so often and look at some pictures of places that inspire me in practical ways.

I'm not hoping for too much, just functionality and enough clean lines to keep me calm in the midst of a living space I share with a large, collect-o-holic, manual-laborer. (That reminds me, I have to clean the dirt stains from the carpet in front of the door before they become permanent.)

I mentioned this apartment before, I'm not sure where, but you can find it here.

Clean, calm colors (though we cannot do white!), functional lighting, and a healthy amount of storage. This would be perfect for our main room. But my search for a good trunk continues and we're in serious need of drawers!

This dresser actually looks a lot like one of ours. We have two since we picked up the small and simple number Tom's grandpa made for them so long ago. Tom is in the process of stripping it of its many coats of paint and primer. On top: dark, glossy blue, perfect for a little 80's Tom, terrible for our place. Tom bought me some vintage knobs for Christmas, almost enough. In the end it will have miss-matching knobs and no paint. It will be very artistic, trust me! It will be perfect for our eclectic, hard-wearing entry which I love, though sometimes I would give anything to have it look more like this:

Simple, elegant, beautiful. We'll see if that ever happens...

Much less elegant but equally desirable is the idea I have for my bathroom and the closet in the office, inspired by this:

Go here and look at the whole thing, including the video - it's very inspiring for the minimalist, the organization-junky, and the utilitarian. There is nothing fancy about what I want to do with my bathroom, with a little help from the made in USA section of The Container Store website I've come up with a rough plan that involves waterproof, stacking boxes that will line the extra wall space of our bathroom. There would labels like Dinah's shoes, temporary storage, seasonal clothes, and holidays. "Temporary storage" is what I look forward to most. So much of what is lying around the office are frames without pictures yet, fabric I'm going to do something with, such-and-such to take to some place, or thing I'm sick of looking at at the moment. My shoes are always falling off the short shelves (designed for books originally) that now reside in on the bathroom wall. Oh! There are so many ways this plan would fix my problems.

I could do with these kitchen shelves while we're at it, though I don't really have the wall space in there.

So, the only problems now - now that I have the plan - are funds and Tom's time, or lack there of. But all this wishing and hoping and planning and dreaming will just make the consummation of my plan that much more wonderful. And until then... I'll keep plugging away, I guess. There is always something more to want, so it's good to keep my dreams small and stretch them out as long as possible.

Though my patience on this one definitely has an expiration date.