project organize: first baby steps

At first glance, my apartment looks pretty good. I mean, I'll never be satisfied with it, but it's generally pretty tidy and calming and seemingly 'put together'. I have a dirty secret though. Look in my drawers and cabinets and you will find this:

and this:

Think that second shelf in the bathroom cabinet actually looks pretty ok? Well, think again. Feast your eyes on the inside of one of those baskets:

Embarrassing. This doesn't even include the super scary 'storage' spaces like closets and chests of drawers. 

So one too many things falling out of cabinets, or instances in which I bought things only to realize that I already had them but had forgotten due to ALL THE CRAP IN THE WAY, convinced me to tackle this shit. 

First up, my miscellaneous/baking drawer in the kitchen. 

Here's the before:

and here is what $7.50 at Dollarama got me!

Yay! 

The bathroom cabinet is next on the list, but this one is tricky. It's super deep (18 inches to be exact) so I need solutions that will allow me to access the stuff at the back easily while keeping each bin from becoming a "catch-all" (aka dump bucket), and making sure that the taller items don't just fall over when I pull the bin out. Been doing a lot of research, but no perfect option so far. The only solution? MORE RESEARCH.

the never ending project

I constantly have a million projects on the go around my apartment. Before I'm done one I have an amazing idea for another, and absolutely can't wait to start. I literally feel like I have to buy the supplies, or do hours and hours of research about what I'll need, RIGHT NOW, even though five minutes ago I wasn't thinking about it at all.

It's why each project takes me so long to complete, or at least most of them do. It's like I've got twenty books beside the bed instead of one, and I'm reading a couple of chapters of one, a few pages of another, and seeing how long it will take me to get through them all. Ridiculous I know, but I can't help it. 

Yesterday I decided I should write down what I have in the works right now, mostly because I realized that I was losing track. Some are almost done, some are barely started, but all of them will happen eventually. 

A few of these I'm going to document here on the blog, either in step by steps or before and afters. Hopefully some of them will inspire you!

First on the list: #8 aka Project Organize, in which I try to overcome the fact that I was born with a knack for making things pretty, but not for making them neat or orderly. This is evidenced by the number of things that crash out of cupboards on a daily basis around here, breaking pretty pink and gold Ikat bowls, falling on my head, or just scaring the shit out of G.

Guess which one bothers me most. 

Yes, I realize I'm a bad person. But it was PINK and GOLD!

lady love - jessica chastain

I've officially decided that Jessica Chastain can do no wrong.

I really didn't like Tree of Life. That movie was beyond me. I'm obviously not artsy or philosophical or introspective enough or something. Ok that last part isn't true. But Tree of Life just felt like it was oozing pretension from its every pore.

The only thing I did like (other than Brad Pitt, but what else is new), was the statuesque redhead I didn't recognize. Her scenes were completely captivating. She was hauntingly beautiful. I NOTICED her.

Now The Debt, I loved. I thought it was one of the best movies of the year, at least in terms of acting. And JC was the best of the lot. I literally thought she blew away the veterans in that movie, which is saying quite a bit. There were some chops in that movie.

She just felt so real.

But it was the discovery that she played Celia in The Help that just clinched it for me. I didn't even realize that was her!

I would never, in a million years, have guessed that that was the same actress. She is so ridiculously versatile, I honestly feel like she just becomes her characters. I haven't seen anything like it in an actress in I don't know how long.

Actors sure, but not actresses.

I'm officially smitten.

I mean, look at her. Damn girl.

the simple things

I've been waiting to start writing thinking that I need some big diy project to get this thing off the ground, but all this has meant is that I haven't written anything. My projects have gotten delayed recently, either because of logistics (a drill bit that didn't work), or just by life. Mostly by life. As anyone who's actually reading this right now knows, things haven't exactly been easy for me lately. In fact, they've been downright terrible, and I'm not really able to think big picture at the moment. It's enough to just get to the end of the day.

So I've decided that the simple things will have to do right now. Not the step by step guides, or the big reveals, but just the little bits of inspiration that I'm actually able to wrap my mind around right now. That, in a really good moment, are actually able to distract me for a minute. I think that's just the way I'm going to have to start this. I'm easing my way in rather than bursting in with a bang. It's what I can handle, and I've decided I'm just fine with that.

I'm also someone who has an insatiable need to talk, and to talk things out, to the point where I drive people a bit nuts. Me included. So maybe rambling about bits and bobbles, to thin air or not, is just what I need for a little relief. Let's test that theory.

how does one start a blog? no really.

So tonight I discovered something. Despite going back to the very beginning of your favourite design blogs' archives, you will never find the first post. Even if you know the author only started writing a couple of years ago. All traces of their fumbling, awkward beginnings have been erased. All those posts where they were clearly only talking to friends (the ones that loved them enough to follow no matter what they were talking about), but still wrote like they were talking to strangers in the hopes of attracting some? Gone. 

And to be honest, that kinda sucks. It would really help me out right now to know how other people, the ones whose blogs inspired me to start my own, got past this initial hump. How they balanced trying to attract readers by posting great diy's and current projects with not posting all of the good stuff before anyone was actually listening. As a new friend put it last night, "you don`t want to blow your load too early". She's right, obviously. But it means that I'm concentrating so hard on not being a one minute girl that doing anything else clever is going to be a struggle. It's the writing equivalent of staring at the wall and thinking about baseball. Hard. 

Sigh. I now understand the pain. 

On the other hand, maybe someday I'll want to erase this post too. Maybe I'll get to the point where I'm professional enough that I won't want a record of my first post, in which I essentially compared myself to an 16 year old kid who's never touched breasts before. 

Doubtful.