The Crown Jewel

Did you see my Facebook posts about my Fayetteville laundry room?  If not, here they are:



Laundry Room Before



Laundry Room After



The other side of the laundry room!

I posted the "before" pictures to publicly shame myself as a form of motivation:  If I got it cleaned up, I got to post the beautiful "after" pictures.  If not, the ugly "before" pictures would live on! 

I should add that it all looks SO much better in the photos than it did in reality.  I look at the photos and I think, "That's no big deal!  I could clean that up in a snap!".  But that's not how the reality was!  I've spent about 8 hours in there so far and there's still more to do!

So, if you're not tired of hearing about my laundry challenges, I have a bit more to say about it!

Buried next to the washing machine is the crown jewel of my laundry room.  I found this little enamel-topped farm kitchen table in a flea market for $59.  Sounds like a lot now but, at the time, I couldn't pay it fast enough!  I was so afraid that someone else would buy it before I could get the cash out of my wallet!  It has a very unusual, original, apple green edge (as opposed to the usual red) and one cute little drawer. 


Buried treasure!

It may not be special to anyone else, but I ADORE it.  It makes me happy to see it.  The problem, as you can see, is that it's usually buried in laundry.  The best motivation I know of to clean out my laundry room(maybe even just slightly above publicly shaming myself with Facebook "before" in the hope of getting to post beautiful "after" photos) is that I might get to gaze upon my beloved table regularly.




I'm wishing now that I'd painted the underside of that shelf!  The lamp base was in my bedroom when I was a child. The old iron and the measuring bowl full of clothes pins belonged to various grandmothers.

I've even cleaned out the laundry bags under the table since I took this picture!  That means I can claim progress, right?

I'm currently scheming to add a shelf underneath.  If I do it right, I'll be able to fit four laundry baskets under there which will make it both beautiful AND super-functional!

Now I have the challenge of trying to figure out what is both practical and important enough to put in that little drawer!

 Come back Monday for a piece on how I keep grandmothers in my laundry room!  Well, I don't actually hold them captive in my laundry room, but I DO keep some of their memories alive there!

Something To Crow About!

I didn't really have anything to crow about this morning but I REALLY wanted to put up a blog post because it's important to me to post every weekday if at all possible.  So, I scrolled through my photos on my phone and found THIS wonderful thing!

I snapped this photo for my friend Susan while were were looking at houses recently.  She commented on it and I whipped out my camera and took a picture of it for her so we cold recreate it later!  I love the primitive simplicity and the bird motif!

This would be very easy to make out of totally free materials -- spray paint a frame black, cut up a couple of dumpster shirts, cut the bird shape out of some old dumpster pants perhaps, spend maybe an hour embroidering the letters, and put it all together! 

Then, try to think of some other sayings and images to assemble in the same way because these would be really great in a series!  Any ideas?  Anyone have a fun old grandma saying that needs to be immortalized?  I can hear my grandmother saying "The watched pot never boils"!  What did YOUR grandma say?

(I guess I did find something to crow about after all!)