A Blue Monday snapshot of the shelf in my bathroom. I probably should have dusted before taking the shot

Enjoy more of Blue Monday - Visit Smiling Sally

A month’s worth of rain forecast to fall over the next two days -
guess we’ll be singing in the rain!

I’m getting ready to join in the 5 Weeks To A Clean And Organized Home! challenge over at the Christian Homekeeper’s Network. (wish me luck….)

Toward that end, I bought a small dresser at Kmart to house my yarn stash. I was tired of tripping over totes full of yarn in the bedroom.

It was on sale for a very good price but unfortunately, for that good price, what you purchased was not so much a dresser – more a box of boards and some screws. And those metal slidey things that drawers need to open and close. Grampy spent three hours turning the boards and screws and slidey things into a dresser.
He didn’t mind (much)

I packed the new dresser full of yarn, stored some more yarn in under the bed totes (no more tripping) then remembered a cool idea my friend Kimela mentioned that I’ve been meaning to try. (Kimela is very clever with yarn – you can take a look at a couple of her projects here and here)

Kimela told me she was working on afghan made up of yarn scraps that she rolled randomly into “crazy balls” of all different colors.
Neat!
I started pulling the yarn back out of the dresser and rolling it into crazy balls to make a rug.
A new rug for spring is a great way to make my home sing.
Here it is so far…

And since I had the camera in my hand anyway, I took a picture of my pretty Claudia.
She makes our home sing every day.

Enjoy more of Making Your Home Sing Monday - Visit Nan at Mom’s The Word.

Don’t forget the Spring Cleaning project at CHK beginning April 1st.

Still working on that same theme – what works for me in our new, lovely, smaller space?
Last week, it was those really neat storage “hackusses”. We’re still loving those.

This week we started taking a look at what we want for the bedroom. One thing we want a lot less of is furniture. There is just not enough space for a wardrobe, two bookcases, my desk, the bed, the desk chair… we need all of these pieces – just not in the bedroom.

In the kitchen is a microwave cart not doing much of anything other than holding up the microwave and providing a small drawer beneath it. The cart is located in a space wide enough to fit one of the bookcases nicely. But… it’s under the kitchen window. I don’t want to put a bookcase in front of a window. It will look awful from the outside (and probably violate some senior housing authority rule about fire safety – they’re big on fire safety here) and it will block the light coming into the kitchen.

But hey…
if we take the back off the bookcase we can still use the shelves-
the light can still come through -
and the bookcase will fall down.
I guess I’m not that well versed in the construction of bookcases. (you need the back to support the frame. )

How about if we cut off half of the back of the bookcase? The half that covers the window? We could leave the bottom half of the back on for support. (Grampy sort of frowned and muttered a half-hearted “we can try that if you want to…)

Yes!
Here is the bookcase in the its new location, providing a whole bunch of space – both on its shelves and in the place it vacated in the bedroom – and letting the light shine in.

I suppose we may still be violating some sort of fire exit rule but we’ll worry about that when someone mentions it. Until then – works great for me!

Enjoy more of Works For Me Wednesday – Visit Kristen at We Are That Family

Are you planning to “downsize” your living space? Do you find yourself living in a tiny apartment and wondering how to organize and decorate your nest? Try these links for some creative ideas…

1. 19 Ideas to Steal for Your Apartment – from Better Homes and Gardens

2. HGTV – Small Space, Big Style – dozens of ideas

3. Small Space Decorating Ideas from Country Living magazine

4. Furniture for Small Spaces – pretty cool idea on this page, lots of links to articles worth reading on organizing small spaces

5. Small Space Solutions from This Old House

6. Rental Decorating Digest has Small Spaces Decorating

7. And Apartment Decorating Ideas

8. 20 Tips For Living In Small Spaces – interesting ideas from a blogger living in an apartment in Japan

9. Think your space is small? Check out this gallery of homes all under 400 sq. feet (one is only 84 sq. !)
Great stuff here!

10. Living In A Nutshell – another super site

11. Check out the Home Decorating section of I Village for ideas you can apply in your small home. Visit the decorating message boards too.

12. Apartment Living has decorating ideas and other apartment living information

13. Did you maybe want to live in a Yurt?

Do you have some creative ideas or maybe some pictures of how you’ve arranged your own Small Space? Leave me a comment and I’ll add your link.

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