Before and After

I was lucky enough to have a day off from work today. Originally, my mom was going to come up to help me pick out fabric for valances for my family room and dining room, but she fell while on vacation and needed to spend the day with her feet up (she says her ankle is swollen to 3 times its natural size).

So, left in the house all alone (D is in Phoenix for work), I contemplated what I should do. Should I watch a movie like I did yesterday? Should I cook up something good to eat? Should I venture out to the fabric store on my own? Or, should I tackle something I've been putting off doing? I chose the latter.

Our house has 3 bedrooms. The blue room (where we sleep now), the yellow room (where D has his closet), and the pink room (which will be our mast bedroom someday). The grand plan for the pink room is that we're going to build a wall turning 1/3 of the room into a walk-in closet. Then we're going to lay down hardwood flooring. After that we'll put up crown molding and a chair rail and paint the room to coordinate with our bedding (which my mom gave me for our shower last year and we have yet to sleep on).

These are great plans. Unfortunately, the only part that has been done is that D has ripped up the pink carpet in the part of the room that will one day be the closet. Why haven't we gotten any further, you ask? This is why:

So today I tackled this room. I wasn't able to move everything out, or to find a permanent home for everything, but I did pare down enough so D can pull up the rest of the carpet. And, I emptied 3 plastic bins (which I'll move to the basement and fill with other things). Here's what the room looks like now:

I know it doesn't really look that much better (especially the 2nd picture), but really, it is. The pile of stuff by the door in the 2nd picture is stuff to donate and recycle, including:

That's 2 old cell phones, plus chargers, earbuds, and earbud covers. I need to add the car chargers to this pile--they're in my car. This whole lot will then be donated. There are a lot of places and organizations that will take donated cell phones, but to be honest, I'm just going with the one that's the most convenient. That would be Staples or Verizon. Based solely on the information on these 2 websites, I'll probably drop them off at Verizon.

Something else I recovered in cleaning out this room was my 2nd pair of glasses (my first pair, circa 1987, broke). This pair is Polo Ralph Lauren circa 1989. I wore these until 1996 (though I really didn't wear them that much). Below is the history of my glasses (minus the 1987 pair which were big peach colored plastic frames with glass lenses. Glass lenses were particularly bad for me because I had perfect vision in one eye and my vision in the other eye was really bad. Picture it, 12 year old girl with braces, bad bangs, and crooked glasses).

Top pair is the circa 1989 Polos. These will be donated to charity through the local Lion's Club (there's a donation box at my local library). The other 3 pairs (and the sunglasses clip) I'll keep. I actually wear the ones 2nd from the bottom the most. I got those in December 2000, and I love them. The pair above (with the sunglasses clip) is the only pair of prescription sunglasses I have, so I'll keep those too. The bottom pair is circa 2005 and I wear them occasionally.

I know you're all really curious about what other treasures I found when cleaning out this room. There were many. I mean real treasures, things that are priceless. Like, the contents of 5 purses:
This photo, the contents of 5 purses I don't use, contains:
6 hair elastics
1 barrette
2 Starburst (circa 2006)
8 band-aids
3 packages of tissues
2 boxes of matches
2 place cards from 2 different weddings
a ticket to an exhibit at the MFA
a stack of old business cards
a bracelet someone lost at my friend Darci's wedding
a sewing kit
a 1/2 piece of "Hollywood Tape"
15 cents (1 dime and 1 nickel)
2 boutonniere pins
1 lipstick
1 lip gloss
3 moist towlettes and a bottle of hand sanitizer
1 emery board
a pack of gum
a handful of candy-coated chocolate mints (circa 12/2007)
a cell phone cozy
a coat check ticket

This isn't nearly as bad as I would have thought. I must have cleaned out most of these purses fairly recently. Of course, these aren't the only treasures from the clean out. I also have souvenirs of my honeymoon in Greece. Look at this next picture and you'll want to be a guest at my house:


Yup, that's mostly toiletries and slippers from the resorts where D and I stayed on our honeymoon. Most of it is from the Blue Palace. They had the most amazing smelling shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and lotion--all of it from Korres, a Greek company that just started selling its products in the US. In this picture is also a handful of beach glass and shells I picked up on the beach on Mykonos. I pick up beach glass and shells wherever I travel. People in Cuba thought I was nuts picking up broken glass at the beach!

So that's it in a nutshell. I found some other truly fascinating things in the room too, but I didn't photograph them. Oh, and for any of you who have noticed a trend between the "before" pictures of the pink room and the "before" pictures of the office (posted here), don't fret. These are the only 2 rooms in the house that look this bad. Honestly, I swear!