Finish it Friday ~ Mending Pile

I finally—finally—finished cleaning, dusting, and decluttering the final room of the house (excluding, of course, the basement): my bedroom. And the final frontier of that room was my sewing corner, where, among other cluttery bits and bobs, was a pile of things in need of mending, which I tackled this week.




In just over an hour, I fixed or replaced the handles on three canvas shopping bags, sewed the legs back on a long-legged bird puppet (heron, perhaps?), took the top four inches off a pair of pajama pants that had become threadbare around the waist and put in a new drawstring sleeve (they were rather long in the waist to begin with), sewed up a rip in the seam of a pair of shorts that haven't fit anyone in this house for a couple of years, and put buttons on three pairs of pants, two of which, like the shorts, are destined for the thrift store.



One jacket with a broken zipper I put aside (something about repairing zippers that always flummoxes me). It, too, doesn't fit anyone around here, but seems a shame for it to go to waste. I also have a mitten and a slipper that need darning, but I need to first decide if I'm going to do my usual run yarn back and forth over the hole in a random fashion or do a proper knitwear repair.

I was happy to see the pile wasn't quite as large as last time I blogged about mending (I long ago gave up on patching knees in pants and instead cut the legs off and make them into shorts), and it didn't inspire quite the same level of philosophical and political reflection, but I was glad that now I can use my sewing machine for more exciting and creative projects.

New Boys' Room

It's taken a long time to get E and Z's room spiffed up for them since M moved into his own room last November. First we had to spackle and repaint the ceiling and walls, which took most of February. Then we had to clean out the closet, into which I had shoved everything but the beds and dressers before we painted. All the furniture, toys, books, and random junk had to come out, get sorted into piles for keep, toss, give away, and store. Then I had to paint the walls. Then I had to put everything back, arranged neatly (notice how I drop the "we"—we all know who exactly did most of this work).



Meanwhile, C was busy in the garage building new desks for the nearly high-schoolers, all from scrap wood (inspired by a butcher block counter that my inlaws were replacing). We each finished our respective jobs right before our trip to D.C. in early August, and since then the room has been arranged, enjoyed, and made messy cozy again.



Two small items remain to be done: a switchplate for the closet light swithc (I was going to decoupage one with old maps, but Z, who is really into maps, tells me this would look tacky) and curtains on the small windows (I have a third purple Indian-print panel, which I need to make into two half-panels, but right now my sewing machine is inaccessible due to all the stuff I've "cleaned up" from the rest of the house having accumulated in my bedroom).

I was hoping that after they saw how tiny M's dorm room is, E and Z would have greater appreciation for the expansiveness (and hominess) of this space, but still it does not seem to be big enough for the two of them, and most study sessions turn into Nerf gun battles. So much for that soothing purple color.

Boys' Room Refresh ~ Purple!

After M moved to his own bedroom last November, and after he finally finished clearing all of his junk out of it much, much later, we started prepping what was now E and Z's room for a slight remodel (this room has undergone a number reorganizations as the needs of three boys have evolved and changed: bunk beds, overhaul part I and part II, loft bed). But after 16 years and three boys, the room needed a lot more than reorganization this time around; it needed a total facelift.

Not even a construction zone can take E away from his Minecraft.

The first order of business was to fill about 18 trillion pushpin holes on the walls and ceiling (yes, ceiling) with joint compound, and paint said ceiling with two coats of white to cover a film of dirty finger and footprints (the downside of bunk beds). Then we got started with the walls.

At first Z wanted purple and E wanted hot pink. Hot pink doesn't exactly work with my color scheme, and I figure at least one compensation for having all boy children is that I've never had to live with a pink room in my house. Then E switched to purple and Z decided he wanted red. Or black. So we went with purple. (When I told a friend whose kids were little in the 90s, she said, "You mean like Barney?"  Since he'd gone extinct by the time my kids were preschool age, hadn't even thought of Barney, but now I gotta admit, yeah, it's pretty close to the color of Barney.)

The whole process took several weeks, requiring, as it did, for C and I to both have the time and the enthusiasm at the same time on the weekends, so E and Z have been living with their room dismantled for a while. Sunday afternoon, after the paint dried, I washed the floors and all the woodwork, cleaned the construction (and preconstruction) dust off all the furniture, made up the beds with new sheets and clean bedding, and put the furniture into place. Then at midnight my internal Mom alarm went off—Z had come down with a sudden stomach virus and didn't have time to get down from his loft bed. He had the foresight to keep his bedding clean by leaning over the rail, sea-sick-syle, and I spent the middle of the night rewashing the floor and all of the furniture and the woodwork and the newly painted wall (fortunately, the room was not its usual state of chaos, and E's basket of clean laundry was just outside the splash radius, and all of the dresser drawers were closed). I've reconsidered my brief thought of getting a rug for between the beds.

We still need to get desks and window treatments, clean out the closet, which is stuffed with outgrown toys and books and all of the things that had taken up space in the room before we started on the walls, and decorate (though I'm in no hurry to hang anything on the wall anytime soon).

Market Crates

So I meant to tell you about our latest house project when it first happened, weeks ago. I don't know what happened. But I do know, that I love it nearly a month in. I've been thinking for a while that we needed some kind of storage unit back in the corner of our kitchen, by the refrigerator and a wall of shelves that hold various nonperishable foods. Something to hold fruits and vegetables, which generally get stacked up in baskets on the blue hutch, creating all kinds of clutter.

C asked me to draw up a design and I happened to run into a picture of "European Market Crates" which I had cut out of an old William Sonoma catalog ages ago, which seemed to fit the bill perfectly. We made a few modifications, making them wider, but shallower (from to back) and slightly taller. We also raised them up on a base, under which we can slide empty egg cartons, which we return to the farm store, and the caddy of milk jars we take back and forth to the farm where we get our milk.

Each crate is separate, with tongue-in-groove sides so they lock together and hand-holes on the sides, so you could pick them up if needed. They also have slatted bottoms for ventilation, which will hopefully help keep produce fresh. Unlike the William and Sonoma crates, which cost $40 15 or so years ago, these were totally free (except one or two days of C's labor).

They're going to come in extra-handy during summer harvest season. The only downside so far is that the space between crates is kind of small, so it's hard to get things like bags of potatoes and oranges through. Also, I worry that things could get forgotten about in there and rot, though we haven't had this happen yet. And my hutch is delightfully uncluttered, so that I can use it for other things, like lining up desserts during parties.

Weekend Things ~ The Morning After

Back when I was working for The Man, I hated Mondays. I'd wake up Sunday morning, thinking "Ugh, I have to go to work tomorrow." I was destined to be one of those people that die of a heart attack on Sunday night after a lifetime of back-to-work stress. Now that I work for me, Monday is my favorite day. I look forward to reclaiming the peace of a silent house, a reprieve from the "get off your screen" wars. I'm more convinced than ever that the 40-hour work week is inhumane. I'm willing to concede that some people enjoy their jobs and like to work, but even so Mon-Fri, 9-5 is too much. Bring on the national minimum income, I say. This Monday morning, after everyone left for school and the peaceful lull descended, I looked around my house and noticed the signs of a weekend well-spent, though it was a weekend in which the camera didn't come out very much.


The kitchen table: I swear I spent the whole weekend eating: a belated Lunar New Year celebration Saturday with friends (egg rolls, stir fry, tofu, a vaguely Southeast Asian dessert of tropical fruit and coconut milk) and then on Sunday I went on The Table Tour (a walk—not enough snow for skiing or snow-shoeing—around the Arboretum, from table of food to table of food). After two days of eating to repletion I needed to start the day with a bit of a cleanse.



Also on the table: The boys were recently gifted a collection of foreign money, and they spent some time sorting through all the coins Sunday after dinner.

The boys' room: I spent Saturday morning helping the boys deep-clean their room—vacuuming under beds, dusting behind dressers, washing windows. I helped M finish cleaning his closet. He's been working on it for a couple of months. It's been like an archaeology dig, uncovering the layers of M past (I feel like there's an essay in there somewhere). But he'd come to a standstill with one-and-a-half shelves of mementos, bric-a-brac, and dust waiting to be resolved. I held up each item and he decided whether it was to trash, keep, pass on, or store. 

The other side of the closet, however, is a bit of a disaster (despite E's and my efforts on that front a couple of months ago), but I ran out of energy on cleaning before I could tackle that.

My room: Draped over a chair is the result of a little Sunday afternoon sewing—finally making progress on a quilt for Z (thanks to my reading deprivation, I'm forced to find other ways to spend my time).

A shelf in the kitchen: We have a problem in our house which came into sharp relief with the cleaning out M's closet—of a ton of science kits and craft and art kits and kids that spend too much time on screen, not doing projects. So Sunday afternoon, I dragged E and Z off their screens and put them to work making crystals.

My desk: And then E and I started making paper boomerangs. He ran out of time to finish his, but here's where mine landed after a fling around the room.

The living room floor: In another attempt to keep boys off of screens, we've been trying to play more board games around here. When I was a kid, my sister and I played cards and games all the time, but not so these guys, unless there's an adult around directing the activities. We played Pictionary with our friends Saturday night and Taboo—E's favorite—Sunday evening.



The kitchen counter: M has been very into baking lately. He's reached the stage of baking confidence that I don't need to help out except with the occasional bit of advice and making sure we have all the necessary ingredients on hand. One weekend he made chocolate chip cookies three different times. Last week he made chocolate cake and brownies. And Sunday evening he mixed up a batch of banana- chocolate chip muffins.



The sofa: I usually write my morning pages in bed, but when C leaves early for work, like this morning, I get up to help motivate the twins to get out the door, and then curl up in a blanket on the couch to write my Morning Pages. After I finished my breakfast, I came back to this nice scene of morning productivity.

Weekend Things ~ Insane

You might have heard of this school of organization that involves taking every item you own in one category, placing them all in the middle of the room, and asking each one if it still serves you. I haven't actually read the book that started this trend (in point of fact, I ran out of the bookstore screaming in terror after just reading the introduction), but it has crept into my brain, wriggling away in there, tempting me to put it to work on our books. Finally on Sunday it overpowered me and I started schlepping books from all over the house to the middle of the living room floor. Here's how it looked halfway through:

And here's how it looked when I got all of the books from the living room and the stairwell book cases and the bedroom piles and end tables onto the staging area (I did not include any of the books from the kids' room, any of my writing books, which live on two shelves in my room, any of my cookbooks, or any of the books that C has down in the basement).

At this point I realized I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Not only did I still have to sort through them all, deciding which to keep and which to let go and then convince C to go through the let-go books to see if there were any there he wanted to keep, but I would then have to sort the keep books into categories, dust and reshelve them, and ferry all of the rejects to the library. By this point I was already exhausted (since most of our books live in our stairway, there was a lot of climbing up and down just to get this far) and sick of books and dust.

But I forged ahead, got everything sorted out and tidied away. I took two boxes and four bags of books to the library (in two separate trips, since they only take three at a time) and I have two more bags to take to the thrift store (of things the library won't take, like text books). Somehow, despite getting rid of that many books, I still barely had room to reshelve all of the books we're keeping (though there's no longer a giant pile of books at the top of the stairs, and some of the shelves have a little wiggle room in them, for future book additions). I also have a renewed commitment to get most of my books from the library (I kept thinking to myself, "Imagine how much worse this would be if I didn't check out so many books from the library!").

I didn't take any "after" pictures, because by the time I was done it was even darker than it had been all gloomy day, and I figured they just looked like shelves of books, but I've been finding myself stopping midway up the stairs to admire the nice, orderly, cobweb-free rows of books, so maybe I'll take a few shots this weekend to share next week. 

Now I'm hoping I've put this organization bug to rest and it will leave me be for a while.

Undomestication

When my children were small, I found the repetitive nature of the tasks required to keep them alive and healthy and happy--change a diaper, wipe a nose, fix a snack, clean up a mess, change their clothes, make a meal, clean and clean and clean--to be wearying. In fact, the unsatisfying, endless tedium of doing so many things that only had to be done again made me downright depressed.

But then I found that if I accomplished something that could actually be finished, with a real, tangible end-product that I could enjoy and admire--paint a chair, knit a gnome, bake a loaf of bread, redecorate or reorganize a corner of the house--that I could pull myself out of a funk and lift my mood. At about the same time I had this realization, I started reading blogs by mothers who were also crafters, cooks, gardeners, and home decorators. I was seduced by the siren song of domesticity and I threw myself into the work of creating a beautiful life wholeheartedly.

That's kind of a weird sentence to write, as a child of the seventies, reared on "Free to Be You and Me." But during a phase of life that can feel so very thankless and unsatisfying, there's real succor in holding in your hands the results of your own creative efforts. Homeyness was not entirely a blog-driven desire, out of character for me--my paternal grandmother knit bales of slippers, my maternal grandmother crocheted afghans and sewed quilts and kept an enormous garden, my aunts crocheted and cross-stitched and sewed, my mother knit, sewed all of our dresses, and dabbled in a range of 1970s-inspired back-to-the-land-type crafts from weaving belts on inkle looms to beading jewelry to stained glass to spinning wool to cake decorating to canning and jam-making. They all cooked and baked from scratch, skipping over the Jiffy Mix and Bisquick the rest of their generation depended on. I had always had a crafty side, and after college I taught myself to knit and sew, cook and garden, with some guidance from my mom, and a lot from books (back before online tutorials and videos).

Finding fulfillment in the domestic was part of my genetic makeup and upbringing, so it was in some ways natural to dive into that world more fully after I had children, and it served the purpose of creative outlet and emotional ballast when the redundancy of motherhood and housework and a boring job threatened to unmoor me. Until it didn't.

Maybe it was the schedule of older children that made cooking real meals impossible. Maybe it was years of hearing "I hate that!" when I put dinner on the table. Maybe it was the realization that even tasks that feel like accomplishments are never truly done--knit a hat, kid loses it, knit another; sew an outfit, kid outgrows it, sew another; paint a chair, paint gets chipped, kid outgrows it, put it out by the road; bake a loaf of bread, bread gets eaten, bake another; can a dozen jars of jam, jam gets spread on toast, buy some at the store until next summer when you can start again. Maybe it was my kids getting old enough that I don't have to serve so many of their endless needs anymore. Maybe in the internal struggle for my creative energy, writing is finally winning out over homemaking.

Whatever it is, I don't want to do it anymore. Dinner? How about frozen pizza again, kids? Sewing project? Dang, the machine's all jammed up. Garden getting overtaken by weeds? Sorry, I'm busy reading in the hammock.

I let rhubarb, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, and blackberry seasons all go by without making a single jar of jam. I finally dragged myself to the stove when a bag of plums from our own plum trees threatened to spawn a new species of fruit-fly. I made the jam by rote--boiling water, one-to-one plums to sugar, some candied ginger, boil, jar, boil, cool. Pop. Pop. Pop. The jars sealed. Plums rescued. Beautiful, jewel-toned jars on the shelf. Jam weirdly astringent from the skins. Sense of accomplishment? Nil. Mood-enhancement? Nada.

Maybe this is just a stage. Maybe I'm just really tired from trying to do too many things for too long. Something had to give. I'm still laboring over words--which is not exactly satisfying, but it feels necessary. I currently get more of thrill from identifying a flower than from cooking a meal. And, well, as long as we manage to get something to eat, and as long as the house doesn't get overrun with cobwebs, I guess that's okay.

A New Housecleaning Protocol

I was getting kind of tired of devoting half of my weekends to housework (okay, I've never NOT been tired of devoting half my weekends to housework) while everyone else in the family was outside having fun.



And then I thought, Isn't the whole point of having kids for the free labor? I mean look at family farms. And family restaurants. And Cinderella's family.

So about a month ago, I started putting them to work. First thing after breakfast, everyone cleans up all their crap that has accumulated around the kitchen and living room and mudroom and sunroom and bottom three stairs over the last week. And no, picking things up off the floor and piling them on the couch/table/chair does not count as "cleaning."

M gets sent up to his room to clean up an entire week's worth of dirty clothes that he drops on the floor. Four feet from the laundry basket.

E and Z divide up the downstairs tasks: vacuum the mudroom, living room, kitchen, and sunroom, and mop the kitchen floor. When they finish with the vacuum, M does the stairs and the upstairs rooms.

This does not happen without a great deal of whining, fussing, cries of "why do I have to?" and sneaking outside to ride bikes. But it does happen. As with everything in the household, E and Z trade off being the Helpful Twin and the Difficult Twin. The Helpful Twin sometimes even takes on extra tasks (like spraying the windows with vinegar/water and wiping them down with an old rag; of course, I don't know any kid who doesn't like spraying liquid out of a squirt bottle).

This also does not happen without a great deal of guidance and correction from me: You have to get into the corners with the vacuum. You have to get under the furniture with the vacuum. If something is on the floor, pick it up; don't just vacuum around it. If something is stuck to the floor scrub at it with the mop; don't just go over it once and call it good.

It pretty much takes as much time to supervise them doing the work as it would if I just did it myself (though I manage to do work as well, like clearing off my desk dusting, while they're at it), but in the long-run I think they will thank me for giving them a grounding in how to clean a house. And I know their future roommates and domestic partners will thank me.