torley manor

We’re getting ready for the next big thing. These last few weeks, we’ve been slowly, diligently, ploddingly organizing our lives and messes. In theory, I support “everything in its place” but not really in practice.

So what we’ve been paying attention to is figuring out how we live and work, and more specifically where we work,  and finding solutions that actually apply to our lives instead of trying to apply our lives to a solution. An example: when we bought our house, I bought a huge desk to put in the “office” upstairs and then never ever even once did any work at it. The drawers became storage and the surface became a debris-holder. We always did bill-paying and work in the dining room. Always. So what we want to do is figure out a system for keeping that stuff together downstairs, where we’ll use it, without having a filing cabinet in the middle of everything.

It’s a design project at heart — how we use the products in our lives — and I’m pretty excited about it. I have a plan but we’ll see how it goes. I think the solution is a sideboard or buffet in the dining room, so that all the pens and tape dispensers and crafty project supplies and bills and stamps can all be in one place together that’s actually where we’ll use them — and put them away when we’re done too.

In the meantime (while I slowly hunt around to find a sideboard that I can afford and that will suit our style), we’re finally making some headway on carpet removal.

Tonight’s the night! I’ll post some pictures of the stairs and our test area too — Q discovered last night that the stairs are in fact normal regular wood stairs. No linoleum, no tile, nothing weird. Just regular wood, stained the same color as the trim on the staircase. At least, that’s what the test-area showed. Here’s hoping we don’t find ten different kinds of stairs.

hooooooo boy.