Housecraft Brakhage

Remember when I got on a high horse last time I posted and said what self-control I have?  Well, it was a load of shite.  I'm better than I was, and I am improving, but I sometimes think it's not so much that I have fewer things than my tastes are changing and I am just replacing them with other items.

Whenever I go to the Bay Area, which is about once every month or two, I make a point of visiting the thrift stores, and I head straight for the tchotchkes.  My personal favorite places to shop are the Alameda Museum's store and the Salvation Army, also in Alameda.  Their prices are so freaking good, I feel like that woman who blamed the casinos for enabling her gambling habit.  Fortunately I'm prone to frugality even when I'm going overboard.

I'm posting a few pieces from my last couple hauls:

This is a vase.  Or a candle holder.  I guess it's my call, but it doesn't really matter what it's supposed to be anyway because it combines just about everything I like in one figurine.  It's a 3" mouse in Laura Ingalls Wilder-wear, leaning against a tree trunk reading a book!  My kitchen is woodsy-camping themed and I almost never get to go camping.  Also, it's blazing lemon yellow, which I also adore.  The Timelords brought this from the 70s and put this in the  Salvation Army just for me.

Speaking of "just for me", this beautiful little pitcher was in the museum store the last time I visited Alameda back in June or so, and I was lucky enough to grab it on my August visit.

Frosty the Snowman was a green and grassy soul...

Most thrift store visits have a "WTF" moment, where you can't help but wonder how someone thought making and packaging a product was a good idea.  But then you're glad they did, because you find these types of things.  At first glance I thought it was a votive holder, which makes perfect sense.  On closer inspection I perceived it was a mini planter for grass.  Grass in the head of a snowman?  Wha?! 

You meet such lovely people in thrift stores too, like the woman who loudly accused my brother-in-law of following her from her car (we were all already inside the store when she showed up). She was later heard muttering something about the CIA as my sister and I looked at shoes.  Or the guy I heard in Better Bargains offering a staffer a check to hold while he "borrowed" a bunch of clothing so a friend could try it on at home. 

Regression Therapy

Sometimes before things get better, they start to look worse than they did after you did all that work to make things look good.  Such is the case with the basement area, which has had a slight temporary setback while I tried to figure out where a shitload of things are going.  I've even sold books and got rid of furniture from the area and it still looks terrible:

The Salvation Army came Thursday and picked up more furniture, this time mainly from upstairs.  I had that little twinge I get when the furniture disappears from view: there's still so much to do.

One of the lessons I've learned while doing this job is that you shouldn't confuse organizing with decorating.  Trying to work out an aesthetic scheme, while you are simply trying to figure out where things should go and what to keep, is a completely separate task.  Yes, things start to look prettier when they aren't bursting off shelves and covering the floor.  But if you try to work out color schemes and space planning at the same time as the decluttering aspect, you might be taking on too much at once.  Keep a notebook to record your ideas along the way.  And I think I've said this before: refrain from shopping for a whole new look with containers and shelves or design accents, because you might not be sure what you need until the worst is over.

That said, I'm trying not to put any pressure on myself about this.  The holidays are here and I am behind on everything to do with presents and the usual planning. That said, I had a mini holiday party this evening where everyone complimented me on how nice everything looked in the living room.  I had to confess that a lot of stuff was hidden in the other rooms behind closed doors.  I should have taken pictures of my snack buffet table, before everything got eaten!

Drudge Report

I spent a big part of today shredding a pile of old checkbooks.  Also I'm figuring out what I need to keep from a big pile of computer books, boxes, wires, and random parts.  Salvation Army will be here next week to take away some furniture.  I can see more and more of the floor in my computer room!

I found at least two sketch/notebooks of Dylan's.  He used to draw in all kinds of random notebooks that he had handy, and keep story and interview information in them.  I am keeping them together to share with our friends if they want to see them.  I still keep a lot of random bits of paper that he wrote on, as well as other ephemera of his that doesn't have a specific category.  I've been saving these little things in a special file for over a year now.

I have to confess that I've been leaving the basement alone more and concentrating on the upstairs area, partly because it's so cold and wet out and I've got heat upstairs.  For an unfinished basement though, mine stays fairly dry and free of mildew.  Right now it's becoming a little more of a catch-all for things I find upstairs that need to leave the house soon.  I've hit a little bit of a wall in the basement too, because some of the furniture down there is just waiting to come upstairs when I make room for it.  Which is exactly what I'm doing.

I tried reading Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World, but it was really off the subject of what I meant to study.  I'm not even sure how I found it at the library.  I did learn how to slaughter a chicken humanely from this book, but it made me glad I'm getting more vegetarian.  There are so many pitfalls that I'd feel more sorry for the bird if I had to take it apart.  I'd end up making it inedible.

Another Beer Please

I finally caved and rented Game of Thrones from Movie Madness last night.  I have it on hold at the library but I'm about #350 of 500 holds, and that's for season one.  Everything people have been telling me about it has turned out to be absolutely true: massive amounts of female toplessness, sex and violence, plenty of gore.  And that's just in the first 15 minutes of episode one!  Peter Dinklage is great as ever.  I'm not sure why there isn't more male nudity.  If HBO has a nudity quota, there should be yin and yang.  Behinds almost don't count anymore, after everything we've had to view on NYPD Blue on network TV years ago.

I was away for a while over the weekend but I made up for it last night by assembling the wooden shelves I had repaired.  I put them in the laundry room.  I've already got a call in to Salvation Army to get some furniture I don't want.  I can't understand why you need to schedule pickups a couple weeks ahead, but it gives me time to add to the giveaway quantity.  I also can't understand why a simple do-it-yourself pine shelving set is so hard to get to fit together correctly.  I KNOW it's not because I hit it with my car, because I've had this problem before with another, identical shelf.

Things are looking pretty good in the basement, it's almost time for another update photo.  I've extended  my efforts to include the laundry room.  I had a bittersweet moment last night when moving a shelf and sweeping; I found some of Dylan's underwear and socks that had fallen behind the dryer long ago.  I washed them today, and put them in a collection of special things of his I'm keeping.

The Day After Xmas

The Salvation Army came yesterday to pick up a few things from my house, including that blond wood thing I mentioned in a previous post.  I moved all the donations to my garage for easy grabbing, and I had to put the blond unit on a "piano mover" trolley to get it about 10 feet from where it had been resting since August.  It was sooo heavy!  Just to get it on the trolley took imagination.  It's nice to see things go when they need to be out of the way, but when they're gone it's kind of like when a holiday happens and you want more afterwards.

Here's a pic of the basement room now that the donations are gone:

You can see there's been a lot of progress since day one of this blog.  You can see the floor.  It's hard to tell that there's a path beyond the towers of stuff, but it's there.

I should have taken a picture of the laundry room, where I kept a lot of the things I was thinking about giving to S.A.  I'd forgotten what the washing machine and dryer looked like.

The above photo doesn't show something I'd like to hide, but it needs to be seen:

It's in the same room, just out of view to the right.  Boxes I'm saving for the bookopalypse upstairs.

Pilgrim's Progress

So, I worked a long time tonight just cleaning the basement.  I wish I had picked up some daytime allergy meds today, because now I'm paying for it.  It's too early for a Benadryl tablet, they put me right to sleep!

If you compare this photo with the one I posted September 16th, you can see there has been some change.  Since that time I've sold a lot of books or given them away to Title Wave, and donated arty goods to SCRAP,  or just made a pile for Salvation Army.  I have a laundry room off to the side, and it's now the place where I put the household item donations.  Despite the fact that things are actually leaving this basement room, the change doesn't look like a whole lot.

See that blond wood thing on the floor in the middle?  That's a piece of furniture that really needs to go.  I wish I gave it away when I had a chance weeks ago!  When one of my friends was helping me move it in here, he asked, "Is this thing made of concrete?"  It's probably heavier than a lot of other bigger furniture I have, and now it's stuck where it is because it's too heavy for me to drag up the stairs.

If I had more pictures of the room from different angles you could see that I have made good progress, and I should be pleased. 

I discovered a clever means of making a "shelf helper", which is what those white plastic-covered wire things were that I was praising September 30th.  I took four bricks (39 to 44 cents each at Home Depot) and laid a wire shelf that I found for free on the sidewalk across the top.  I think the shelf I found would normally be attached to brackets on a wall.  It's not a very dressy look but it did the trick for a basement bookcase I have.

I've been reading The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff, and I'm almost done.  There was a movie made based on it called The Eagle, starring Channing Tatum.  The book is much, much better.  It takes place in Britain in the Roman era, one of my favorite periods of history.  I understand this book was written for young adults, but it's a great read at any age.