Lavender Blue

With Winter being so awful in so many parts of the country I decided we all needed some "flower therapy"! This is a photo of the beautiful African Violet that sits in my dining room window. I love the lavender blue color of the blooms. I have two old windows that sit on this ledge as well as a few other pretties. The soft bluish lavender blooms cheered me and spoke to me today of the promise of Spring, just around the corner.

Last week it got down into the teens here in South Texas and we are not accustom to this cold.
Our homes are not built to take extreme cold. Now that may not be cold by your standards in other parts of the country but here it bursts pipes and freezes plants at an alarming rate. Multiply that by three days and you 've got a minor crisis. We were all told to drip faucets and cover our outdoor spigots or suffer the consequences. Luckily we didn't incur any problems at our house but it sure did a number on the outdoor plants, even the plants that were covered. I guess I'll just have to wait for Spring to see what survived and what did not. Luckily my roses all look pretty good. Most of ferns, on the other hand, look pretty burnt.

Today it is in the 60's and we are supposed to have the 70's by this week end.. You just never know about the weather here! There is a saying here in Texas that" if you don't like the weather, just wait 5 minutes!! " We are anticipating a visit from an old friend this week end so I hope that the weather is nice so she can have a little vacation from the ice and snow.

If it is cold and gray in your world just look at the photo above and visualize it sitting in your sunny window instead of mine. Wishing you sunshine and warm breezes!!!!!

Still A Work In Progress

I'm still working on the laundry room. I finally have all the shelving up and lots of the storage in place. Originally I had put shelving just on one side of the room and had my modular units on the other side. Even though they were only 12 inches in depth they really closed the room off. I finally got some one to help me move them to the back wall of the garage. No small task as there are about 10 pieces that stack all the way to the ceiling! That requires a lot of muscle which I'm afraid I just can't do alone.

In the picture above I added the shelf below the picture to kind of pull the idea of the dishes down from the picture. To the right on top of the dryer is an old wooden baby swing that I bought at a flea market for $10.00. I added pads to the bottom screws that hold it together so that it wouldn't scratch my dryer surface. I really like bunnies as you may have noticed in a lot of my things so when I saw this tall old wooden bunny I just had to have it. She's the queen of the land of laundry!






Since I moved the wire rack in the dining room to the area where I had shelves with my Fitz and Floyd pieces I wanted to still showcase them, at least my favorite pieces! So this part of the shelving was incorporated to accommodate my favorite pieces. I also had to be able to access the breaker box. Below these shelves are my recycling bins. One for glass, tin and plastic and the other for paper. We have a very large dumpster outside the garage which the city picks up once a week. We try to recycle just about everything that we can. I also mounted my ironing board behind the door to the dining room. That gets it out of my bedroom and the iron out of my closet.
I want to make a curtain to cover the lower, narrower shelves that has all the cans and stuff on it. Just to keep it neat looking and uncluttered as much as I can.





This side has a lot of decorative boxes that I have been accumulating slowly over the past year when ever I could find them on sale. They will contain a lot my sewing supplies and material. (I still haven't gotten much of that done yet. Lots of the boxes are still empty. Like I said still a work in progress! I left the shelving high so that I could put the laundry sorter under them so it would stay out of the way when not in use. We pulled the chest of drawers in from the garage and it will hold a lot of fabric, too. It was left in one of my former home so I kept for storage. Free storage is good, is it not? I have quite a large stash and would like to separate them by color.




With the extra shelving I have a place to put my bread machine, pressure cooker and other small appliances that really cramped my kitchen cabinets. It makes accessing them so much easier and I have started to use them more and since I'm not doing as many projects I have been able to cook more.

I hope you've enjoyed this little tour. Like I said I still have some things to complete out there but it is finally getting there and I'm really happy with the outcome!