The next chapter

Five and a half years ago we opened this door and started a new chapter of our life that would see our family grow from two to four.

I was hugely pregnant with J and this was the place that would be her first home. By the middle of that day, our place looked like this:

But even so we hosted our first dinner. My awesome parents were here to help us move and we got the apartment cleaned and sorted enough to have company. Luckily we didn't have to do anything for dinner...my amazing aunt and uncle brought dinner, dishes, cutlery and a lot of laughter which was great after a really long day. We had a one hour window between when we could get into our new home and when we had to be out of the ghetto Pink Palace. Thank goodness for excellent helpers!

Less than three weeks later, before we were fully unpacked, this little lady made a dramatic entrance into our lives and the Lyons' Den became home to a family of three.

We had lots of fun, celebrated some birthdays and Christmases and then, last April, this happened.

And we made do in the Lyons' Den we had outgrown a year or two before for another nine months...it looked like this for a while

(seriously, what family with two small children can sustain this for an extended period of time?)

Today, our little Lyons' Den looks like this...

much like it did on that hot summer's day five and a half years ago. We made a few changes and a lot of memories. And now our keys belong to another family, also starting a new chapter in their lives. There were a few tears and one emotionally torn five year old went around to each room to say goodbye and I love you. She kissed all the walls and each window and door in her special green room.

And then the chapter ended.

And our next chapter? Well, it begins here:

Goodbye Lyons' Den. You were good to us and we'll miss you, but we are very excited to see what this next chapter brings!

City garden clean up

J and I planted our lovely balcony garden in the summer and it looked beautiful and produced a few tomatoes, a handful of strawberries and a handful of green beans and some herbs. And then things got a bit nuts at our house. And then fall happened. And our poor garden got neglected. I take full blame for it looking like this:

 

Last week I’d had enough of looking and dead, dreary plants, so I got myself a big bag and some shears and went to work. It took less than 15 minutes to get the deck looking like this:

I left anything that still had signs of life, cut back the perennials (we’ll see if they’re perennials on our deck) and pulled up most of the annuals.

And I discovered something else. A tiny little bit of green pushing up out of this pot.

Sometime in the fall, J found a bulb somewhere and carried it around with her for days. She wanted to plant it, so we stuck it in a pot that had once contained beans. I didn’t expect the poor thing to do much. It had lost its “shell” (I don’t know what you call the outside part – skin?), it was bruised and it had a couple of little nicks in it. I figured we’d plant it, we’d both forget about it and in the spring we’d plant more beans or something. Apparently that little bulb had other plans and it was far more resilient than I thought it wass. J asked me today what colour the flowers will be, but we have no idea what is or if it will even get to the point where it can bloom.

Decks in bloom

When we lived in the Blue House, we had a super large deck - it was awesome. The deck was off the kitchen and we used it all the time. We were super spoiled at the Blue House; we had three eating areas in good weather: the kitchen, the dining room, and the deck.

I loved it. Okay fine, I loved the whole Blue House.

But the deck. The first summer we were in the house, I knew I had to do something with it but I had no idea where to start. My friend Chandra gave me an early birthday gift of plants and planting materials and we spent a very pleasant day making the deck look beautiful.

The deck became a central part of our life that summer. It was home to a big table with an umbrella, a bunch of solar powered lights (there was no power on the deck), an awesome park bench and our bbq. We played board games out there. We ate our meals out there.

We often had friends over for meals and of course we ate out there. We had birthday cake for breakfast out there.

We had parties out there, lots of deck parties. We had birthday parties out there, more than once.

We had an upstairs neighbour and a downstairs neighbour in the Blue House and they both had their own small-space gardens. Water our respective gardens became part of our evening rituals. After the sun had set, the crows had flown home to Burnabye and I had taken down the ugly sheets on the kitchen windows (I finally made and hung the curtains before the second summer) and opened the windows and doors in the house to cool it off, I'd head to the deck to water my plants.

Around the same time K and R would both be out doing theirs. We liked our neighbours and we saw them often and this became a time, just before bed, for the three of us to exchange pleasantries and stories. By that second summer, K was preparing to move out and R and I were on tenterhooks because we didn't know when/if the house was going to be sold and we'd be looking for another place to live. The second summer I pretty much only had volunteers and herbs. I didn't want to leave much behind if we did end up leaving. And the deck had started to rot. K probably would have replaced it for us, but she no longer owned the house and the new landlords were...difficult.

Moving into a condo was a huge adjustment for us. We downsized tremendously. Our outside space shrunk. We lived in close proximity to a whole bunch of people, not just our beloved neighbours K and R. Oh and we had a brand new baby.

But I still wished for a garden and a green space and some plants. And this year, I finally figured it out. It's not as spacious as the Blue House. There's no grass. I can barely fit a kitchen chair out there, so it's not exactly a comfortable place to eat or read or do much of anything. But it's ours. And it's pretty.

And J is so excited about it...and that makes it 100% worth it! Oh, and I'm excited to what the plants will produce...looks like lots of strawberries and herbs, a few tomatoes and some beans...which is way more than we've ever had before!

The first harvest

39. Grow herbs on the deck

One of our requirements when we moved into this place was that we needed to have some outside space. I didn't care if that was a balcony, a deck, a patio, a roof; I just needed to be able to open a door in my home and be outside and have space to have a few plants. Between here and the Blue House, we lived in the Pink Palace disaster zone and there was no outside space and I hated it.

We've lived here for four years now. FOUR YEARS. And for most of those four years some sad empty pots and a few dead plants lived on our little balcony. And then a stroller took over pretty much all of the space. And then we had some storage issues and the stuff from our storage room ended up on the deck.

And then I had enough. I wanted a garden. But we didn't have a yard so the deck would have to do.

Partway through the clearing up process (I forgot to take a real before shot)

We were cleaning things up and putting things away and I discovered some gross stuff on the carpet (yes, there was ugly green carpet on our deck) and I as I was trying to figure out how to get it off, I realized the carpet wasn't stuck down. Up it came and off to the home store we went to invest in some floating deck tiles. I LOVE THEM! Why didn't I do this four years ago?

I went crazy with the plants and had to get more planters. And then I bought too many planters and so, for this year at least, some of them have to live in the storage room, but next year, they will all be out there full of plants.

J helped me plant everything - I didn't manage to get any pictures as we were both covered in muck. She had just come back from my mom and dad's where she had helped them plant some things in the garden and she didn't quite grasp that she couldn't make the same mucky mess on the deck that she could in the garden. We had a great time planting and now she's excited to water them before bed every night and check the strawberries for ripe fruit.

Tonight we made our first strawberry harvest:

J is pretty stylish these days - those glasses are bug glasses and the lens open up...

Isn't it cute? J said it was super yummy. We're now on strawberry watch as there are a number more on both plants that are just a few sunshine-filled hours away from being edible.

With the nice weather the last few days, we've really noticed everything taking off. Some of the flower baskets have totally filled out, the tomato plant is almost as tall as J, the beans are looking more like beans everyday, the basil is visible from inside the house. It's awesome! J is so excited about our garden. Now she just laments the lack of an easily accessible yard space. One day kid, one day!

Oh yeah, and I get to cross one off the 101 list because we have basil, rosemary, parsley, chives and oregano out there. We've used some of the basil, chives and oregano so far. I love having fresh herbs. One day when we have a real garden I will have ten times the number of basil plants though...we love basil in this house!

Just the two of us

We are very fortunate that while my parents live a five hour drive from us, we get to see them a lot. My family has always been close and I'm so glad that J gets to have a good relationship with her grandparents even though we're not in the same city. We Skype with them regularly and once or twice a year J gets to go visit them *without* her parents. I'm not sure who is most excited about that, J, my mom and dad, or Alex and I. Sometime Alex and I get to do fun stuff while J is away and sometimes it's a time for us to catch up on work around our place.

J was gone for five days this time and we decided to try to get some fun stuff and some work in. I had the week off and Alex was working the day shift, so we actually got to see a lot of each other.

Five nights without J meant all kinds of things:

4 afternoon naps
1 piece of furniture given away on craigslist
5 nights where I stayed up past my bedtime
1,473,204,283 pieces of random paper and other junk removed from our home
38 cups of coffee too many
1 shower almost fixed
62 times an hour I thought of and missed J
nothing painted because instead we sorted out the balcony and did other boring cleaning chores
15 - 84 times a day I checked on J because she was playing too quietly or sleeping too quietly but really she just wasn't here
5 mornings where I got to sleep in a little
1 kitchen back splash picked out (but not yet installed)
2 trips to the post office
1 trip to the library
4 walks
1 night of Shakespeare
1 dinner date with Alex
1 lunch date with Alex
1 dinner date with Fifers

I think we did pretty well! But I'm oh so glad to have my little J back. I missed her so much!

And then there was the time I thought I'd get organized...

Or there were many times. Or something. I've tried a few things that have worked and a few things that haven't worked and I've drawn some conclusions and came to some realizations.

1. I know how to be tidy and organized and keep my home relatively clutter-free, I'm just not doing it for some reason. I keep going back to what I read in One Year To An Organized Life about how my house got to the state that it's in (a state that I'm not particularly happy with, but isn't atrocious) and keep reminding myself that instead of analysing it and agonizing over it to just DO something about it.

2. I did the 52 weeks of organizing challenge over at I'm an Organizing Junkie. Part way through I stopped blogging about it partly because life went sideways and partly because I figured that the time I spent fiddling around with pictures and writing was time that could be better spent decluttering, organizing or cleaning something. I've been keeping track of the list and I updated it last and I've managed to cross a bunch of things off. I might actually get to cross most of it off eventually.

3. When I first had J, a friend of mine told me about FlyLady stuff. It sounded like it might be a good way to get myself into a routine. Life was super different - I wasn't working and I was home with an infant all day. But FlyLady didn't work for me...it felt too rigid and too inflexible and too commercial (buy our special feather dusters etc). So I stopped doing it. And that was okay. It took me a bit to get to the "that was okay" part because I kept thinking I'd failed, except I hadn't. My house was clean, my family was fed, we had our own routine that didn't start with a shined sink and require shoes in the house. And really, I took some good stuff away from it. And we have a routine now. I just don't always remember to follow it.

4. We have too much stuff. We don't have enough space. I've been getting rid of stuff (go see...it's not all the way updated but I have now officially tossed,returned, given away or recycled over 250 things...) I know I can live with less stuff - I used to live in 500 square feet and I didn't have too much stuff, I just had better control of it, so I should be able to control stuff in 950 square feet. Maybe. I didn't have a preschooler with all the multitudes of things that preschoolers come with when I lived in the Hobbit Hole.

5. I discovered the UnFuck Your Habitat website. It's to the point, there's no excuses, there are before and afters, there are cleaning tips, there is no harassment about shoes in the house. It's awesome. I check it regularly. And the biggest thing I've taken away from UFYH is that small steps are good...20/10s and 45/15s are good. Marathons are BAD. MUST remember that.

So, we're in a week of doing little projects at our house. I'm hoping when I'm done the piles are gone (or at least noticeably smaller) and maybe we'll have some newly painted walls...We'll see...

So that time that I thought I'd get organized? It turns out it's not a one time task - it's ongoing and requires maintenance. Huh.

Water, running in the kitchen

In which I describe my first world problem and marvel at how easy we really have it...

Last weekend we came to appreciate how easy our lives are because we have running water in our kitchen.

For over a year we've had a temperamental, sometimes drippy, kitchen faucet. For too long we've had a leaking kitchen faucet - a minor thing that a small buck and occasional tea towel swipe kept in check.

But then it became bad. Super drippy and an under-the-counter leak that needed attention now. But we couldn't deal with it now.

So for three whole days we had a kitchen sink that didn't give us water on demand. We had to bring water from somewhere else to use in the kitchen. Somewhere else like the bathroom, six steps from the kitchen. And we could still us the sinks and let the water drain out. And the dishwasher was fine, so we tried to limit dish usage in those three days to stuff that could go in the dishwasher. I didn't cook or bake much because I didn't have easy access to water to wipe the counters or rinse stuff or wash my hands.

And one evening, while filling the kettle from the tub and dreaming about the new faucet, I realize just how ridiculous I was being. It wasn't that long ago that there was no running water in most kitchens or bathrooms around the world. It wasn't that long ago that there wasn't even a pump. And people survived. People in other countries are still surviving without indoor plumbing (yes, I know there are those who are not...) and there I was looking forward to my new faucet. There are places where the amount of water we had to toss because of the leak might be the day's water for a village....

I have a new faucet now. It doesn't leak. And every time I turn it on, I'm reminded of how lucky I am to have it.

Kitchen Tweaks

I'm generally happy with how my kitchen is organized. I'd love to have more space, particularly a proper pantry, but as it is now, it will do. We're working on a solution for a pantry that involved our small storage closet, some shelving and the assistance of Alex's dad.






I can't really complain about my kitchen. It's small, but it works. I'd love new paint, a back splash, new counter tops, different flooring and different (or at least painted) cabinets, but those are cosmetic issues and they will eventually get changed. Eventually. One day.

There were two spots that were bugging me a bit - our miscellaneous drawer and a corner cupboard when I keep cutting boards, cookie sheets, muffins tins and other flat things.

The drawer wasn't too bad for a catch-all - there were many, many, many sets of take-out chopsticks (I'm not entirely sure when we had Japanese or Chinese take-out last), a bunch of ketchup and soy sauce packets and a few weirdo kitchen utensils that we tossed, but that's it. With the exception if the roast lifting fork things, the turkey baster and the rolling pin (they're in another drawer), everything is in here and sorted.

It's amazing what three small containers can do for one unruly drawer! Everything had a place before but the whisk attachments for the hand blender and the mixer kept getting crushed, the pastry cutter floated around and the eight bazillion chopsticks where just really annoying. We have beautiful, lacquered chopsticks a friend from Japan brought us and we usually use those. We ask for our takeout without chopsticks and that usually keeps the number of extra chopstick to a minimum. If we were ordering chopstick food and there were more than six people, we could just ask for chopsticks then. I've never heard of a chopstick emergency...

I also tackled the corner cupboard. I had read somewhere about using tension curtain rods to make a rack for cookies sheets and other flat kitchen things, but I had been unable to find ones that didn't need hooks to attach. I was out a few weeks ago at a discount department store (you know, the one that sells off stock from other stores...starts with a "W") and was looking for something else and I saw this. It was less than $15, so I figured it was worth a try.

Our pans were all leaning against one another in the corner cupboard - well, flat-ish stuff, not just pans. There was a roasting pan and rack (not pictured because it was in the oven cooking a turkey) three cookie sheet, a pizza sheet, a bunch of cutting boards, and some muffin tins. T Hat glass loaf pan you can see there sort of held them up, but not really. In reality everything just slid down until the loaf pan ran into something else and nothing moved.

It drove me nuts! The kitchen in the blue house had a funny narrow cupboard with wooden dividers just for stuff like that.

This is the result. And it's so nice. Nothing falls over. There's no avalanche of flat stuff every time we take something out of here. The rest of the things in this cupboard have more space. It's great.

Side note: Does anyone know why we have holes cut in the tops of the corner cupboard (like the one you can see in this picture)? Both corner cupboard have similar cutouts. Does it have something to do with installation?

I'm slowly getting back on track with my 52 weeks of organizing list, so I'm linking to I'm an Organizing Junkie.

I win!

Alex and I made a bet (of air apparently) that the bathroom would not stay in this state for two weeks.

Particularly the top photo. He figured that as I did laundry, it would again begin to accumulate on the counter top and very soon we'd be back to where we were before.

Did I show him or what?

Oh. Yeah. No photo. Ooops. But trust me, it looks pretty much like it did those pictures except maybe the drying clothing has changed. And the reason? It's a lot easier to fold the clothing right there, right off the rack, than to pile it up and do it all at once (and dig through the pile for a shirt or pair of pants that didn't get put away)

Dust is still an issue, but there's not as much...right now. We don't use the dryer all the time in the winter and I try to use it less in the summer...not only do the clothes smell better, fade less and generally last longer, it uses less electricity and doesn't add to the already too hot temperature of the house. We have two of those sturdy wooden racks and that means I can usually do two loads of laundry on a week night and four one a weekend day (in warm weather). In the winter, it's one load a night because it takes about a day and a half to dry...We're hoping to get a new washer and dryer in the fall - maybe an new, energy efficient one won't make as much dust??

And do you know what the unintended side effect of this was? The rest of my house has caught the stay clean bug. It's never really been that bad, overall, but the clean bathroom has inspired us to keep the kitchen tidier (hello, doing dishes every night...a clean kitchen in the morning is SO nice) and the dining room table clear.

J decided she wanted the shoes in the closet, so I helped her arrange the shoe rack so all our shoes would fit. She loves opening the door and getting the right pair of shoes for us when it's time to go out.

A much tidier house has made getting ready for work easier. The ease of getting ready for work means I get to work a little bit earlier which allows me a few minutes of alone time before that part of my day starts and that means I'm WAY more productive during the day. And that means I'm more relaxed when I go home, which means more fun stuff to do in the evenings with J. And I've been able to read a bit after J goes to bed and I still manage to go to bed earlier than I was. IT'S AWESOME being organized and I'm not even all the way there yet!

Hard to believe one tidy bathroom could have that much effect on my life! Thank goodness I found Laura's 52 weeks of organizing challenge. It gave me the kick in the pants that I needed!

Next up: the bedroom.

The end

Today we got rid of a piece of furniture that has been with us for the last five years. It was a key table in the Blue House and held our keys plus other random stuff that came into the house (cell phones, mail, apparently if you take a peak at the picture, miniature Christmas trees). It was a bedside table in the ghetto Pink Palace. And here it was also an entryway table/recycling station until it got repurposed into a side table in the living room.

But then we got new tables. And the sewing table had to go. There was no room for it. I liked the little table. I had great plans to refinish it and fill the sewing machine hole and then take out the sewing machine holder stuff and put a shelf behind the door. But that wasn’t really ever going to happen.

So we put it on craigslist and made a few dollars and put them towards the new storage for the living room (I hope by the end of the summer we’ll have it!)

But that’s not all we got rid of today. Alex helped me carry the table out to the waiting car and send it off to someone else’s home and continue its life. I wasn’t sad to see it go, but when I walked in the house, I felt a lot lighter. It took me a minute to know why I felt lighter and then I realized: I hadn’t just said goodbye to a table, I had released an old relationship. That table was the last remnant of that relationship.

Five and a half years ago a friend of mine came to Canada from far away and lived with me. For many reasons it didn’t work and she left early. There were unhappy words said and not said. There were hurt feelings. There was resentment. There were unmet expectations (often because they were also silent expectations) and there were unmet responsibilities. I ended up inheriting some furniture and other bits and pieces as part of my “compensation” for a few things…

Over the last five years we’ve had two moves and three or four big clear outs of our stuff. This is the last piece of that relationship – the rest of the things were either donated or thrown out or accidentally left behind.
When I came back in the house I realized that the lightness I was feeling came from getting rid of that last piece of furniture. Sending it off to a new home allowed me to stop mourning a long dead friendship. I realized that even though the hurt, sadness and anger are long gone, and even though I know things are best the way they are now, and even though our friendship breathed its last breaths back in 2006, and even though I knew it could never be, some piece of me longed for the friendship we had before she came to Vancouver. And that piece of me left with the sewing table.

One of the questions that you can ask yourself when you’re decluttering is “Does this item make me feel guilty?” Maybe instead I need to ask myself “Is this item giving me a [negative] reason to live in the past?” I never would have thought a simple table could hold so much power over me!

So tonight I said goodbye. And I think that’s it.

On giving up…for now

I’ve been looking for the perfect coffee table for our place since we moved in – three years ago! I recently decided that what I had in mind was just not going to work for our little family right now and instead I’d go to one of the many thrift shops and find something solid and that would do for now. Interestingly the coffee table isn’t on my list of 101 things in 1001 days but most of the rest of the projects for our condo are…oh well…

This weekend was Father’s Day and my father-in-law’s birthday and we had Alex’s family over for cake and coffee. Probably when the cake came out and there was nowhere for anyone to put their plates, I mentioned that I had given up my search and would be headed to the thrift shop this weekend in search of something functional.

We got home last night to find a message from my father-in-law on our answering machine…he had been out at his favourite second-hand store (VV) and he found a solid oak coffee table for us. And two end tables. And they were cheap. And on top of that it was Seniors’ Day.

Tonight he arrived at our house with three tables. That he got for about $40. And now we have a coffee table. But I need some help with the end tables. One had a natural home. The other we thought might work as a bedside table but it’s too big. I’m a bit wary of putting it down in our storage room because, well, it’s damp. And wood and damp don’t go well together.

Here’s the before:




And here’s the after:






We’re getting rid of the sewing table between the chair and the rocking chair – it’s just too big. Does anyone see a spot I may have missed where the second end table can go? It’s the same size as the one between the two chairs….

There is actually a bit more open space in the living room now because I had to move everything a bit closer together and the living room doesn’t feel cramped…that’s a good thing, right?

The IKEA Solution(s)

So, I mentioned that we ventured to IKEA last weekend…and came home with lots of STUFF. Tons and tons of stuff. But it meant I got to cross a few things off my 52 weeks of organizing list (for the 52 week challenge at I'm an Organizing Junkie).

Some of the stuff was used to make J’s bedroom a little tidier and some was used to corral J’s stuff and some is waiting. Because once again I jumped the gun and got a few steps ahead of myself in the organizing/sorting/decorating process. There are a couple of things I need to do first – like I bought a couple of things to hang at the front door, but first I need to move some furniture. But before I do that, I need to move some other furniture…etc. etc. etc.

I love the shelves we got J in the summer, but they are deep and tall and while I’d like them to look like this:


In reality, they usually look like this:


The books spilled out onto the floor. The toys spilled out onto the floor. UGH. Even when they were put away, they weren’t nice to look at because J usually just shoved them in the shelves.

So we got two things: bins and special shelf dividers.


This looks better. It’s easier to clean up. It’s great. The library books are all together in one bin. The few toys are in another bin. The other two bins have J’s books - they're in no particular order, but they all fit, spine up, so we can easily choose the books we want. She chose her “favourites” to put in the divider shelf and board books fit in this addition perfectly! I love how it looks!

We also got some Samla bins to corral art supplies, colouring stuff, and playdough. I love containers! I actually got four of each size, knowing I had purposes for three of the biggers ones, but figuring a could find a use for all of them. The bigger ones fit two stacked into an Expedit and that was something I considered when I picked them.

I used two of the smaller ones for her tea sets and they are the perfect size - everything (except for the tray) fits perfectly and they will work well when we get rid of the ugly black bookcase they're sitting on now and finally replace it with something more functional!


(I forgot to take a before picture)

I used another small one to corral all the envelopes of pictures we have...they just need to be put into an album. I used the big ones for J's art supplies (up high - things like paint, markers, extra paper), J's personal art stuff (down low where she can get it - crayons, colouring books, sticker book), and playdough.


The playdough was pretty much all in one spot, but it was loose and not nice to look at.


Now it's binned and the bookcase (which will also be going away in the near future) looks much better. I didn't take pictures of the art stuff because it was literally strewn around the house. The box I don't want her get is on top of the playdough box and the other one is low, where she can get it (you can see it on the right side of the picture of the puzzles below). She loves it - she can get her colouring stuff out whenever she wants to colour and so far she's put the stuff away on her own...I'm sure THAT novelty will wear off!

Last week, I sorted the stuff above, but the other bins were still hanging around with no purpose.


As I contemplated J's stuff that was still hanging out in our living room, my brilliant two and a half year old said "Mommy, maybe the puzzles can go here." And put her puzzles in one of them.


After we did the puzzles, she asked for the last small one for her "special stuff" and found a place for it on the bookcase. She was a big help and very proud of herself.


J organizing her things.

Back to the theme of puzzles, you can see this puzzle in the picture above. It was a pain - it came in a huge, heavy box with the accompanying book, but it wasn't an appropriate place to store either of them. We usually tried to stack it nicely but it inevitably tumbled all over the place. I tried it in a small container, but it was just too tall and too wide (that's the container J ended up using for her "special" stuff).


Alex gave J his old lunch kit, and for a while she used it to cart stuffed animals around, but it's been abandoned for a while and I thought it might be time to get rid of...although, I felt bad doing that because Alex is not sentimental very often, but I think he was a bit sentimental about this...


Look at how perfectly they fit and it closes up and they don't spill and J can carry the whole puzzle in one go (this was previously a source of great frustration for her). I love repurposing things!

Anyway, our IKEA trip turned out to be a success. There are a few more things that we picked up, but they're getting their own posts (on project isn't quite done) We’ll also be heading back to IKEA in the near future…stay tuned!