skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Yesterday Hubby took his first trip out of town since his surgery in November. I think it's like the first time I haven't driven him to the airport and still had time to drive the hour back home and get back in bed by 5:30 a.m. That alone makes this non-morning person happy.
Yesterday it was mid-morning, so Ikea was open, and if I do the loop different, it's on the way home. So of course I did the loop different and went. That makes me ecstatic.
(By the way, Hubby went to the doctor last Tuesday. They did a CAT scan of his liver and a side-by-side comparison from before the surgery. His liver is fully regenerated. He saw the original scan with the two lobes and the new one where the one lobe takes up the same space. I keep telling him to be careful carrying his suitcase even though he got cleared to do regular activities. I mean, he went out the next morning after he got cleared and decided to shovel a little snow. He's nuts! He also got in trouble with me.)
Betsy asked me what I got at Ikea in the comments yesterday. I looked at pulls and knobs for my kitchen cabinets when Mari and I were there last April, but they didn't have enough in stock. So I looked at those and they had plenty. I've started putting them up.
It's a chore! I've done five. I have lots to go.
I'm doing knobs on the drawers.
They are all a black matte finish, and some type of metal that reminds me of iron. Very substantial.
I also bought the nifty guide with holes to help you line up where to drill. At under $2.00, I consider it the best purchase of the day.
Several months ago I took a picture of the odometer reading on our van. It's our only vehicle. I was short a four in the front, but I guess that's a good thing. That would be a lot of miles!
Today I found the four. I wish I'd realized ahead of time how close I was to the 150K milestone so I could catch it instead, but I guess catching the four on the end was second best.
The best part is that I was in the Ikea parking lot! I haven't been there since I met Mari in April.
I don't buy many things unless I have a way I can use them and a place I can put them.
When I was at Ikea last Friday, I bought something that I didn't really know what to do with. I mean, yes, they are vases, but there are several of them, and I don't have fresh flowers in my house that often.
But I told Mari, "I'm getting them because they put me in my happy place."
I went to Michael's yesterday, and they are having a killer sale on gerbera daisies. The fake ones. They look much more realistic than they do in my pictures. Unless you choose to get the blue, black, or green they sell, and then they don't look so realistic.
This vase is larger than all the others, and I only got one in this size. You know I got it because it's blue. My picture is pitiful, but the flowers do look nice in person (they have a ponytail holder around them right below the rim of the vase and then the stems are kind of splayed out in a circle so they hold themselves up like tent stakes).
I bought three matching smaller vases in blue, green, and yellow. They were displayed in the store with a single flower sticking out of them which I thought was cute. I bought some great big flower (that my cousin probably knows the name of) and stuck them in a little piece of floral foam. Then I covered them with some clear flat marbles.
I didn't know if I was going to use colors or white, so I got three white and two colors, my favorite fuchsia and orange combo. I went ahead and used all three whites together and the colors individually.
Pitiful, pitiful pictures that just make them look fake and sad, but they really look cheery. And yes, fake, but in an okay way.
Then I also got these cute little white pots. One has stripes going vertically and one has them going horizontally. I put fake daisies in there and then hot glued some moss on top of the floral foam.
I think there may be more green on those daisies than there is outside...still. But every day there is a little more. Home Depot had a few hanging pots outside today, so that's got to be a good sign.
If you've read my blog much at all, you know I have a love affair with Ikea.
If you didn't know that and really want to know, you can read about it here.
And here.
And here.
And even here.
I also have a love affair with all things cubbies. Here's a little look at the ones in Caboose's room.
And in sticking with my little theme-o-la, if you want to read about my sickening little thing with cubbies, you can read about them here.
And here.
And here.
Even though Ikea makes the most fantastic Expedit cubbies in the entire world (including wordless, picture-only directions for the entire world!), they do not make fabric cubes for their system. They make a multitude of baskets, plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, and even zippered fabric boxes, but not just plain old fabric cubes.
The cubbies that are sold at Target, Lowe's, Home Depot, etc., that we used to have in our military quarters (most of which were destroyed in this last move or by the rats in the storage facility) have fabric cubes. This is the size they are compared to the Ikea system:
Not such a great fit, but we've been using them in Caboose's room anyway since we had them.
I was looking through the Target ad from Sunday's paper, and I happened to have a $50 Target gift card I won from another blog (I did mention on my Menu Plan Monday post about being lucky lately). I saw these fabric cubes on sale for a plastic system called Itso. They appeared to be the right size, so I picked some up today. Here they are in Caboose's Ikea Expedit system.
The first time I put them in I had to squeeze the sides in on the bottom, but pretty much they are a perfect fit. I had Caboose take them out and put them in after I did, and the second time they went in easily.
I got four blue and two brown. I can't wait to save up and get a few more!
Of course it came from Ikea! This was one of our first purchases when we went last November.
It sits on the second floor loft, which is a central location for all the kids. Our towels are kept on the shelf in our master closet, right off of the master bathroom.
I can't keep towels and washclothes under my bathroom sink. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. I'm funny that way. Sounds better than saying weird, too. So that area is limited to all the other things in a bathroom that need to be put away — cans, bottles, hair dryer, etc. — everything except toilet paper. I can't keep it under there either.
Go ahead and call me weird.
This is where we keep most of the extra bedding and pillows. It's on a back wall in the rec room. I've tried putting folded sheets between the mattress and box springs, but unless you barely fold them, it makes the mattress all lumpy and lopsided.
Our kids only have one set of sheets, so they get washed, dried, and put right back on. It saves money because I don't have to buy more sheets and storage space because I don't have to find a place to put them. My kids also don't like to use the flat sheet. They'd rather just use a blanket or duvet. I think they're weird, too.
But I'm not saying which side of the family I think it came from.
This month's organizing round-up is a surface or shelf. Mine that I'm showing you in this post is a combination surface/shelf. It is what used to be our computer desk, and is now two computer desks with storage cubbies between them, from Ikea of course.
Here is the before picture that was taken sometime between Christmas and the middle of February. Yes, took me that long to get it down. Come to think of it, I see a big dinosaur that was a birthday gift in the middle of January for Caboose, so I know it was after that.
After we took the tree down we temporarily put up one of those plastic white folding tables to hold the second computer. I was a little indecisive about what I wanted, and they no longer made the desk like the one we already had. Plus the movers broke it and glued the legs back on that far side (you might be able to see particle board showing above the black metal strip at the bottom...it was completely broken off) so I didn't really know how long this one was actually going to hold up.
The night Hubby and I went to Ikea and measured the floor arrow, I wandered and stared at desks. The plan was to pick something. Wandering always gets my idea cells in my brain flowing. It doesn't happen very often. But I walked away with something totally unexpected that completely works for us.
This is on our second floor loft. Sometime I'll show you the rest of it, but I'm trying to stay focused here and not digress. It's challenging, but I'm determined.
The drawers are something extra that you can purchase to add in with this system (Expedit). I knew one set of drawers would be handy to hide a few things that would be necessary to have in this area.
Pencils, pens, scissors, tape, a couple of small notepads, small stapler, etc. The game box is there because I ran out of small cd cases that I move them all over to, so it's sitting in there for now.
I keep all the chargers we need to get to regularly in here, either electrical or the ones that hook up to the computer for cameras or ipods.
There are a couple of magazine files next to the drawers. One holds my current catalogs, and the other holds a couple of poly files. One of those files holds a bunch of odds & ends papers that would otherwise be scattered all over the desk area but that are notes or things that need to be kept for some reason or another, but not things that need to be filed. The other file holds recipes that I've printed off the computer that haven't made it into a menu plan yet...basically ones that I want to try soon.
The red cd boxes are from Ikea also. I posted about them and my favorite plastic bookends a little bit here. I still need to label all of them, but I thought I'd show you inside them, just so you could see how they are being used.
Kids' cd games. I have the Nancy Drew game cd's separated with a plastic bookend that you can't see. The newer ones come with two cd's that are necessary for game installation, but you only need the first cd to play the game, so I stick the second discs in the back.
School cd's, headphones for Rosetta Stone, my cd's (pictures, software, etc), and a few more game cd's.
My postage scale (usually my packing tape is in this box too, but it's downstairs ready to tape up a box), and an empty box!
One box has all the electronic/computer type cords that go to stuff, and the other box has video camera tapes, my old digital camera that will hold about 16 pictures, and some of our extra cords, because we don't need more than one out at a time.
Those wonderful brown woven baskets on top — one holds my extra printer paper, and the other holds items that need to be shredded. Of course I have a pile of papers and stuff over a foot tall piled up on top of the shredder right now, but we'll just pretend it's not there for the purpose of this post.
One of the woven baskets underneath is empty, and one holds files, primarily ones where I've torn out magazine ideas, but some are school files with catalogs or curriculum plans, and the green files are some that we have to keep from Hubby's military work travel for five years before we can shred them.
I put a couple of the plastic bookends in the back of the last file to hold them up since they don't take up the entire basket.
The blue lidded boxes hold files that we don't access frequently. Off the top of my head I can tell you that the red files are our taxes and my grandparents'/grandma's taxes, and the green files are Hubby's from the military.
The other blue box has a lot of medical records or school records that we need to keep. The brown accordion file doesn't have to be kept, but it has the insurance claims from the first 13-14 months of the girls' lives, and it's pretty astounding. I'm keeping it just for historical purposes.
I also used the plastic bookends at both ends of these boxes even though they were full. They are cardboard-type boxes, so the bookends helped to hold the files upright a little better and gave the boxes more stability.
I love how it looks.
You can check out what other people are organizing, or link up yourself, over at The Organizing Junkie.
You might also be interested in these posts:
The entire surface of my garage floor! — Garage: Before & After
Last month's round-up — Organizing the Master Bedroom Closet
You know my fetish for these cheap inexpensive plastic bookends from Ikea.
Did you also know that fetish is only spelled with one 't' and not two?
I found out when I was teaching some Chinese teenagers ESL a couple of summers ago. One of the boys had gone shopping and bought shoes, we found out he had a shoe fetish, and they all brought out their little English-to-Chinese translator dictionaries. I spelled the word (I'm actually a very good speller), with two t's of course following our short sound rule and doubling the consonant, and they couldn't get it to come up. I pulled out my little Webster's I was carrying along with me, and low and behold it had one 't'. I would assume not doubling the consonant must have to do with the word root.
Well, the point of this post is to show you one of the other uses I found for these little bookends.
These are cd storage boxes that sit by our computer, of course also purchased at Ikea. This box has a hodge-podge of computer game directions, the second discs that aren't needed except for installation, etc. It's basically things that aren't accessed much, but it's also a box that isn't full and every thing was going all tippy. So I grabbed one of my plastic bookends, since I bought three thousand extra, and tried it. I was afraid it would be too tall, but it wasn't, and it worked fantastic!
I have them in several of the cd storage boxes and they work like a dream.
You should move by an Ikea just to buy these.
Here it is...look very big to you?
I laid the Ikea paper tape measure over it and took a picture. Good thing we went on a Tuesday night when there weren't many people there. I should have worn a little name tag that said, "Hello, my name is Kayren. I blog. If you see me take any weird pictures, that's why."
So if you read any blogs out there and they talk about the weird people they saw in the Canton, Michigan, Ikea, it was probably us. Unless their people have colored or unnaturally positioned hair, tattoos, or piercings, then it's someone else.
Okay, so here's the measuring taking place:
I tried to get Hubby to lie down beside it for effect, but he wouldn't. There was no way I would, because I wasn't going to let my hair touch the floor where people's shoes that might have been in a bathroom had walked. He let me very quickly snap this as he picked up the tape measurer.
And just notice that the perfect purse in spring green even looks good when a Hubby is holding it for you.
Now because I don't think you can read those little numbers in the pictures, here is the end of the tape measurer up close:
Those circles are 34"! And I've missed them every time. Every single stinkin' time! Walked against the flow of traffic just as happy and oblivious as you please.
Tuesday night, I went counter-clockwise with the flow of traffic the way the arrows pointed. Hated every minute of it. I felt completely disoriented and confused. I kept thinking I was almost done with the top floor and it kept going. I couldn't tell exactly where I was (halfway through, middle, far wall, etc.). I told Hubby I will not do that again. He thinks I just need to keep practicing, but I don't really think I'm going to get him back enough times to practice.
I was so stressed out by it all I almost forgot the main thing I went for by the time I got to the bottom floor in the self-serve furniture area. If it hadn't been for Hubby I would have, and that's sad, because we'd passed his hour and a half limit and he wasn't doing so well, plus he'd just dropped a box in the middle of his foot. Being thrilled at being at Ikea, the only explanation was having gone the wrong way upstairs.
So I didn't twitch, but internal disturbances are much worse.
Oh, the joy!
I needed another four-cube cubbie for my scrapbooking room. That's exactly what happened when I was doing the school room. There seems to be a pattern evolving.
So Hubby said he would take me on Friday night. He hadn't been feeling so well for a couple of days, so I said I'd wait, although I had a list going already of what I needed. That was all the encouragement he needed.
Now at this point I just looked at Hubby and told him I'd always had a list. Granted, sometimes it was a little more vague like 'some kind of cabinet for towels', but I did have a list.
I also reminded him that the last two times he'd taken me, the last of which was for my birthday, that he had not been too happy when we left. After about an hour he goes downhill fast. But he said he was up for it.
When I go in the Ikea store, the first thing I do is ride the escalator to the upstairs portion. It's where all the room displays are set up and some of the kids' items you can purchase are located. I always start out straight and then take a left and make the circle clockwise. I have never even thought about it.
We are about halfway around and Hubby asked me if I realized I was always going against the flow of traffic. Now I am not normally a ditzy person, but I've never noticed. I suppose I am just too entranced. Hubby proceeds to show me the very large circles on the floor with very large arrows in the middle that are pointed in the opposite direction to which I always go. These things are somewhere between 12" and 18" in diameter. They really shouldn't be hard to miss. But I did. Next time I'm taking a picture.
My answer to Hubby was, "This is a foreign store so they walk the wrong way just like they drive on the wrong side of the road." At least it's wrong to me. We'll see if I twitch the next time I go and walk around the way the arrows show me I'm supposed to.
Well, one of my favorite things at Ikea I purchased for the first time when Monica was visiting in December. They are plastic bookends.
I purchased four in December to use in Sparky's room. She has some of her books on top of her two dressers and no way for them to stand up. This was a very inexpensive and almost invisible option.
When Hubby took me back for my birthday, which was at the end of December but I didn't get to go until after my in-laws left in January, I bought ten more. I used some of them up on top of the cubbies in my scrapbooking room to hold albums and things upright.
There is also a single bookshelf located in our rec room where I used a couple.
I had too many books for the shelves, but based on how I was organizing them these particular books needed to be with this shelf. So I put them on top with the plastic bookends holding them up.
This time the plastic bookends were marked down even cheaper than usual — 39 cents each. I bought 20! I figured I would use them eventually, and I'm afraid the markdown means they are discontinuing them. I found a solution while I was there for the two shelves we have in our master bathroom, but I'm going to post about that separately another day. I also kept fairly well to my list, Hubby didn't walk off and leave me behind, and he was pleased that we walked out of the store before it was officially closed.
He was proud of how well he did, but seeing as how we didn't get there until right after 7:30 and were there less than and hour and a half, I don't think that counts. Let me take him on a Saturday and really test his resolve!
The funniest thing that happened while we were there was when I spotted another couple. We were down on the bottom floor in the home organization area. Hubby and I will usually walk down the larger middle aisle, and then I'll float off down the sides to check stuff out. This other couple was walking down the middle, she left him there to look at stuff, but as she walked off she looked back with this twinkling in her eye. I imagine it's somewhat akin to the twinkle I have in mine when I'm there. Her Hubby was just standing in the middle waiting, hanging over his cart, much like mine does. I pointed it out so Hubby would realize we weren't alone, but he saw it all take place.
And to hold me over between visits, this beauty:
Today we met there and had lunch and then shopped. She brought her daughters Laura and Heather. Hubby drove me, had lunch with us, piddled around down the road, and then came back for me..JPG)
Good thing she's such a nice person and would never dream of using it.
Posts
