the mud

I've been debating whether or not to show our ugly bathroom.  Honestly I am so embarrassed by just how ugly it is and each day it gets worse.  So before I chicken out again, I'm going to bear all, well not all exactly, but a lot more than I am comfortable with.  And while I'm at it, I'm sending it in to HGTV for the Ugliest Room Ever in hopes that we can have it made over.  Do you see any redeeming features?  What would you do with a bath like this?  Send it in to HGTV, right?  (Or at least not show everyone just how bad it is... ) Wish us luck... Do you think we'll win? This picture shows the missing plastic ceiling tile that exposes the attic floor beams!  Have you ever seen a bigger medicine cabinet?  It's a trick - only the side mirrors open for storage. While I see this pattern everywhere nowadays, it's old and cracked. Here's the shower.  Lovely.

This week is definitely taking on its own theme, with all these little notes about paper.  But in the meanwhile, I am cooking up something big for next week, adding trim work to the upstairs hallway, so stay in touch! Paper is so fun.  I think it's one of the reasons I became a teacher.  I just love playing with all things paper.  I could spend hours in the stationery store.  A few years ago at a conference at Penn State, I visited the bookstore and found all these new "teacher toys" for school:  blank hardbound books, highlighter tape, rainbow paper on rings, and tons of other goodies.  Here is one little notebook I love that sports the logo good thinking ! I'm afraid two of my children have the same addiction, one doesn't stop making paper airplanes and the other just loves paper.  This morning on his WAY OUT THE DOOR, my son stopped to grab a piece of paper out of the printer to MAKE AN AIRPLANE to fly on his way to school.  (I so wish I were ten again!)   

This is our old book case.  It used to house books.  But when we moved, we left behind two corner cabinets, only because they were built into the walls and couldn't be moved.  (Though my one friend took hers with her, framing and all!  You go, girl, cause I'm wishing I did that!)  I loved those corner cabinets!  They had beautiful glass window-framed doors and in the lower cabinets, well,  you could throw anything in there when the doorbell rang!   When we first moved into the house, we painted the interiors red and the trim white.  Below the chair rail we did a cool painting technique of blue with poly-acrylic stripes so that it looked like real wallpaper.  We thought we were so patriotic until a few months later, after trying to get used to it,  we realized it looked ridiculous.  Anyway... you get the idea.   I loved those cabinets! So here we are in the new house with no place to store our china and after all the shopping I'm doing in the attic, I thought I should bring

Last year I had the incredible opportunity to go on a writer's retreat for teachers sponsored by AROOM. The retreat was held at one of the most peaceful places I've ever been - Pendle Hill in Swarthmore, PA.   At the retreat center there was an art studio that I wish I could somehow replicate.  Imagine a large light filled room with huge windows overlooking a garden.  Shelving lined the walls floor to ceiling and each shelf was filled with papers, pens, and all sorts of wonderful embellishments to add to your work. A few friends and I snuck away for the day and had so much fun creating!  We made these wonderful layered books where layers of different torn papers were glued together and folded in upon each other.  Words or poems could be written on each 'page.'  Talk about connecting to your inner child it was playful and fun -  like kindergarten for moms!  I was looking for new inspiration for my book this week but after a quick look online, came up with nothing.  This

Our downstairs powder room is the only room so far that has undergone a complete renovation.  I wish that I had pictures to show you from before, but let's just say that my husband and I were going to put a deadbolt on the door and call it a 2 bath house, forget the 1/2.    That was until we went to Home Depot the night we moved in and found a toilet and sink for half-price.  Despite the fact that we were only shopping for a new mop, floor cleaner, and lightbulbs, we came out of there with a whole new bath.  We took off the deadbolt, tore down the walls, tore up the floor and got rid of every last bit of evidence.  (It was that bad!)  So three sheets of rock and two sheets of beadboard later, we had a nice new powder room.  We painted it the same blue as the wall from the living room and !voila! - a happy bathroom!  But this morning it needed heavy-duty cleaning attention: You know how it goes, things get piled up and the room starts to lose its personality.  So I wanted to fres

Last week my seventh grader had a science project to do.  He completed the project on aerodynamics and wrote the report.  But the real work was not included in the report.  The original experiment called for an industrial-size fan, which my son assured me he could replicate.  Well, not quite.  He tried a fan, then two, then three.  Then he tried a blow dryer.  Nothing.  Then somehow he came up with the idea of a leaf blower.  And it worked.  But the trial and error part, the real work that took a full weekend, never made it into the report.  There was just one simple word in the material list and one simple line in the procedures, "Turn on leaf blower." So here's my full disclosure.  I hung a reused light in the kitchen, which I loved.  Then I came home one night to find this: The lights had actually melted the holders!   Thank goodness nothing worse happened.  The bulbs I used were too high a wattage.  So I went to the hardware store and bought replacements.  Cool, huh

I spend more time in the kitchen than any other room in the house.  I don't really know why.  Even if I'm working from home, I end up in the kitchen for probably an hour or so.  I'll bring the laptop to the kitchen table while the tea water boils and then I'll end up making phone calls and doing emails from there.  It's like a magnet for our family.  When I was home all the time when the kids were babies, the kitchen was the command center for so much:  bottles, trash, dishes, baby food, tea for mommy, dishes, sippy cups, chee-chos snacks, wine for mommy, baking to keep us away from the tv, lots of dishes, Jewish apple cake that I was addicted to while breastfeeding, and then more dishes.  These days it's more like homework, dishes, lunch packing, dishes, cereal, dishes, I'm hungry, dishes, dishes, dishes, dishes.  So when I'm doing dishes I really want to have something nice to look at.  At our first house I had a nice double window above the sink that