If Only You Had Children Like ME!

As I'm very good at procrastinating once I'm given the opportunity, I thought I'd share my plans for this week! The plans I'm currently not doing since I'm procrastinating... Thursday is my birthday and I wanted to give myself a nice gift since I'll only turn 25 once. I really thought long and hard about what I could use or what I needed. No matter how I looked at it, I really needed this one thing... Those who know me well might laugh since I'm sure they've heard this before, but I NEED and WANT: a clean room. Yep, one organized and one I can walk in and one that I want to be in instead of just sleep in! I was planning on taking pictures when I got home from work this morning, but one of my wonderful roommates actually de-messed the room... a little. She put together my new craft table as a much appreciated surprise and in doing so, the room already looks a little better since there's no 5-foot-long garish and huge table taking up a whole wall and floor space.

Do you want to see the pictures I DO have? They might be a little scary, please shield young or impressionable (or parental) eyes!


Yep... That's my room... See the huge table leaning against the wall, in between the closet and sewing machine? I'm starting to think that taking an axe to it might be fun... Anyone have an axe I can borrow?


These are some of the craft supplies I'm in the process of organizing... Remember the tornado known as "Nicole's craft mess"? Yeah, these are part of the culprits. They're actually pretty compressed into those bins right now...


My bathroom's not terrible, but could use some picking up, particularly my jewelry, which happens to currently be in a bowl... in my school bags... in my luggage... in my car... NOT in the jewelry box... Oops... Oh, I also have new pictures I need to find room for on that sink!


Ignoring the mess this time, I'm planning to not only clean but rearrange. I need a bigger bookcase as my bookcase is two books deep on each shelf and I currently use my car, closet and living room for extra shelves... Although you might not be able to see it, there are two beds there, the oak day bed and another bed on the floor with all the... junk... on it. I want to move each bed to it's own wall so there's walking space on the floor. That would be amazing!


Still ignoring the mess and also ignoring the bright light, I want to move the dressers, the (hopefully new) bookshelf and the craft table (seen in the very first pic and in this one from a side view) to one wall. The beauty of the craft table is it's on wheels and the part holding my sewing machine folds down so it becomes just a set of drawers! Genius, right? I'm also looking at new storage for the closet, which is where most of my craft stuff is kept. I currently have a dresser in there which is bulky and hard to access and not very space efficient, so Ikea and I just might be good friends this week. :-P

I know, I know, you're not thinking "how are you going to accomplish such a huge feat?" or "you've got a big job ahead of you!"... I know you're really thinking (especially my mom) "WHAT ABOUT ALL THAT LAUNDRY?!?!?!?" Yeah, I might get to that too...

So, now that you all know I am not embarrassed to put my messy room on the Internet, I'm going to stop my procrastination and get back to cleaning. My objectives for tonight is to finish getting the craft stuff sorted and tackle the monster...err..mess under my bed! Hopefully reason will return to me in the morning and I'll have to finish my room just to put up pictures of a clean and orderly room, like any 25 year old should responsibly have... (I'm trying not to laugh right now...) Have wonderful dreams tonight about your children growing up to own messy rooms! :-D

I Think I Saw a Flying Couch!

Wake up: 6:30 am... On a Saturday morning! To be honest, this is quite normal for me, and it's not because of work. Saturday mornings are the one day of the week where I do not drag myself out of bed but rather wake up excited and wanting to go. To where? GARAGE SALE-ING!!!! I've gone every Saturday since the beginning of May it seems, and yes, I always spend too much money and then wonder what I'm ever going to ACTUALLY do with some of the items I bought, but it's a rush none the less. :-D So, today's... adventure!

We (Melissa, "the room-mate", Rossam, her fiance, and myself) started out around 7am, close to normal. Leaving around then means we have enough time to indulge in starbucks if we want, stop for cash (since our convienent credit cards and debit cards are no good at people's personal homes), or get any directions we might need (for some insanely far out whim we might have) to visit an "interesting" garage sale. The first sale we hit was at an apartment complex, something I've never seen before. Nothing's there that catches any of our attention so we start heading towards the freeway to drive about 30 miles looking for a sale we found in a penny saver ad. Rossam wanted a bike, and that was mentioned in the ad, the ONLY reason we would drive so far when there are ALOT of garge sales right by us! Lo and behold, the bikes were sold before we even got there and we got there at 8:09 am. That particular garage sale started at 8:00am... Yeah, apparently we were slow... Well, the next garage sale we went to told us about this REALLY big garage sale that was held in a field, it's that big! So we follow his directions and find it very easily, less than two minutes from where we were. Apparently this sale didn't start till 9:00am and we got there around 8:27am... But it looked very promising so we decided to wait.

Have you ever seen the Day after Thanksgiving at a garage sale? Seriously, have you? Well, I have, after today that is... When we got there we were probably the 8th or 9th in line. By the time it opened, and they let us in at 8:50am, my count of waiting bodies was up to 87... OMGoodness!!! For a Garage Sale!!! By the time we had been browsing around for 15min, the field was full of parked cars and even more people! I had to take a picture:

Amidst this seemingly large sea of people I found something fantastic! Something I could only have dreamed of finding so perfectly! Something I... Ok, you get the picture!

Let me give you a quick side story. When "the room-mate" told me she was getting married, I realized all our furniture in our apartment was hers, minus my bedroom and the kitchen... Thus the reason I started going to garage sales in the first place. I can't afford to furnish a two bedroom apartment with brand new furniture, but I don't have a problem with second-hand stuff (I grew up in a family of 6, I never had a new outfit till I asked for one on my 12th birthday... :-D). I decided, tho, that I didn't want just mis-match pieces. I actually wanted to carry out a theme, on a garage sale budget none the less! I'm going for a victorian motif with slight modernistic touches. I've found two wing back chairs and an iron coffee table and beautiful frames, some with mirrors attached! I've done pretty well, but I hadn't found a couch yet... Can you tell where this is going?

YES!! I found a couch!!! Not any couch, but one that fits PERFECTLY with my wanted theme!! It's tufted on the backrest and arms and the wood carved legs are so period. The fabric is an ivory background with embroidered floral clusters in a goldish thread that's way elegant and not even tacky! There's bronze/gold tacks all along the top of the back, to put it simply, it's beautiful! Best part? It was only $30!

Ok, so now I have this fantastic couch and absolutely NO WAY to transport it the 30 miles to home... So, I had a fantastic idea! We go to the local dollar store and buy some bungees with full intention to strap the couch to the roof of the car and drive it home. I'd done this before with my wingback chairs when I went out with my friend Michelle and we had no problem... It never occured to me that the chairs were way smaller or that we were all of 5 minutes away from my apartment... I totally thought this was going to work... Melissa was so amused by Rossam's and mine efforts that she took a pic for us!

Now, this was really tall on the top of the car, but I was still confident!! We were actually stopped by someone and asked which direction we were heading. When we answered he breathed a sigh of relief and said something along the lines of "thank goodness I'm going the other way!" LOL! We started driving and I thought all was well, but something was worrying me... I rolled the window all the way down, unbuckled my seatbelt and leaned out the window to see how my couch was faring only to see it FLYING!! Ok, not quite flying, but the wind was picking it up from underneath and lifting it up and down ontop of the car, almost as if it were one half of a pair of wings. We pulled over...

After readjusting for a good 20 minutes, we finally felt satisfied enough with our efforts and went back on the road. I still got scared out of my wits watching it slip down the back windshield but it never fell! We stopped once more to push it back up toward the front, more for my peace of mind than actual necessity, only to have it slip back down again before safely reaching home. It was quite and adventure! My heart was constantly racing because of excitement, delight, fear and anxiety and relief! :-D We (more accurately Melissa and Rossam) decided next time I wanted to buy a couch at a garge sale I needed to make sure I'm closer to home and have a friend with a truck come help me. LOL, I think I made their day!